23 Degrowth: Activity Seeds

Like the other activity seeds in this toolkit, these are deliberately flexible and light-touch: you’ll know how best to root them in your teaching. Some examples for classwork or homework are:

• Influence behavioural change. As ‘homework’, set students tasks to contribute to a reduction in production and consumption of energy. At the end of the session, encourage students to use less carbon for the next week and have them report back in the next class. Suggest ways they can do this – hire a bicycle, use timed heating, reduce shower time, ditch plastic bottles and straws, start using reusable water bottles, sort waste (recycle, general and compost). Invite them to brainstorm and research more ideas. Frame it as a learning exercise: ask students to reflect on what makes these changes possible or impossible, easy or hard, cheap or expensive, satisfying or frustrating. Based on these observations, what kind of behaviour change could be driven simply by raising awareness? What changes might require bigger social shifts to become properly established? What sort of social shifts — changes to university policy, or at the local government or national level, or even more profound and wide-reaching shifts? How do these behaviour changes relate to privilege and oppression? You could play with a competitive element: who managed to reduce their personal carbon footprint by the most?

• Ask students which nations can degrow easily and which nations cannot and why. This is a follow-up to the debates on degrowth not being easily applicable to every region, particularly poorer countries who are trying to attain ‘developed’ status by catching up to wealthier countries. Further reading: Escobar, Arturo. 2015. ‘Degrowth, Postdevelopment, and Transitions: A Preliminary Conversation’. Sustainability Science 10 (3): 451–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0297-5.

• Put your imaginations to work. Here students are nudged to imagine their life in a degrowth society. What would change, what would the secondary effects be? How might people internalise the values of a degrowth society? What would life beyond GDP reliance really look like?

• Debate public perceptions of green growth vs. degrowth. Allocate students to groups for this activity. Critics of degrowth tend to see it as a relatively radical stance, and an impractical one. Proponents of degrowth may or may not agree that it is a revolutionary philosophy. They generally see green growth as impractical and illusory, sustained by a series of misleading discourses: greenwashing, discourses of delay, techno-fixes, and climate denialism. Explore degrowth in relation to these discourses. Further reading: Lamb, William F., Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, J. Timmons Roberts, Stuart Capstick, Felix Creutzig, Jan C. Minx, Finn Müller-Hansen, Trevor Culhane, and Julia K. Steinberger. 2020. ‘Discourses of Climate Delay’. Global Sustainability 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13.

• Debate GDP and alternative macroeconomic indicators. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is effectively a measure of monetary transactions over the course of a year. Economic growth means that this number (adjusted for inflation) is going up. There are obvious limitations to this as a method for gauging the overall success: for example, GDP can’t differentiate between building new housing, and building housing to replace housing lost in a natural disaster.
  • •  Invite students to think imaginatively about measurement and governance. If they could magically measure anything, what would be most useful to steer public policy?
    • Why might wellbeing be challenging to define? Why might it be challenging to measure? What are some of the perils and pitfalls of capturing happiness data directly (compare Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness)?
    • How does GDP growth relate to growth at a smaller scale? Why do companies (and other organisations, including universities) always try to grow? What are the pitfalls? Can we imagine alternatives?
    • Why do some people advocate so fiercely for Beyond GDP metrics? How might decentring GDP be an effective intervention? Is it really that radical — couldn’t economies continue in just the same way as they did before, even if they measure success in new ways?

• Debate Universal Basic Income. UBI has proponents (and critics) from both the left and the right. Why is this the case? Are they really talking about the same thing?