Adapted from Minding Nature Vol. 6. No. 2 (May 2013). Available at: www.humansandnature.org
Yves-Marie
Abraham of the Université de Montréal, who was one of the organizers of the
Third International Degrowth Conference held in Montreal on May 13-19, 2011,
has written that “. . . degrowth is a call for a radical break from traditional
growth-based models of society, no matter if these models are ‘left’ or
‘right,’ to invent new ways of living together in a true democracy, respectful
of the values of equality and freedom, based on sharing and cooperation, and
with sufficiently moderate consumption so as to be sustainable.” [1]
The
concept of degrowth (le décroissance;
decrecimiento; decrescita)
is currently being used in a way that is imprecise, deliberately so.[2] I
take it to be related to, but distinct from, economic ideals such as
steady-state economics, social ideas such as decentralization and localization,
and cultural ideas such as the contemporary agrarian movement. Rhetorically one
aim of degrowth is defamiliarization, the shock of “making strange” (ostranenie), as promoted by the Russian
Formalists of the early twentieth century.[3] By
directly and outrageously confronting the central reification and
unquestionable assumption of the OverCity of contemporary globalization,
endless growth, and material consumption, the notion of degrowth aims to open a
new space for critique and utopian imagination. Thinking otherwise is a
precondition for living and doing otherwise. Emotionally, the degrowth idea
conveys a widespread sense of exhaustion and frustration with excess of all kinds—consumptive,
technological, financial—and with the aspiration of mastery, which is not
treated as a narcissistic fantasy but as an accomplished fact that has reached
the point of cultural satiation and disgust. Ideologically, degrowth turns the
tables on the emancipation project of the Enlightenment. Economic growth and
human mastery over natural limits is not a sign of our freedom or our spiritual
election, as Max Weber suggested, but a sign of our domination and entrapment,
as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno maintained.[4] The
metaphor of the day here is “addiction,” a slippery and polysemic trope that one
ought to be careful of deploying in social critique, but that is striking and vivid
in its capacity to motivate aversive and interventionist social and political responses.
Those who believe themselves to be free are in fact being controlled and
manipulated by those with opposing interests or by an impersonal system and
symbolic order that reduces acting human subjects to responding objects.
In short, the notion of degrowth connotes a
particular normative vision of an entire society. That said, the question
arises concerning the kind of political economy and governance that would be
most fitting and best suited to a degrowth society.
The
reality of the ecological limits and planetary boundaries to major forms of
human economic and technological activity—especially to those actions that are
conventionally counted as economic growth—poses a normative and practical
challenge to governance on national, regional, and global levels. We must
countenance the possibility that liberal democracy, as we know it, will not be
able to meet that challenge and so must give way to a new structure of
governance.
It
remains to be seen whether this transition to a post-growth governance will be
done incrementally and in an orderly way, or chaotically in response to
significant ecological crisis. It also remains to be seen what general form new
regimes of governance can take—how representative and accountable governing
officials and bodies will be; how limited their power and authority will be by
constitutional and institutional mechanisms and by norms regarding due process
of law, justice, and human rights; how democratic they will be and in what
sense of the term.
Governance
is not the same thing as government. Governance is the overall process of
coordinating, shaping, and directing individual and collective agency.
Governance is inherently normative, and at its best explicitly ethical. It sets
parameters around the means and forms of human agency, excluding some practices
(such as genocide, murder, torture, slavery, rape, bigotry, and racism) from
the sphere of social life as intrinsically illicit. Governance also defines the
telos, the ends, of collective agency; stipulating worthy ideals and placing
parameters around the objectives to be intended and sought, again excluding
some types of objectives as wasteful or unworthy. Finally, governance embodies
the character of the collectivity, representing the kind of society an
association of people aspires to be or become. Governance both rests upon, and
enacts anew, the understanding of solidarity that holds individuals together in
shared meaning and common purpose and mutual endeavor. Governance is an
enabling act of mind that creates communities; its work is the construction of
institutionalized normative practice and symbolic orders of meaning.
So
conceived, governance is a process that involves many institutions—in the
economy, civil society, and religious and cultural organizations—in addition to
the government legally defined. Governance is even more ubiquitous than the
entity, also not identical with the government, called the state. Questions
about the form that governance in a degrowth society should take are therefore
not limited to structural questions about the location of authority, the
distribution and interaction of powers, the selection of individuals to fulfill
specialized roles, or the enactment and enforcement of common rules, as vital
as these matters are. Glancing toward Montesquieu, I would say that governance
is not only about the letter of the laws, but also about their spirit; not
about the body of law, but about its mind.
Heretofore
in human history the shaping and directing of human agency has not approached
(except on local scales) the boundaries set by the biophysical fact that the
earth is an open system as regards energy, but virtually a closed system in
regard to matter. Until recently, such boundaries did not matter and the
horizons of governance were limited only by human social organization, and the
mobilization of collective will. Today natural boundaries do matter as much, or
more, than political ones; at any rate, they should. Population, technology,
and the concerted mobilization of human ingenuity and economic activity have
produced a global exploitation of biophysical “resources” with historically
unprecedented pace, volume, and consequence. Humankind has entered the zone of
planetary boundaries and effects. That has been the journey of growth
governance.
Moving
beyond growth governance toward a new sense of normative responsibility and
political accountability consonant with the ecologically destructive power of
humanity is the challenge of the future. Will we discover how to circumvent
those boundaries, or will we learn how to live within them and accommodate our
aspirations and our activities to them? No doubt the temptation to find
technological means to overcome natural limits will be alluring; witness the
incipient discourse of geo-engineering as a response to climate change, or the
various innovations in extractive techniques, such as natural gas fracking or
tar sands oil recovery, designed to stave off the closing of the fossil fuel
era. I have nothing to contribute to that discourse, and I will not place my wager
upon it. I explore instead the articulation of a discourse of natural
accommodation and cultural innovation. I explore a discourse in which growth
governance is replaced by another governance.
At
the Montreal Degrowth Conference last year, the Center for Humans and Nature
organized a panel on these issues, asking: Can liberal democracy lead the way
to a change in consciousness concerning economic interests and well-being, and
concerning their obligations to civic communities and natural ecosystems both
nationally and globally? Speakers on the panel were Lisa Eckenwiler of George
Mason University, Stephen Latham of Yale University, Jack Manno of SUNY College of Environmental Science and
Forestry, and myself.
Latham’s paper will appear in a later issue of Minding Nature; the other papers growing out of this panel comprise
a special Symposium on Ecological Governance featured in this issue (May 2013). Eckenwiler
presents a conception of ecological personhood and ecological citizenship, and discusses
the implications for democratic participation by drawing on feminist theory and
theories of place. Jack Manno reflects on what can be learned about ecological
governance from North American First Nation sources, particularly the
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). My own essay offers a typology of three modes of
governance that could fulfill ecological imperatives in the years
ahead—ecological authoritarianism, ecological discursive democracy, and
ecological constitutionalism. These are alternatives to a failing form of
interest group democracy, and I offer my assessment of some of the strengths
and weaknesses of each type.
Notes
[1] Y-M. Abraham,
“Little Vade Mecum for the Growth Objector,” May 2011, at http://montreal.degrowth.org/aboutdegrowth.html.
[2] S.
Latouche, Farewell To Growth (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2009) and “Degrowth,” Journal
of Cleaner Production 18 (2010): 519-522; G. Kallis, “In Defense of Degrowth,”
Ecological Economics 70, no. 5 (March
15, 2011): 873-880. J. U. Martinez-Alier, F-D. Vivien Pascual, and E. Zaccai, “Sustainable
De-growth: Mapping the Context, Criticisms, and Future Prospects of an Emergent
Paradigm,” Ecological Economics 69
(2010): 1741-1747.
[3] F.
Jameson, Marxism and Form:
Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971), 373-4.
[4] M. Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
trans. T. Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1958); M. Horkheimer and
T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. J. Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
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