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

Introduction

Momentous change awaits the global political economy in the coming decades. As Paterson (2021, p. 395) puts it in light of the climate crisis: ‘Transform or collapse is now the stark choice for the future of the global political economy.’ Although hardly more could be at stake, International Political Economy (IPE) scholars have seldom problematized the widespread notion that ‘the economy must grow’, even beyond ecological limits (Paterson, 2021, pp. 396, 399–400). Despite some recent interventions (Albert, 2022; Barry, 2020; Buch-Hansen & Carstensen, 2021; Stuart et al., 2022), the growth question has not defined core debates in the field. Tellingly, the recent double issue on ‘blind spots’, published in New Political Economy (NPE) and the Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) in 2021, does not feature a single article devoted to the topic although some contributions speak to it (Lockwood, 2021; Paterson, 2021).

In this article, we argue that the thin problematization of economic growth poses a significant problem to the relevance of IPE scholarship itself. At a time when human-made ecological disasters already remake the fabric of societies, the field lacks a vocabulary to capture how the continued attachment to growth contributes to these unprecedented global problems (Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021). By comparison, scholars in other fields have done more to analyze the sources and effects of pursuing economic growth over other objectives, as well as engaging in post-growth thinking (Asara et al., 2015; D’Alisa et al., 2015; Kallis et al., 2018). Their research can inspire IPE scholars as they develop their own language about the increasingly contested politics of economic growth. This conceptual groundwork is urgently needed because of the massive socioecological consequences of ever-expanding economies (Steffen et al., 2015). Engaging a pluralist body of work on green growth, post-growth/degrowth, sustainability transitions and socioecological transformation—which cuts across IPE, organization studies, ecological economics, innovation and transition studies—we mesh prevalent critiques of economic growth with concepts of societal change.

Through this interdisciplinary engagement, we articulate four pathways of change toward socioecological sustainability in political economies: (1) modification, (2) substitution, (3) conversion and (4) prefiguration. Each pathway reflects a particular combination of paradigm (green growth vs. post-growth) and pattern of change (top-down vs. bottom-up). Apart from this broader conceptual contribution, we muster material from the plastics and food sectors to show that while the pathways can principally reinforce each other, top-down conversion is the least traveled pathway. While this insight affirms that contemporary states are institutionally wedded to the objective of economic growth (Bailey, 2015; Hausknost, 2020), our account takes the problematization of growth one step further by conceptualizing how political economies could move toward less growth-dependent configurations. Given current empirical evidence (for example, Haberl et al., 2020; Hickel & Kallis, 2020), staying on a pro-growth path is a highly problematic political choice from a socioecological perspective. We thus call for greater attention to mutually reinforcing transformative dynamics between the four pathways, especially with regard to activating the conversion pathway.

The article unfolds over three sections. First, we review the debate between ‘green growth’ and ‘post-growth’—that is, the debate about the feasibility of decoupling economic growth from ecological impacts at a scale and rate that keeps the Earth habitable. Second, we distill four pathways of reorganization toward sustainability from the existing literature, outlining the state-society-market relationship and key mechanism of change for each. Third, we consider how this framework can account for reorganizations currently ongoing in the plastics and food sectors. Our conceptual vocabulary for post-growth in IPE orients debates about socioecological transformations, can be applied empirically, and builds bridges to other research communities. IPE has much to learn from the post-growth literature, which has shaped debates in fields mostly ignored by IPE scholars. At the same time, IPE can enrich these conversations with its unique grasp of how structural dynamics and political agents relate to post-growth ideas, which have so far flourished in local niches but rarely diffused to the international level. Overall, we stress the currently missing top-down, post-growth conversion pathway as an area where IPE research could make important contributions.

Growth and/or sustainability? The decoupling debate

The relationship between economic growth and ecological sustainability is heavily contested. The decoupling debate reflects an unresolved conflict between those who principally believe in the possibility of sustainable growth and those who deny it. It is common to distinguish between ‘resource decoupling’ and ‘impact decoupling’. While resource decoupling is achieved with less input into one unit of growth (for example, lower energy use), impact decoupling implies diminished adverse environmental effects (for example, fewer carbon emissions). Another important difference is between ‘relative’ and ‘absolute decoupling’. Relative decoupling happens when more economic growth can be produced from the same amount of resources or with the same environmental impact. Absolute decoupling happens when total resource use or environmental impact decreases while growth continues or even accelerates (UNEP, 2011, pp. 4–5). From an extensive literature review, Haberl et al. (2020) conclude that while relative decoupling of gross domestic product (GDP), resource use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is common, absolute decoupling is very uncommon. They therefore recommend combining efficiency gains from relative decoupling with sufficiency measures and lower resource consumption levels. Although current evidence proves that historical decoupling rates will be insufficient to meet global sustainability commitments such as the Paris Agreement, green growth supporters hope for more favorable future decoupling rates.

Green growth represents the current mainstream position among political and corporate elites. The underlying assumption is that with sufficient investment into and deployment of clean energy technologies, economic growth can decouple quickly enough to respect planetary boundaries (Stoknes & Rockström, 2018). The ‘environmental Kuznets curve’, whose reverse U-shape suggests that ecological pressures will first rise with increasing national income and then fall beyond a certain level, is often mobilized in support of the green growth position. The implication is clear: Continued economic growth is seen as necessary to lift societies out of poverty and move them past the peak of ecological pressure on the curve. A range of green growth approaches and policy programs exist, from interventionist Green New Deals (Chomsky & Pollin, 2020) to neoliberal carbon markets (Lane & Newell, 2016).

In contrast to the green growth position, post-growth advocates argue for a reorientation away from economic growth as the primary means to ensure human flourishing within planetary boundaries. Instead of pursuing further growth, societies should thus prioritize the establishment of sustainable and socially just institutional arrangements that can function well without economic growth. As with green growth, there are various post-growth positions. At one end of the scale, we find those who are somewhat growth-agnostic and advocate replacing mainstream economic indicators with well-being metrics to stop conflating means with ends (Fioramonti et al., 2019). At the other end, we find those who promote a democratically controlled degrowth of the global economy in line with ecological limits and an equitable redistribution of wealth (D’Alisa et al., 2015).

All post-growth positions, however, agree that the economy is embedded in a larger but physically limited ecosystem, which constrains the scale and nature of economic activity (Hickel & Kallis, 2020, p. 476). The ‘planetary boundaries’ framework is the usual reference point for defining these limits (for example, Fanning et al., 2022). Currently, six of the nine planetary boundaries are in overshoot (PIK, 2022). Post-growthers are united in their belief that the evidence to date overwhelmingly undermines the green growth assumption about the feasibility of sufficiently fast and effective decoupling on a global scale (Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Parrique et al., 2019; Tilsted et al., 2021). These criticisms are bolstered by mounting evidence that most countries tend to exceed planetary boundaries without even satisfying basic needs (Fanning et al., 2022; Wiedmann et al., 2020). As Brand et al. (2021) show, a just socioecological transformation requires agreeing on ‘societal boundaries’. According to such voices, a lowering of aggregate resource use and environmental impacts will be possible only if rich economies shrink.

In addressing the future relationship between economic growth and ecological sustainability, we posit that the decoupling debate will become an increasingly intractable and contested feature of global sustainability politics. Some IPE scholars have characterized green growth as a ‘passive revolution’ aimed primarily at defending and re-legitimizing current strategies of capital accumulation (Spash, 2021; Wanner, 2015). Green growth proponents tend to respond that we are yet to witness serious attempts to make green growth happen (Chomsky & Pollin, 2020; Way et al., 2022). Nonetheless, impact decoupling may be achieved only through vast ‘green sacrifice zones’, especially in the Global South, which would enable the decarbonization of the Global North (Zografos & Robbins, 2020). The most successful cases of national decoupling have indeed depended on increasing environmental pressures elsewhere (Tilsted et al., 2021). Our stance in this article is that it would be irresponsible to ignore these valid criticisms formulated by the post-growth position. IPE must engage with such ideas to be able to develop alternatives to green growth programs. In the next section, we extend existing work by introducing four pathways of change toward sustainability.

Green growth and post-growth pathways

How are transformations toward sustainable political economies broadly thought about in IPE? Here, we synthesize insights from various fields, most notably IPE, environmental politics, innovation and transition studies, and organization studies.

We begin by breaking down major paradigms and basic patterns of change toward sustainability (see also Scoones et al., 2015). Considering paradigms of change, we take inspiration from Linnér and Wibeck’s (2019, p. 6) distinction between ‘transition’ as ‘a passage—“going across” from one state to another’ on the one hand, and ‘transformation’ as ‘change in form or shape’ on the other. A transformation thus seeks to replace one set of social structures with an entirely different set, rather than merely adjust unsustainable existing structures (Asara et al., 2015; Eckersley, 2021; Hölscher et al., 2018; Newell, 2019). In practice, these conceptual differences blur when transitions combine to usher in larger-scale transformations (Göpel, 2016). However, we render the transition–transformation divide more tangible via the analytical distinction between green growth and post-growth. The resulting divide follows recent work by Buch-Hansen and Carstensen (2021) on green growth and degrowth as rival ‘ecopolitical projects’, while also echoing the discussion in the previous section. Considering patterns of change, it is common to distinguish between top-down and bottom-up processes. We assume two main, potentially complementary, dynamics of transformations: top-down structural changes enforced from positions of political-economic authority vs. bottom-up grassroots initiatives driven by individuals or organizations pursuing sustainability goals (Buch-Hansen & Nesterova, 2023, pp. 5–7; Schmelzer et al., 2022, ch. 6; Scoones et al., 2015).

Combining these two dichotomies yields four possible pathways, as displayed in Table 1. A process of change that results from the imposition of top-down sustainability initiatives and keeps current arrangements for green growth largely in place qualifies as modification. If initiatives emanate (primarily) from the bottom up where actors seek to realize green growth through changes to business models, logistics or technologies, we label the process substitution. As we move to the right-hand column, we depart from green growth and move into post-growth. If radical changes to structures and institutions along post-growth lines transform society from the top down, we speak of conversion. Finally, for bottom-up processes of enacting transformative social arrangements that overcome the need for economic growth, we reserve the term prefiguration. These four pathways demonstrate that a wide spectrum of sustainability reorganizations is possible. To structure our discussion of the pathways, we spell out the underlying assumptions about (1) the state-market-society relationship and (2) key mechanisms of change.

Table 1. Pathways of reorganizing political economies toward socioecological sustainability.

		Paradigm
		Green growth	Post-growth
Pattern	Top-down	Modification	Conversion
	Bottom-up	Substitution	Prefiguration

Source: Authors.

Modification

Modification implies a top-down green growth approach to global sustainability, in which society plays a minor role while the state mobilizes its own resources for either massive interventions into markets or massive de-risking of corporate investments in these markets. The increasingly popular Green New Deals are typical manifestations of the interventionist variant (Chomsky & Pollin, 2020) whereas large-scale de-risking has occurred under what has been dubbed ‘the Wall Street Consensus’ (Gabor, 2021). Modification pathways are top-down by delegating most responsibility to the state (or international organizations, IOs) in either fixing markets or steering market actors toward greener outcomes. In both cases, the green growth orientation surfaces in the assumption that economic incentives (leading to growing economies) are necessary to spur investments into greener business models and ensure the creation of new green jobs.

The modification position insists that economic growth can be decoupled from ecological degradation, mainly through state-led and state-funded development of more efficient technologies, supported by institutional reforms (such as a better pricing of externalities). In its interventionist variant, decoupling is still assumed to be possible, but it requires the work of an active ‘entrepreneurial state’ within robust international governance frameworks to channel investments and aid (Mazzucato, 2011). In its de-risking variant, the decoupling hypothesis is connected to light-touch regulatory measures or marketized solutions, such as carbon markets, which present capital accumulation opportunities in their own right (Lane & Newell, 2016).

The modification approach has its roots in the 1987 Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment & Development, 1987), a foundational contribution to mainstreaming sustainable development globally. During the 1990s, scholars formalized these ideas into theories on the environmental Kuznets curve (Stern, 2004) and ‘ecological modernization’ (Mol & Spaargaren, 2000), which helped to make technological innovation central to the green growth position. In this view, new technologies can ‘fix’ current energy and production systems without hampering economic growth, because there is now a business case for going green (Way et al., 2022). This line of thinking represents the standard approach to sustainability adopted by the vast majority of states, IOs and transnational corporations, which reflects an attractive win-win narrative around green growth, as well as its institutional and structural embeddedness (Barry, 2020; Meckling & Allan, 2020; Schmelzer, 2016).

Despite remaining vague on the definition of green growth, IOs converge on a preference for using government regulation and market incentives to enhance ecological efficiency through technological progress (Hickel & Kallis, 2020, p. 470). This conceptual open-endedness is arguably a strategic asset as it allows relatively diverse actors to rally around a range of policies and initiatives under the umbrella of green growth. The modification pathway, however, raises nagging questions about the extent to which incremental change can overcome the problem of systemic lock-in through what Bernstein and Hoffmann (2019) call ‘the fractal carbon trap’. The track record of ‘green capitalism’ has so far been underwhelming in this regard (Buller, 2022).

Substitution

Substitution involves bottom-up initiatives that still operate under the default assumption of green growth while offering market actors new incentives for greener behavior. In this pathway, we see a substantial shift of agency and responsibility from state to market actors. The implied mechanism of change toward sustainability is mass technological substitution through Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’. Using the language of the popular multi-level perspective (MLP) in innovation and transition studies, we may say that change typically originates in ‘technological niches’, from where new solutions can be mainstreamed to ‘socio-technical regimes’ (Geels, 2002, pp. 1260–1263). Frequently, modification initiatives enable substitution by incentivizing market actors to develop and diffuse technological solutions to sustainability problems. As before, decoupling is assumed to be principally feasible because cumulative technological ‘breakthroughs’ can redirect entrepreneurial practices. Whereas the modification pathway pivots around top-down actions to make markets greener, the substitution pathway highlights the actions of market actors themselves in inventing technological alternatives.

Literature in innovation and transition studies has substantially contributed to theorizing bottom-up sustainability initiatives that follow market logics (Geels & Schot, 2007; Turnheim et al., 2015), while also garnering high-level policy attention (Geels, 2020; Mazzucato, 2018). Whereas, the main actors of interest in this literature are firms, their interactions with other actors (such as universities or public agencies) in ‘multi-level’ transition processes have also received much attention (Geels, 2002, p. 1260), leading to various examples of disruptive innovations that trigger substitution processes (Geels & Schot, 2007, pp. 409–411). Niche technologies or actors can then ‘amplify’ sustainability solutions (Lam et al., 2020; see Smith & Raven, 2012). Recent work in IPE has begun to address similar concerns (Newell & Simms, 2021).

Studies on sustainable entrepreneurship echo the modification argument that environmental degradation results from market failures, while adding that market failures present business opportunities that can be realized through disruptive technologies and new business models (Cohen & Winn, 2007). Over time, this line of research has doubled down on entrepreneurship as a solution to environmental degradation and other ‘grand challenges’ (Howard-Grenville, 2021). Scholars have also linked entrepreneurship to broader questions of social transformation in ways that point to more prefigurative modes of action (Daskalaki et al., 2015), as we discuss later. Substitution thus shows considerable vertical straddling with modification, but also the potential for horizontal straddling in our pathways matrix.

Within IPE, a more cautious approach to the sustainability potential of individual market actors or industries has been adopted, in line with a critical tradition that tends to view all actors as embedded within constraining societal and political structures. For example, in the domain of energy, recent scholarship paints a variegated picture of the agency of different market actors in transitions, depending on their relation to labor, capital and competitors (Kuzemko et al., 2019; Newell, 2019). Even if some agents remain agnostic on the question of economic growth or post-growth, their activities typically reproduce, rather than question, green growth institutions. Thus, the substitution quadrant includes bottom-up initiatives with an explicit commitment to, or a tacit acceptance of, green growth. In either case, such actors would seem incapable of planting the seeds of transformative change that would help to unleash decarbonization and also tackle other pressing socioecological problems.

Conversion

Moving to the right-hand column of Table 1, we cross the divide between green growth transition and post-growth transformation. Conversion centers on strategies of instituting a new system from the top down, with nation states as the key actors. The label captures the idea that existing societal institutions, which would destabilize without constant economic growth (Rosa et al., 2017), would require a fundamental reorganization around an entirely different modus operandi, rather than the more modest reforms implied by green growth. This would amount to what Victor (2019) calls degrowth ‘by design’. As opposed to the modification pathway, the conversion pathway relegates the market to a more passive role, imagining the state as the primary agent of sustainability transformations. While the market becomes a tool that the state can use, credible or effective sustainability progress does not originate in it. As for society’s role, the conversion quadrant contains both more or less democratic forms. Eckersley’s (2004) notion of the ‘green state’ is a classic example of a democratic conversion of the state toward post-growth principles. More authoritarian versions include eco-fascism or ecological Leninism as desperate attempts to maintain social order under rapidly deteriorating ecological conditions (Tooze, 2021).

However, there are considerable obstacles on this pathway. Critical accounts suggest that sustainability transformations presuppose an overhauling of the framework of the liberal capitalist state (Bailey, 2015; Wanner, 2015). Eckersley (2021, pp. 253, 261) argues that capitalist states need not be chained to the growth imperative, given that the state is still the best locale for planning and designing sustainability transformations. Others agree that states can be repurposed to contribute to and function within sustainable post-growth economies, especially when working in tandem with prefigurative actors (Buch-Hansen, 2014; Koch, 2020). Going further still, Malm (2020) suggests that the climate emergency necessitates the immediate capture of the state for a large-scale intervention in the economy to accomplish dramatic emission reductions that would never materialize by virtue of market dynamics under neoliberalism alone (see also Buller, 2022).

Looking beyond the state, the question is whether broader structures of the global political economy can also be captured and converted to realize a post-growth transformation. Some post-growth interventions that criticize the tenets of orthodox economic theory make such arguments (Daly, 1996; Göpel, 2016; Jackson, 2017). However, most of such work concentrates on demonstrating flaws in mainstream economic thinking and building a case for post-growth economies. We know less about the political strategies and structural changes needed to set the transformation in motion. Because economic growth has been enshrined in global economic structures since the end of World War II (Schmelzer, 2016), the scope and scale of institutional change that will have to happen rather quickly is monumental.

There are some international sites in which conversion ideas are already flourishing. Notably, some supra- and international institutions have started to question the desirability of endless economic growth: Recent reports from the European Environment Agency (EEA, 2021) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019) explicitly consider deprioritizing economic growth to attain key environmental policy objectives. These examples show that IOs can potentially initiate and lead sustainability transformation initiatives (Kranke & Quitsch, 2021). Yet while we understand that post-growth societies can theoretically work on a macro-scale, we know little about how to get there, or what conversion will do to the current structure and arrangements of the global political economy. The conversion quadrant is still a heavily undertheorized and politically rarely imagined pathway, especially at the international level.

Prefiguration

Prefiguration unfolds through agent-led, bottom-up efforts to imagine and enact alternatives to the current system. Since that system is growth-centric, some social movements promote post-growth imaginaries as a key step toward societal transformation (Brossmann & Islar, 2020). In terms of how agency and responsibility are distributed, prefiguration goes the furthest in imagining civil society as the primary source of genuine progress on sustainability. Both states and markets are regarded as being complicit in capitalist accumulation, which undermines both social cohesion and ecological integrity. Truly sustainable alternatives will have to emerge from societal activism that strives to break with the principle of capitalist accumulation (Chertkovskaya & Paulsson, 2021). The mechanism of change envisioned in the prefiguration quadrant is a diffusion and multiplication of prefigurative alternatives that grow organically from small-scale demonstrations to increasingly larger constellations (Yates, 2015, p. 14).

The concept of ‘prefiguration’ has become established especially in scholarship on social movements and, more recently, critical organization studies. The term is used to analyze particular kinds of social movement strategies that revolve around ‘the attempted construction of alternative or utopian social relations in the present’ (Yates, 2015, p. 1). Whereas substitution does not seek to overcome the hegemony of green growth, prefiguration explicitly problematizes economic growth. Rather than building up niches that would feed into the growth-centric political economy, prefiguration focuses on creating post-growth alternatives in the present that can diffuse through market or non-market means. The primary agents advancing prefigurative activities are citizen-led initiatives, social movements and alternative organizations, such as cooperatives, non-profits or worker-owned collectives (Brossmann & Islar, 2020; Hinton, 2020; Parker et al., 2014).

Attention is also growing within environmental politics research to the role of everyday material practices in upholding unsustainable structures (MacGregor, 2021; Schlosberg, 2019). This insight makes alternative economies an apt target for investigations into a post-growth everyday IPE (Ford & Kuetting, 2020). The wider field could help to broaden conversations about which actors might advance prefigurative initiatives, such as trade unions (Felli, 2014). Given its strong track record of studying a variety of organizations at different scales of analysis, IPE could empirically explore how prefigurative practices ‘travel’ to the landscape of the global political economy: How can the global political economy be organized differently through direct action?

The overall message from the prefiguration category is that economies and organizations are continuously being made and remade. However, although prefigurative activities already enact viable solutions on smaller scales, top-down approaches usually ignore them. In this respect, some authors in critical management and organization studies have argued that organizations can re-arrange themselves and entire economies in line with post-growth ideas (Banerjee et al., 2021; Ergene et al., 2021). Their capacity for change is potentially greater than IPE research has tended to assume. It is thus worth investigating the potential to build post-growth economies from the bottom up.

The pathways in action: global plastics and food systems

To illustrate the applicability of our pathways framework, we focus on the global plastics and food systems as key areas for sustainability action given their massive contributions to global warming and other socioecological crises. In our discussion, we especially highlight the interplay between the pathways introduced above, as well as shifting actor constellations and change dynamics.

Current plastic politics are largely characterized by an intersection between modification and substitution pathways. However, the plastic crisis was rendered legible for the general public and policymakers through environmental campaigns and artistic production, both of which prefiguratively emphasized distressing images of ocean life suffering from plastic litter (Chertkovskaya et al., 2020). This activism instigated bans and regulations of problematic plastic objects, such as bags, bottles or microbeads (Nielsen et al., 2020). More recently, the European Union (EU) introduced limits on some single-use plastics (Palm et al., 2022). The initial regulatory response to the plastic crisis follows the modification pathway by tackling selected issues instead of challenging entrenched political economies of plastic production. Momentum is now building on the back of these regulations to close material loops, thereby connecting the problem of ocean pollution to inefficiencies and wastefulness in the plastics sector (Nielsen et al., 2020, pp. 9–14).

At first glance, the circular economy agenda appears to emerge from a conversion pathway. Upon further analysis, however, an implicit growth orientation becomes visible (Palm et al., 2022, pp. 376–380). The circularity agenda has gained industry acceptance by revaluing waste as a resource and facilitating capital accumulation through recycling, thus legitimizing the further expansion of the plastics sector (Mah, 2021). The European Commission (2020) makes several explicit references to pursuing continued economic growth through decoupling in its New Circular Economy Action Plan. More importantly, the circular plastics agenda fails to address the problem of the fossil dependency and intensity of plastic production (Bauer & Fontenit, 2021). On green growth pathways, incumbents act as key agents of change, and interactions between the modification and substitution pathways are common and expected. In the case of plastics, it is evident in how the mainstream policy response relies on new recycling technologies. According to the European Commission (2020), research and entrepreneurship will create cost-effective chemical recycling facilities that can break through technical barriers to recycling difficult polymers and plastic products. In addition to recycling, substitution through the use of bio-based plastics and other alternative materials can provide technical fixes within the existing plastics system.

Against this backdrop, prefiguration initiatives aim for a reduction of plastic use and waste (and waste more generally) while showcasing how to do so. The many zero-waste stores that have opened across Europe are prominent examples, given their deliberate attempts to challenge mainstream industries by avoiding single-use packaging and selling products by weight. Emerging from a wider zero waste movement, these stores prefigure a world where one’s daily consumption needs are satisfied with minimal waste creation. Beyond waste prevention, zero-waste stores often work closely with local suppliers of produce, enabling economies around small-scale, producer-run alternatives to mainstream retail (Beitzen-Heineke et al., 2017). Unlike dominant agents in the plastics industry who receive large volumes of subsidies and investments, zero-waste stores are mostly missed in public debates. In contrast to the interplay between modification and substitution, there are few, if any, links between prefiguration and conversion. In fact, the conversion quadrant is empty as no institutional agents pursue a top-down, post-growth approach to plastics. The predominant modification pathway has created several regulatory frameworks, which could be steered toward conversion if the growth in plastic production is increasingly challenged. Another key measure is to create institutional mechanisms that would empower prefigurative agents (Chertkovskaya et al., 2023).

To show the broader applicability of our analytical framework with a different example, we now briefly discuss reorganizations toward sustainability in the contemporary global food system. Within it, modification promotes policies and programs for optimizing production efficiency and reducing climate emissions, thus keeping the status quo largely in place. A case in point is the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy as a state-led strategy to make agricultural subsidies conditional on marginal environmental improvements in farming practices (Alons, 2017). Other actors seek to mainstream disruptive innovations, such as lab-grown or plant-based meat and dairy, to outcompete incumbent actors and create a new sociotechnical food regime (Mouat & Prince, 2018), enabling substitution. The key actors here are venture capitalists, start-ups and incumbents who also invest in new technologies. Many modification initiatives in the food sector also aim at (partial) substitution and contain incentives to develop and scale up disruptive food technologies.

On the post-growth side, the conversion quadrant is again empty. Conversion does happen to some extent through initiatives at the level of cities or municipalities, such as local support for urban farms. However, these examples are marginal compared to modification policies. Another example would be entire countries or regions that would radically reorganize their food system by removing subsidies to industrial agriculture and by promoting a proliferation of small-scale local food supply chains. Finally, prefigurative actors oppose such capital-intensive and growth-oriented developments, instead practicing alternatives that break with the industrial and economic organization of the current food regime, such as agroecology, peasant networks or ecovillages (Casey et al., 2020). Like in the plastics example, the ideal-typical quadrants enable us to visualize feedback effects between different types of sustainability reorganizations, thus foregrounding unexpected interactions: Conversion initiatives could amplify disruptive high-tech and just local food solutions, such as cooperatively owned bioreactors producing for local communities instead of global markets. Table 2 lists some of the examples from the preceding discussion within the basic setup of the pathways matrix introduced at the beginning of the previous section.

Table 2. Pathways for reorganizing the plastics and food sectors.

Modification		Conversion
Plastics	Food	Plastics	Food
Regulations, circular economy	Production efficiency policies	?	?
Substitution		Prefiguration
Plastics	Food	Plastics	Food
New production and recycling technologies	Animal-free meat and dairy products	Zero-waste stores	Agroecology, peasant networks

Source: Authors.

As the reorganization dynamics in the plastics and food sectors suggest, our framework allows us to clarify the interactions between different types of sustainability reorganizations, and to show what constellations of structures, actors and paradigms are thus activated to what end. For the global political economic order to avoid catastrophic collapse in the coming decades, it is vital to harness growth-oriented initiatives on the modification or substitution pathways for post-growth initiatives that can convert existing political-economic arrangements and create new ones over time. Moreover, while prefigurative activities require a stronger coupling with top-down conversion pathways to realize their full potential (Buch-Hansen & Nesterova, 2023, pp. 6–7; Schmelzer et al., 2022, ch. 6), state-initiated transformations of this kind have proven elusive, at least in our two illustrative cases. In other words, post-growth or degrowth ‘by design’ (Victor, 2019) is not easily forthcoming. Luckily, IPE has a theoretical toolbox suited to imagining and analyzing conversion scenarios.

Conclusion

We have shown in this article why IPE research would benefit from engaging more comprehensively with post-growth thinking to problematize the widespread normalization of economic growth. Otherwise, the field may struggle to come to grips with the socioecological crises that will remake the global political economy in the coming decades. An IPE fit for purpose can no longer afford to sideline the (post-)growth question, which is inexorably intertwined with many of the daunting challenges facing humanity.

We have offered a conceptual vocabulary of four pathways of reorganization toward socioecological sustainability. Even though contemporary states have failed to enact transformative change through conversion, as exemplified by our illustrations from the plastics and food sectors, we still suggest that interactions between the pathways are fruitful for scholars and activists to explore; new coalitions that transcend old divides might emerge precisely here. In this sense, our contribution is hopefully just the start of a broader collective effort in critical IPE. As Babic and Sharma (2023, p. 8) highlight in a recent contribution, critical IPE needs to produce policy-relevant knowledge about ‘paths towards a post-growth future’ in response to anthropogenic climate change. Here we see particular potential for ecological, feminist and postcolonial perspectives to strenghten our framework and bring more nuance to it, substantiating the move from critiquing economic growth to researching post-growth empirically.

The shift toward more growth-independent political economies will hardly start with the insistence on the ‘purity’ of certain ideas. There is in fact enormous potential not only for intellectual cross-fertilization, but also for political mobilization once we decipher what habitual calls that ‘the economy must grow’ actually stand for. When invoking the growth imperative, political elites typically mean the prospect of more jobs, higher tax revenues and the smooth working of social welfare systems. These concerns are obviously important. Post-growth proponents, however, are not against (meaningful) jobs and strong welfare. On the contrary, they argue that the unrelenting pursuit for growth will not deliver these goods equitably but, instead, eventually degrade the ecosystems that sustain human livelihoods and lives. Moreover, jobs or welfare do not necessarily depend on economic growth under all institutional configurations. Critics who accuse post-growthers of being ‘radical’ thus risk mistaking means for ends. Seen from this angle, today’s radicals may be tomorrow’s visionaries.

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.