Beyond continuationism: climate change, economic growth, and the future of world (dis)order

Abstract

An apocalyptic zeitgeist infuses global life, yet this is only minimally reflected in International Relations (IR) debates about the future of world order and implications of climate change. Instead, most approaches within these literatures follow what I call a “continuationist” bias, which assumes that past trends of economic growth and inter-capitalist competition will continue indefinitely into the future. I identify three key reasons for this assumption: 1) a lack of engagement with evidence that meeting the Paris Agreement targets is incompatible with continuous economic growth; 2) an underestimation of the possibility that failure to meet these targets will unleash irreversible tipping points in the earth system, and 3) limited consideration of the ways climate change will converge with economic stagnation, financial instability, and food system vulnerabilities to intensify systemic risks to the global economy in the near-term and especially later this century. I argue that IR scholars should therefore explore the potential for ‘post-growth’ world orders to stabilize the climate system, consider how world order may adapt to a three or four degree world if Paris Agreement targets are exceeded, and investigate the possible dynamics of global ‘collapse’ in case runaway climate change overwhelms collective adaptation capacities during this century.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The work of Friedrichs (2013) and Di Muzio (2015) come closest in this regard, though they focus primarily on the role of ‘peak oil’ and energy scarcity in forcing an end to growth. While this scenario should not be discounted, the rise of unconventional oil and the current supply glut suggests that oil depletion is unlikely to be the critical factor that cripples the growth trajectory, though they may play an important role in conjunction with climate and other stressors in the future.

2 Exceptions to this tendency include Burke et al. 2016; Dalby 2015; Friedrichs 2013; Falk 2016; Grove 2019; Di Muzio 2015

3 Climate justice groups like the Climate Justice Alliance have long called for abandoning GDP in favour of alternative notions of well-being, while leading Extinction Rebellion strategists agree that this will be necessary to meet the Paris Agreement targets (Read & Alexander 2020, 16, 23). Furthermore, survey data suggests that the wider public may already be receptive to such demands. A recent YouGov poll, for example, found that 8 in 10 people in the UK would prefer the government to ‘prioritize health and wellbeing over economic growth’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas 6 in 10 would prefer to permanently prioritize health and wellbeing over GDP (Harvey 2020).

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Michael J. Albert

Michael J. Albert finished his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and is now a lecturer at SOAS University of London in the department of Politics and International Studies. His research investigates the intersection between political-economic, ecological, energy, and food crises in order to anticipate how world order may transform in the coming decades.