Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the “right not to repair” as an infrastructural form of resistance. Drawing on post-growth and degrowth research, it examines how refusing expansion, maintenance, or renewal can open political space for alternative socio-ecological futures.

Presentation long abstract

Infrastructures are conventionally imagined as systems that must be expanded, upgraded, or repaired to sustain economic growth and social order. Yet in a world marked by ecological limits, stranded assets, and declining resource availability, such assumptions no longer hold. Building on my recent work on degrowth and post-growth infrastructures, this paper theorises the “right not to repair” as an emerging mode of infrastructural resistance—one that challenges the political, institutional, and cultural forces compelling societies to maintain or revive infrastructures that are socially harmful, materially unsustainable, or economically obsolete. The 'right not to repair' reframes decline, decommissioning, and deliberate non-maintenance not as failures, but as collective refusals of the growth paradigm embedded in socio-technical systems. Drawing conceptually on Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, and socio-technical transitions, and empirically on research conducted in Italy (ILVA/Taranto), Japan (Fukushima and Kaminoseki), and Spain’s energy and mobility sectors, the paper examines how communities, activists, and local institutions negotiate the politics of not repairing: from resisting airport expansions and energy megaprojects to contesting the forced preservation of polluting or dangerous industrial infrastructures. I argue that the right not to repair constitutes a form of infrastructural dissent that disrupts the temporality of growth—its assumptions of perpetuity, renewal, and inevitability. As such, it expands the political ecology of infrastructure by foregrounding practices of abandonment, care, and sufficiency. Ultimately, this conceptualisation opens a new horizon for imagining post-growth futures grounded not in innovation and expansion, but in selective letting-go as a legitimate socio-political choice.