Organizing for transformation: post-growth in International Political Economy

Abstract

The global political economy is organized around the pursuit of economic growth. Yet scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) have been surprisingly slow to address its wide-ranging implications and, thus, to advance debates about post-growth alternatives. The premise of the article is that for IPE to deepen its grasp of the escalation of contemporary socioecological crises both analytically and normatively, it needs to put the growth question front and center. To problematize the pursuit of economic growth from an IPE perspective, we bring together research on green growth, post-growth/degrowth, sustainability transitions and socioecological transformation. More specifically, we develop an analytical framework that revolves around four pathways of reorganization toward socioecological sustainability: (1) modification, (2) substitution, (3) conversion and (4) prefiguration. We use illustrative examples from the plastics and food sectors to show how the post-growth pathways of conversion and prefiguration could interact to trigger change for sustainability. Notably, our discussion reveals that conversion, which requires a strong state for developing post-growth institutions, is the least traveled pathway in both sectors. This insight points to a strategic priority for post-growth proponents and an urgent research agenda for IPE scholars.

Keywords:

• Degrowth
• economic growth
• green growth
• post-growth
• socioecological crises
• sustainability
• transformation

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from comments given by participants at a virtual RIPE workshop, 27–28 April 2022; the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics Annual meeting in Amsterdam, 9–11 July 2022; the Ecologies of Emancipation summer school, organized by the tranzit.ro network, Cluj, at Câmpu Cetății, Mureș County, Romania, 2 September 2022; and a seminar at Copenhagen Business School, 30 November 2022. The authors are especially indebted to Michael Albert, Milan Babic, Cornel Ban, Timon Forster, Oddný Helgadóttir, Alison Johnston, Mathias L. Larsen, Amit Loewenthal, Lena Rethel, Annika Stenström, Dimitris Stevis, Eleni Tsingou, Ole Willers and two anonymous reviewers for their critical engagement with earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no potential conflicts of interest to declare.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Jacob Hasselbalch acknowledges funding from the Velux Foundation for the project ‘Expert Niches: How Local Networks Leverage Markets’ under grant number 00021820-NICHE. Ekaterina Chertkovskaya and Jacob Hasselbalch acknowledge funding from the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS) for the project ‘Plastics in a Circular Society: Alternative Organising beyond Resource Efficiency’ under grant number 2021-02440. All three authors are members of the 3-year scientific network ‘The Global Politics of Post-Growth’, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number 466076465 and coordinated by Matthias Kranke.

Notes on contributors

Jacob A. Hasselbalch

Jacob A. Hasselbalch is an Associate Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. His research is broadly concerned with the political economy of sustainability transformations, especially the relations between incumbents and niche actors. Current research areas include plastics, agriculture, circular economy and the question of growth in international political economy.

Matthias Kranke

Matthias Kranke is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Kassel. From April to September 2023, he is on leave from Kassel to be a Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen. His research currently investigates the global politics around the relationship between economic growth and ecological sustainability.

Ekaterina Chertkovskaya

Ekaterina Chertkovskaya is a researcher based at Lund University, working on degrowth and critical organization studies. She has been writing on corporate violence, problems with work/employability and the plastic crisis, on the one hand, and degrowth as a vision for transformation, its political economy and alternative organizing, on the other. Ekaterina is a member of the ephemera editorial collective.