Terminology

I’ve wondered about the difference between the terms “post-growth” and “degrowth” and found this article: Post-growth, degrowth, the doughnut and circular economy: a short guide (originally posted at planetamateur.com). Here are some of my takeaways mixed with my own thoughts:

• The circular economy contrasts with the linear economy, which is a one-way path that extracts resources, which are then used and thrown away. The circular economy tries to close loops (William McDonough’s term “cradle to cradle” comes to mind). This can be done by making waste into resource inputs, both at the larger scale of manufacturing (I recall an actual business that uses waste coffee grounds to grow edible mushrooms), to the smaller scale of things like repair cafes.
• The doughnut or doughnut economy is Kate Raworth’s term, illustrated below, which ties together meeting human needs across a dozen categories (avoiding shortfalls) while staying within nine types of ecological limits (avoiding overshoot).
• The article describes post-growth as an “approach without a toolkit.” Post-growth is the simple (and obvious) recognition that we can’t endlessly expand production and consumption on a finite planet. As I’ve been reading in more detail in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down, absolute decoupling (in which the economy grows while material consumption does not) is a nice concept to dream about, but is fantasy. Post-growth moves beyond seeking green technologies as the solution to our environmental problems to calling into question growth itself. (Green technologies, while certainly useful and important, will never be a sufficient solution to our environmental problems as long as we have endless growth.) I also think of post-growth as somewhat synonymous with the term “steady-state economy.” Both of these terms, to me, describe a future state that we intend to reach, but they don’t describe how to get there.
• In contrast, degrowth is the “agenda of action” that can get us to the targets that the doughnut tool can define. I think of degrowth as a strategy, or agenda, for reaching a post-growth (or steady-state) economy. Unlike the other terms, degrowth brings in a critical component of justice instead of focusing solely on the environment. Jason Hickel and Kohei Saito both discuss the need to address the dramatic inequality between the Global North and the Global South. Hickel discusses increasing consumption and development in the Global South while decreasing production in the Global North of extractive and destructive production that’s less necessary, such as fast fashion, industrial beef, McMansions, advertising, military armaments, planned obsolescence, food waste, etc.

Circular economy, doughnut economy, post-growth, and degrowth can be complementary. For example,