Ecological Reparations and Degrowth: Towards a Convergence of Alternatives Around World-making After Growth

Abstract

Faced with multiple crises, recent years have seen the rise of degrowth as a newly emerging field of research on alternatives to development in the Global North, as well as increasing calls for ecological reparations to the Global South to address the harm done by colonial, capitalist, and extractivist development over the past centuries. This article makes a twofold argument about the need to closely interlink these. Degrowth and ecological reparations discourses, policies and related movements could gain from strengthening their connections and a mutual integration of core perspectives and demands. On the one hand, we argue that degrowth needs to develop into a global justice perspective by integrating demands for (ecological) reparations, freedom of movement, and a global-justice oriented reshaping of the international economic system—demands most prominently articulated from Global South movements. Without this global justice outlook, degrowth risks becoming an inward-looking, provincial, localized, and eventually exclusive project within Europe and the Global North. On the other hand, demands for reparations—strongly articulated from the Global South—could benefit from incorporating the call for degrowth in the Global North. Without this call—which can, of course, be articulated by using different terms—the reparations agenda risks a key opportunity to address core structural and systemic drivers of extractive processes.