Format/Structure

This contribution is intended as a panel bringing together scholars with a focus on degrowth and more-than-human approaches

Long Abstract

This panel explores the synergies and tensions between degrowth and more-than-human scholarship within political ecology. Though these traditions have largely developed in parallel, we argue that placing them in dialogue offers crucial insights into the ecological crisis, the politics of growth, and the relational entanglements of more-than-human life.

Degrowth critiques the ideological and material centrality of economic growth in capitalist societies. It calls for a deliberate downscaling of production and consumption—especially in the Global North—to achieve a more just and desirable future. Rejecting extractivism, accumulation, and technocratic "green growth" solutions, degrowth challenges colonial and patriarchal hierarchies and offers a radical rethinking of our futures centered on care, autonomy, and conviviality.

More-than-human thought, rooted in feminist, decolonial, and STS traditions, questions human exceptionalism and highlights the entangled agencies of humans, more-than-humans, technologies, and ecologies. It unsettles anthropocentric assumptions in political thought and foregrounds ontologies and epistemologies that center multispecies life and interdependence, i.e. a worlding that exists beyond growth and greed.

Bringing these approaches together allows understanding the structural, epistemological and ontological dimensions of the multiple crises in an existential way. Degrowth provides a needed political economy lens to more-than-human debates through a focus on unequal and historically grounded distribution of violence, wealth, and resource use, and the brutalities against multispecies life that arise precisely from capitalist greed. More-than-human perspectives, in turn, enrich degrowth by decentering the human subject and emphasizing multispecies care, nonhuman agency, and ontological pluralism in envisioning post-growth futures.

We invite contributions that critically and creatively engage with the intersection of degrowth and more-than-human thought. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Theoretical integration of degrowth and more-than-human approaches

Empirical studies of multispecies resistance to extractivism or infrastructure

Feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives on post-growth ecologies

Alternative ontologies and epistemologies from Indigenous or more-than-human worlds

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