Crafting post-growth? A support-structure diagnosis of Jaipur’s craft economy

Post-growth scholarship has often celebrated craft as a privileged site for imagining postcapitalist and post-growth transitions. Yet this discussion remains largely Global North-centred and empirically underdeveloped, drawing mostly on small-scale, elective and niche craft economies rather than large craft sectors where artisanal labour constitutes a major livelihood system. This paper addresses this gap through the case of Jaipur’s craft economy, one of the world’s largest concentrated craft economies. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with craft-sector experts, field visits to craft fairs and markets, participant observation at a socio-ecological enterprise, and documentary analysis conducted between 2023 and 2024. We examine how Jaipur’s craft sector enables, constrains and complicates post-growth-compatible forms of territorial development. To do so, we develop a support-structure diagnosis, understood as an analysis of the institutional, material, financial, cultural, geographical and historical conditions sustaining, transforming or absorbing craft economies into dominant growth-oriented circuits. We map three interrelated support structures operating across multiple scales: top-down institutional structures, bottom-up and intermediary structures, and local conditions. The article shows that Jaipur’s large-scale, decentralised and historically embedded craft economy unsettles simple distinctions between local and global, formal and informal, traditional and entrepreneurial. It requires a more situated understanding of relocalisation, alterity and market integration in post-growth debates. We identify four dynamics through which support structures interact: encouragement, collaboration, suppression and friction. Theoretically, equity, central to post-growth economies, remains a concern for Jaipur. Scale, heterogeneity of informalisation and decentralisation, and multiple axes of power in Jaipur’s craft ecosystem open up a productive challenge for post-growth scholarship.