Critical realism, the climate crisis and (de)growth

ABSTRACT

What does it entail to study the climate crisis from – or consistently with – a critical realist perspective? The paper addresses this question in three steps. First, it considers the boundaries of critical realism in relation to climate crisis research. In this context it identifies climate science as a field that in important respects resonates implicitly with critical realism. Conversely, a book by human ecologist Andreas Malm is introduced as an example of a work that, while sympathetic to critical realism, in key respects contradicts core features of it. Second, to illustrate what an analysis of the crisis informed by critical realism can look like, the paper brings into focus the main causes of the climate crisis – including the capitalist growth imperative, neoliberalism, and consumer culture. Finally, the status quo project, the green growth project and the degrowth project are identified as fundamentally different ways of approaching the climate crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical realism
• climate crisis
• economic growth
• degrowth
• capitalism
• Andreas Malm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article is based mainly on our Cheryl Frank Memorial Lecture held in The Hague in August 2022 and our book Critical Realism: Basics and Beyond (Buch-Hansen and Nielsen 2020) which was awarded the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize 2021. The book is an introduction to critical realism. Aside from presenting the basic features and development of critical realism, the book relates it to competing perspectives and brings into focus the practical implications of using critical realism as a researcher or student in the social sciences. The present article benefitted greatly from the comments we received from the two reviewers and the editor.

2 It can be noted that other postmodernist are ontological realists in that they acknowledge the existence of the climate crisis. For example, discourse theorist Laclau (2012, 94) underscores that he is ‘not saying that global warming did not exist independently of the discourse which called it global warming, because that would be absurd’. Importantly, however, neither Laclau nor other postmodernist discourse theorists have anything to say about the climate crisis itself; considering it as an empty shell, all they can tell us is how it is being discursively articulated.

3 A strong correlation also exists between global economic growth and use of natural resources (Hickel and Kallis 2020). As such, economic growth is a major cause also of the escalating biodiversity crisis. The biodiversity and climate crises are also interrelated and amplify each other. For example, the loss of nature aggravates the climate crisis (IBPES 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hubert Buch-Hansen

Hubert Buch-Hansen is a political economist and associate professor at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research focuses on degrowth, green transformations and business networks. He has written several articles and books on (/drawing on) critical realism, including Critical Realism: Basics and Beyond (Bloomsbury Publishing 2020), co-authored by Peter Nielsen.

Peter Nielsen

Peter Nielsen lives in an ecovillage where he works with regenerative farming. He also works part time as an associate professor in political economy at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has published numerous articles and several books. His most recent book is Critical Realism: Basics and Beyond (2020), co-authored with Hubert Buch-Hansen.