Is Degrowth working in the developing world? With Julien-François Gerber

Key Points

• Degrowth is presented as an alternative to traditional GDP-focused growth models, aiming to incorporate ethical and sustainable perspectives by considering environmental, cultural, and community impacts.
• For the Global South, degrowth involves policy shifts such as focusing on basic needs over undifferentiated growth, wealth redistribution, addressing sovereign and ecological debt, moving away from extractivism through selective delinking, and organizing around culturally specific concepts of well-being.
• Implementing degrowth in developing countries faces challenges including economic imperialism, elite interests, global market integration, employment concerns, poverty narratives, and the cultural dominance of Western consumerist ideals of the good life.
• Degrowth is not synonymous with austerity or universal shrinkage; it emphasizes healing and increasing socially beneficial activities, and its intellectual roots are not exclusively Western, drawing significantly from Southern thinkers and traditions.
• While no national-scale degrowth models currently exist in the Global South, there are local and regional post-growth initiatives, and countries like Costa Rica are cited as examples that align with alternative well-being indicators.

Summary

The podcast episode discusses degrowth as a critical alternative to conventional GDP-centric economic growth, particularly examining its relevance and application in the Global South. The host, Yulun, and guest Julian Frosso, an assistant professor in environment and development, explore whether degrowth is a viable or desirable path for developing countries. They challenge the traditional Kuznets curve argument, which suggests environmental and social issues will self-correct with increased GDP, noting a lack of evidence for this in the Global South. While acknowledging growth's historical benefits in areas like life expectancy and education, they argue it now creates irreversible ecological, climatic, debt, inequality, and cultural problems, often tied to Western values.

Frosso outlines a degrowth policy framework for the Global South across five fronts: first, shifting focus from undifferentiated growth to fulfilling basic needs, possibly using tools like modern monetary theory; second, prioritizing wealth redistribution to address extreme inequality; third, tackling sovereign debt and acknowledging the ecological debt owed by industrialized nations; fourth, moving beyond extractivism through selective delinking from global markets to foster local well-being; and fifth, basing development on culturally specific, non-Western philosophies of the good life, such as *Buen Vivir* or *Ubuntu*.

The conversation addresses significant challenges to implementing degrowth in developing contexts, including external economic pressures, internal elite interests, deep global market integration, the growth-employment linkage, persistent poverty narratives, and the widespread cultural adoption of Western consumerist ideals. Importantly, Frosso clarifies that degrowth is not about imposing blanket austerity or punishing the Global South, but rather a process of social and ecological healing. He emphasizes that industrialized Northern nations must lead in reducing their unsustainable material consumption.

Furthermore, the intellectual heritage of degrowth is shown to be not exclusively Western. Thinkers from the Global South, such as India's J.C. Kumarappa and M.K. Gandhi, Sri Lanka's Ananda Coomaraswamy, and traditions like Buddhist economics, have long articulated post-growth ideas. Although there are no full national-scale examples of degrowth in the Global South yet, successful local initiatives exist, and countries like Costa Rica, which perform well on alternative indices like the Happy Planet Index, offer glimpses of potential pathways. The episode concludes that degrowth represents a necessary, nuanced, and globally relevant critique of growth ideology, requiring tailored approaches that learn from both historical critiques and contemporary experiments.