From Growth, through Degrowth, to a Pluriverse of Flourishings

Summary

A sympathetic critique of degrowth. Saurabh Arora and Andy Stirling argue that it shares with techno-optimist ecomodernism “a deep conditioning by colonial modernity”: one world, where ways of living differ only in how much they consume. Both can reproduce “a common colonial imagination of control over other worlds”. Better many worlds, and “caring relations rather than controlling categories”.

Rationale

Their “imagination of control” is a pull we noticed in our own language: part of why we chose ‘approaches’ over ‘strategy’, with its top-down promise of predictable results.