Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations: The Growth Paradigm (Routledge Advance


The movement arose from concerns over the perceived consequences of the productivism and consumerism associated with industrial societies whether capitalist or socialist including: As economies grow, the need for resources grows accordingly. There is a fixed supply of non-renewable resources, such as petroleum oil , and these resources will inevitably be depleted. Renewable resources can also be depleted if extracted at unsustainable rates over extended periods.

For example, this has occurred with 'caviar' production in the Caspian Sea. Many organizations and governments look to energy technologies such as biofuels, solar cells, and wind turbines to meet the demand gap after peak oil. Others have argued that none of the alternatives could effectively replace versatility and portability of oil.

Proponents of degrowth argue that decreasing demand is the only way of permanently closing the demand gap.

Development theory - Wikipedia

For renewable resources, demand, and therefore production, must also be brought down to levels that prevent depletion and are environmentally healthy. Moving toward a society that is not dependent on oil is seen as essential to avoiding societal collapse when non-renewable resources are depleted. The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems.

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In this article, multiple theories are discussed, as are recent developments with regard to these theories. Retrieved 8 February For Indonesia, it found that the rate of growth between and would be reduced from 7. Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. But as I have shown, the incorporation of environmentalism strategically replicates and elaborates a form of managerialism which neither disrupts nor displaces central themes in the conventional approach to development. In this model, the foreign exchange gap is perceived as a key constraint on growth. Ecological anthropology Ecological economics Environmental anthropology Environmental economics Environmental communication Environmental history Environmental politics Environmental psychology Environmental sociology Human ecology Human geography Political ecology Regional science.

It compares human demand with planet Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste. According to a Global Footprint Network report, [9] inhabitants of high-income countries live off of 6. For example, while each inhabitant of Bangladesh lives off of what they produce from 0.

India's big challenge: Economic development vs Environmental damage

Each inhabitant of North America uses According to the same report, the average number of global hectares per person was 2. In order for the world's population to attain the living standards typical of European countries, the resources of between three and eight planet Earths would be required. In order for world economic equality to be achieved with the current available resources, rich countries would have to reduce their standard of living through degrowth. The eventual reduction of all available resources would lead to a forced reduction in consumption.

Controlled reduction of consumption would reduce the trauma of this change assuming no technological changes increase the planet's carrying capacity. Degrowth thought is in opposition to all forms of productivism the belief that economic productivity and growth is the purpose of human organization. It is, thus, opposed to the current form of sustainable development. Degrowth therefore sees sustainable development as an oxymoron , [12] as any development based on growth in a finite and environmentally stressed world is seen as inherently unsustainable.

Critics of degrowth argue that a slowing of economic growth would result in increased unemployment , increase poverty and decrease income per capita. Many who understand the devastating environmental consequences of growth still advocate for economic growth in the South, even if not in the North. But, a slowing of economic growth would fail to deliver the benefits of degrowth—self-sufficiency, material responsibility—and would indeed lead to decreased employment. Rather, degrowth proponents advocate for a complete abandonment of the current growth economic system, suggesting that relocalizing and abandoning the global economy in the Global South would allow people of the South to become more self-sufficient and would end the overconsumption and exploitation of Southern resources by the North.

Technologies designed to reduce resource use and improve efficiency are often touted as sustainable or green solutions.

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Degrowth literature, however, warns about these technological advances due to the " rebound effect ". There are also fundamental limits to technological solutions in the pursuit of degrowth, as all engagements with technology increase the cumulutive matter-energy throughput. The contemporary degrowth movement can trace its roots back to the anti-industrialist trends of the 19th century, developed in Great Britain by John Ruskin , William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement — , in the United States by Henry David Thoreau — , and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy — Mishan , [18] the industrial historian Tom Rolt , [19] and the radical socialist Tony Turner.

The writings of Mahatma Gandhi and J.

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Kumarappa also contain similar philosophies, particularly regarding his support of voluntary simplicity. More generally, degrowth movements draw on the values of humanism , enlightenment , anthropology and human rights. In , the Club of Rome , a think tank headquartered in Winterthur , Switzerland , asked researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a report on practical solutions to problems of global concern. The report, called The Limits to Growth , published in , became the first important study that indicated the ecological perils of the unprecedented economic growth the world was experiencing at the time.

The reports also known as the Meadows Reports are not strictly the founding texts of the degrowth movement, as these reports only advise zero growth , and have also been used to support the sustainable development movement. Still, they are considered the first official studies explicitly presenting economic growth as a key reason for the increase in global environmental problems such as pollution, shortage of raw materials, and the destruction of ecosystems.

A second report was published in , and together with the first, drew considerable attention to the topic. The degrowth movement recognises Romanian American mathematician , statistician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as the main intellectual figure inspiring the movement.

Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations: The Growth Paradigm

Georgescu-Roegen's intellectual inspiration to degrowth goes back to the s. Georgescu-Roegen and Grinevald soon made friends, and Grinevald started devoting his research to a closer study of Georgescu-Roegen's work.

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Entropy — Ecology — Economy'. The book gained influence in French intellectual and academic circles from the outset. Later, the book was expanded and republished in , and once again in ; however, the word Demain 'Tomorrow' was removed from the title of the book in these second and third editions. In this article, Georgescu-Roegen stated the following view:. When reading this particular passage of the text, Grinevald realised that no professional economist of any orientation had ever reasoned like this before.

Grinevald also realised the striking conceptual resemblance between Georgescu-Roegen's viewpoint and the French debates progressing by the time; this resemblance then transformed into the title of the French edition. Instead, the neologism 'degrowth' was coined to signify a deliberate political action to downscale the economy on a permanent and voluntary basis—as in the prevailing French usage of the term—something good to be welcomed and maintained, or so followers believe.

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When the first international degrowth conference of its kind was held in Paris in , the participants bestowed a generous amount of credit and appreciation on Georgescu-Roegen and his work. Serge Latouche , a professor of economics at the University of Paris-Sud , has noted that:. If you try to measure the reduction in the rate of growth by taking into account damages caused to the environment and its consequences on our natural and cultural patrimony, you will generally obtain a result of zero or even negative growth.

In , the United States spent billion dollars, or 2. The Clean Air Act increased this cost by 45 or 55 million dollars per year. For Indonesia, it found that the rate of growth between and would be reduced from 7. Schumacher 's book Small Is Beautiful predates a unified degrowth movement, but nonetheless serves as an important basis for degrowth ideas.

In this book he critiques the neo-liberal model of economic development, arguing that an increasing "standard of living", based on consumption, is absurd as a goal of economic activity and development. Instead, under what he refers to as Buddhist economics , we should aim to maximize well-being while minimizing consumption. In January Edward Goldsmith and Robert Prescott-Allen—editors of The Ecologist journal—published A Blueprint for Survival , which called for a radical programme of decentralisation and deindustrialization to prevent what the authors referred to as "the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet".

The First International Conference on Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity of Paris was a discussion about the financial, social, cultural, demographic, environmental crisis caused by the deficiencies of capitalism and an explanation of the main principles of the degrowth. Many critiques have been made concerning the proposals, mostly about the financial aspects, and this has refrained changes to occur.

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Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations: The Growth Paradigm - CRC Series: Routledge Advances in International Political Economy. Economic Growth, the Environment and International Relations: The Growth Paradigm (Routledge Advances in International Political Economy) [Stephen J.

Although not explicitly called Degrowth, movements using similar concepts and terminologies can be found around the world, such as Buen Vivir [46] in Latin America or Eco-Swaraj [47] in India. The degrowth movement has a variety of relations to other social movements and alternative economic visions, which range from collaboration to partial overlap.

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