Discourses surrounding sustainable development contain many different positions on what socio-economic transitions, or transformations, need to occur in order to prevent further environmental degradation and promote greater justice. Proponents of Green Growth advocate for technological advancements in carbon sequestration and renewable energies to maintain an ostensibly healthy growth-centered economy that preserves an increasing GDP (find source verifying this). For many in the U.S., this often appears to be the only option. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report[1], and what the Guardian[2] calls their “final warning,” drawing renewed attention to the need for fossil fuel reductions and green investments to avoid irreversible climate breakdown. In the report, the IPCC also states that “GDP is a poor metric of human well-being, and climate policy evaluation requires better grounding in relation to decent living standards”[3], signaling a slow but important shift in discourse that challenges traditional metrics of well-being with a more holistic sense of well-being.
Development discourse has been largely dominated by visions that maintain a growth-centric capitalism, but there are scholars and activists that argue such a socio-economic system is harmful for the environment and maintains exploitative characteristics. One such group, degrowth[4], draws on the works of ecological economists and other disciplines, along with the lived experiences of those working toward social and environmental justice in different contexts.[5] For them, economic growth as a policy imperative needs to be abandoned, and they lean on Ivan Illich, a prominent social critic and priest who spent much of his life in the global South, to make their case.[6]
In 2020, the Lane Center released a book titled Integrating Ecology and Justice in a Changing Climate that explores the “multifaceted challenges of our historical moment.”[7] Vijaya Nagarajan, a professor at USF, wrote a chapter for the book in which she explores key contributions Ivan Illich makes in analyzing environmental and social justice issues in the context of development. His concept of thresholds, being one such contribution.
The concept of thresholds enables a more critical analysis of those created things that supposedly benefit individuals and the wider human community. Illich warns that certain technologies (broadly speaking), if left unchecked, could have destructive consequences. In illustrating this point, Illich describes a snail and its shell:
“A snail, after adding a number of widening rings to the delicate structure of its shell, suddenly brings its accustomed activities to a stop. A single additional ring would increase the size of the shell sixteen times. Instead of contributing to the welfare of the snail, it would burden the creature with such an excess of weight that any increase in its productivity would henceforth be literally outweighed by the task of coping with the difficulties created by enlarging the shell beyond the limits set by its purpose. At that point, the problems of overgrowth begin to multiply geometrically, while the snail’s biological capacity can be best extended arithmetically.”[8]
The concept of thresholds has been applied to various technologies like cars and other machines, as well as social institutions, to locate the limits of beneficiality. In today’s context of environmental breakdown and social injustice, the concept should be used to locate how development, as it has been traditionally understood, is failing, so that a development that promotes individual and collective flourishing in healthy relations with the natural world can unfold.
Ignoring key thresholds our socio-economic system stresses maintains an unsustainable and unjust path. And even with an awareness, our collective agency can seem diminished due to long entrenched systems and practices that have become normalized. It is why plastic production is projected to increase in the coming years[9], along with other industries we know are harmful to environmental and social health. Economic growth, its ties to fossil fuels and toxic byproducts, and its demand for increasing production and consumption, has outgrown its benefit, and we have to at least give ourselves the freedom to consider futures without it.
Illich’s snail metaphor for thresholds has become the symbol for the degrowth movement that offers both critiques of modern capitalist trends and visions for an alternative post-growth approach.[10] Thought leaders in the movement draw on Illich’s work often[11] — particularly the snail metaphor — to demonstrate how a certain technology that might have had some benefit in the past can quickly become destructive. Illich’s work and thought in this sphere lead many to call him a “pioneer” of the movement[12] and at the very least a seminal figure.[13]
Serge Latouche, one of degrowth’s most outspoken proponents, references Illich’s snail demonstration in Farewell to Growth,[14] directly comparing the growth of the shell to economic growth — it grows at a certain healthy rate, but after surpassing a threshold, further growth would become too much for the snail. Latouche argues that the snail can teach us valuable lessons and help us recognize that economic growth is surpassing healthy biophysical and social limits, and that is helps point “the way to a ‘de-growth’ society, and perhaps a serene and convivial society.” In order to protect and preserve environmental and social systems, the long-held assumption, or ideology as Latouche words it, that economic growth is necessary for human flourishing must be abandoned.
Being significantly influenced by the ecological economics discipline, degrowth argues that current socio-economic dynamics are surpassing certain key thresholds that contribute to environmental and social injustices, known as biophysical limits.[15] Essentially, the biophysical limits framework delineates those ecological systems within which socio-economic activity takes place. It offers insight into what intertwined facets of the ecological system are most stressed and threatened by socio-economic activity. Degrowth argues that the economic growth currently characteristic of capitalism is unsustainable within earth’s biophysical limits. Due to biophysical limits, economic activity would either voluntarily or involuntarily retract as a result of environmental limits. The goal is to reduce production and consumption voluntarily, abandon economic growth as an assumed economic requirement, and transform socio-economics to respect earth’s physical limits.
Degrowth critiques go beyond analyzing stressors on earth’s ecological systems. Illich’s contribution to the discourse has guided degrowth to reflect on key thresholds relating to the social activity of humanity, that is to say, the way humans relate to each other and institutions.[16] An important concept Illich provided regarding this particular facet of development is the concept of conviviality. The concept of conviviality acts as an alternative to technologies that nurture destructive relations and behaviors due to unhealthy growth that surpasses key thresholds. For Illich, conviviality designates:
“[T]he opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.”[17]
The concept of conviviality is an important development for ecological thought as it pertains to both environmental and societal health. According to Marco Deriu “From the perspective of degrowth, conviviality constitutes one of its core anthropological constructs; it represents faith in the possibility of space for relationships, recognition, pleasure and generally living well, and thereby, reduces the dependence on an industrial and consumerist system.”[18] Degrowth references conviviality often, using it as a lens to reveal overreaching patterns and institutions that degrade healthy individual and collective living. It is a concept that also guides the movement’s visioning as they speculate post-growth futures. Like Illich, they envision a future that is not serving mechanisms of production and consumption but rather a fostering of individual and collective living that controls systems and institutions for the sake of a flourishing humanity and environment.
President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland became the first Western head of state to explicitly call for a post-growth, environmentally sustainable, socio-economic system,[19] and Bhutan has abandoned GDP as an appropriate socio-economic measure. But while development discourse in general has become more accepting of post-growth visions, much more can be done in the United States to promote alternatives to our growth-centric development policy. We must advance Illich’s concepts of thresholds and conviviality, along with degrowth’s contribution to post-growth visions, in our conversations about sustainable and just socio-economic transformations so that the IPCC’s final warning is not in vain.
Chad Baron recently earned a master’s degree in international studies at the University of San Francisco, focusing on sustainable development and environmental justice. He received his undergraduate degree from James Madison University, with a major in Spanish and minors in humanitarian affairs and Christian studies. He has worked at Cristo Rey San José Jesuit High School and for the Cristo Rey Network in Orange County, California, and in higher education as a campus minister in Virginia.
Selected resources on what “degrowth” looks like in practice, and what it can look like:
- Demaria, Federico, Francois Schneider, Filka Sekulova, and Joan Martinez-Alier. “What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement”, Environmental Values 22, 2 (2013): 191-215.
- Hickel, Jason. “Degrowth: a Theory of Radical Abundance”, real-world economics review, no. 87 (2019), http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue87/Hickel87.pdf
- Hickel, Jason and Giorgos Kallis. “Is Green Growth Possible?”, New Political Economy (April 2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964
- Latouche, Serge, Farewell to Growth, (Malden, MA: Polity. 2009).
- Parrique, Timothée. The Political Economy of Degrowth. Economics and Finance. Université Clermont Auvergne [2017-2020]; (Stockholms universitet, 2019) English. https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02499463/document.
- Puggioni, Roberto. “Pope Francis and Degrowth: A Possible Dialogue for a Post-Capitalist Alternative”, International Journal of Public Theology 11, 1 (2017): 7-35, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15697320-12341470.
- Schneider, François, Giorgos Kallis and Joan Martinez-Alier. “Crisis or opportunity? Economic Degrowth for Social Equity and Ecological Sustainability. Introduction to this Special Issue”, Journal of Cleaner Production 18, 6 (April 2010): 511-518.
[1] IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change, accessed May 11, 2022, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/.
[2]Fiona Harvey, “IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster”, The Guardian, April 2, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/04/ipcc-report-now-or-never-if-world-stave-off-climate-disaster
[3] V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.) IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In Press).
[4] Degrowth (website), accessed May 11, 2022, https://www.degrowth.info/en.
[5] Federico Demaria, Francois Schneider, Filka Sekulova, and Joan Martinez-Alier. “What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement,” Environmental Values 22, no. 2 (2013): 191-215.
[6] Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth, (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009).
[7] Mickey Sam, ed., Integrating Ecology and Justice in a Changing Climate, (San Francisco: University of San Francisco Press, 2020).
[8] As cited by Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth, (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009).
[9] Sam Meredeth, “Just 20 Companies are Responsible for Over Half of ‘throwaway’ Plastic Waste, study says,” CNBC, May 18, 2021,
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/20-companies-responsible-for-55percent-of-single-use-plastic-waste-study.html
[10] Timothée Parrique, The Political Economy of Degrowth, PhD dissertation, (Université Clermont Auvergne (2017-2020), 2019).
[11]Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, and Giorgos Kallis, eds., Degrowth: a Vocabulary for a New Era, (New York: Routledge, 2014).
[12] Parrique, Timothée, The Political Economy of Degrowth, PhD dissertation, (Université Clermont Auvergne (2017-2020), 2019).
[13] Joan Martínez-Alier, Unai Pascual, Franck-Dominique Vivien, and Edwin Zaccai, “Sustainable De-growth: Mapping the Context, Criticisms and Future Prospects of an Emergent Paradigm.” Ecological Economics 69, no. 9 (2010): 1741-1747.
[14] Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth, (Malden, MA: Polity. 2009).
[15] Federico Demaria, Francois Schneider, Filka Sekulova, and Joan Martinez-Alier. “What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement.” Environmental Values 22, no. 2 (2013): 191-215.
[16] Silja Samerski, “Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich’s critique of technology revisited.” Journal of Cleaner Production, 197 (2018): 1637-1646.
[17] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
[18] Marco Deriu, “Conviviality,” Degrowth: a Vocabulary for a New Era, ed. Giacomo D’Alisa, Giorgos Kallis, and Federico Demaria, (New York: Routledge, 2014).
[19] “‘Climate Action and the Role of Engineers’ Speech at the Engineers Ireland annual conference” President of Ireland, Accessed April 20, 2022, https://president.ie/en/diary/details/president-delivers-keynote-address-at-engineers-ireland-conference-on-climate-action/speeches
