Introduction to Routledge Handbook for Degrowth

The Routledge Handbook for Degrowth was released in open access and hard cover forms in July 2025. Here is a summary and thought-provoking extracts from Chapter 1, ‘Degrowth has come of age’, co-written by Degrowth Central Victora activist scholar Anitra Nelson along with a highly respected and longtime French degrowth activist Vincent Liegey who has lived in Budapest for the last two decades and is a founder of degrowth cooperative Cargonomia.

‘Degrowth has come of age’, the introductory chapter to the Routledge Handbook on Degrowth (2025), sketches the volume’s structure. Thirty-five chapters written by more than 55 contributors show various responses to key questions on the meaning and characteristics of ‘degrowth’ and its future.

Part I establishes the ecological, economic and political contexts for understanding how and why degrowth has evolved as a significant concept for societies worldwide facing twenty-first century challenges of growing socio-political inequities and ecological unsustainabilities.

Part II identifies degrowth theories, philosophies and activist movements in a sample of countries, languages and regions, starting with its origins in France.

... degrowth is an essentially qualitative concept. It is an invitation to explore new imaginaries liberated from economism and, instead, focus on what really matters around such concepts as “conviviality” and “autonomy”.

Part III presents key degrowth concepts in practice such as commoning, conviviality, the degrowth doughnut, frugal abundance and de-Fashioning to show activists and practitioners.

Market economies oriented to production for trade seem outdated, ineffective and inappropriate for a century where key challenges focus attention on satisfying everyone’s basic needs and taking account of planetary limits. This is why degrowth, explicitly critiquing and inverting the all-encompassing and ever-eroding drive to growth at all costs, strikes such a chord.

Part IV offers forward-looking imaginaries for the degrowth project from ecofeminist futures to solidary modes of living, from showing how degrowth is essential to address poverty to the geopolitics of the nonaligned movement, utopian thought, and a youthful call for action.

… degrowth advocates seek a transparent and open world based on ecological and humane values, applying principles of social and ecological justice, political autonomy, conviviality, solidarity and ecologically sustainable living for everyone. Degrowth is an invitation to view the world anew in enchanting ways, to practice everyday life in alterity, to be deeply alive, responsible and respectful, relating to other people and the more than human world in ways that promise greater security, sustainability and freedom for all.

This post is the second in a series on the handbook. See the first here.