Paper short abstract:

By analyzing household-level data of back-to-the-landers and their neighbors in French Prealps, this paper will explore attempts to create a semi-autonomous, livelihood-centered territorial economy that opportunistically profits from the capitalist growth economy

Paper long abstract:

One of the key obstacles to a transition to a post-growth economy is that we all have stakes in economic growth: it produces jobs and taxable incomes that fund state redistribution and ecological transition programs. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and a representative quantitative study in a relatively isolated rural area in France that attracts diverse back-to-the-landers, this paper will explore attempts to create an economy that is constructed on the (re)production of human livelihoods while profiting from the capitalist growth economy only marginally. It will analyze household-level data on livelihood strategies to learn how households combine informal economic practices, state redistribution measures and economic opportunities in the formal market economy to make a living in an economically poor area. By looking at how individual livelihood strategies add up to a peculiar territorial economy, the survey will reveal whether and, if so, how internally diverse settlement in a relatively isolated countryside is conducive for creating new, more autonomous modes of life on the sideways of the productive capitalist economy. Above everything, this paper aims to contribute to theory about how to create economies constructed around (re)production of livelihoods, not (re)production of capital and thus sketch pathways towards a post-growth economy.