The future of post-growth strategy: bureaucratic blindness in Visegrad countries

This paper examines the public sectors of the Visegrad countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) to determine the potential of a post-growth strategy. To this end, the research explores centralisation–decentralisation cycles and bureaucratic reshuffles in V4s across socialist and capitalist eras, as well as the political will-reality gap in eco-social changes. It asks whether certain V4s’ strategies teach us how to evolve towards post-growth societies. It argues that the historical cycles of centralisation–decentralisation show bureaucratic blindness to post-growth as long as V4s prefer quantitative economic growth as the end goal rather than a means to socially and ecologically sustainable systemic functioning.