Abstract Research on degrowth has burgeoned in the last 15 years but one of the greatest challenges is its relevance for and potential to build fruitful alliances with the Global South. Articulations of degrowth as an alternative are often associated with nourishing autonomous grassroots initiatives, relocalizing economies, as well as transforming institutions and policies in the Global North. However, this would not in itself bring the much-needed fundamental change of North–South power relations and risks reproducing destructive dependencies in the global economy. Engaging with this tension, this article addresses the following question: how to foster a transformation of relations between the Global North and the Global South from destructive dependencies toward caring interdependencies? We conceptualize the notion of caring interdependencies by bringing degrowth into conversation with delinking and ecofeminism. This allows us to develop an analytical framework that aims to stimulate systematic thinking about degrowth action for caring interdependencies and that is articulated around four scaling dynamics. Taking particular sectors or commodities as entry points, this framework is illustrated through the concrete cases of plastics and gold, which help us draw out current pitfalls and potential directions for fostering caring interdependencies.
Chertkovskaya et al. (Tue,) studied this question.