Debate
Green Growth or Degrowth?
Some rich countries already emit less while their economies grow – but far too slowly to meet the Paris climate goals. Can growth be made green in time, or must rich countries learn to prosper without it?
Since The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report to the Club of Rome, the question has returned with every ecological crisis; in the same year André Gorz asked whether the earth’s balance, which requires that material production stop growing or even shrink, was compatible with the survival of capitalism. Some facts are settled. Growth and falling emissions can go together: between 2013 and 2019 eleven high-income countries cut their emissions while their economies grew. But at that pace they would need more than 220 years to cut them by 95 per cent (Vogel and Hickel, 2023), and a review of 835 studies found that observed decoupling rates cannot deliver the rapid cuts required (Haberl and colleagues, 2020). Disputed is what follows. Most governments bet on “green growth” through renewables and efficiency; a growing current in ecological economics calls on rich countries to reduce their material and energy throughput deliberately. Since 2022 the IPCC has also discussed degrowth, and Kohei Saito’s book on “capital in the Anthropocene” (2020) became a bestseller in Japan.
Positions
Green growth
Defenders of green growth argue that what harms the climate is not growth as such but fossil energy. Since the mid-2000s many rich countries have cut their carbon emissions while their economies grew – in eighteen developed economies emissions fell for a decade or more (Corinne Le Quéré and colleagues, 2019) – and the costs of solar power, wind and batteries have collapsed. Growth, on this view, pays for innovation, the welfare state and the energy transition, and remains indispensable for the billions who still live in poverty. The authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) and Hannah Ritchie (Not the End of the World, 2024) see the task as accelerating decoupling through clean technology and carbon pricing, not giving up prosperity.
Degrowth
Giorgos Kallis (Degrowth, 2018), Jason Hickel (Less Is More, 2020) and Saito argue that absolute decoupling of resource use and emissions from GDP has been rare and far too slow: at the rates achieved between 2013 and 2019, even the high-income countries that had decoupled would need more than 200 years to bring their emissions close to zero (Vogel and Hickel, 2023). Rich countries should therefore plan a democratic reduction of their material and energy throughput – scaling back harmful sectors such as fossil fuels, aviation and fast fashion – while securing wellbeing through public services, shorter working hours and a fairer distribution of wealth. Degrowth is meant for rich economies, not poor ones. The economist Branko Milanović objects that freezing world output while lifting up the poor would require incomes in rich countries to fall to a degree no electorate would accept – a form of “magical thinking”.
Beyond the growth question
A third group regards GDP growth as the wrong target for both sides. Tim Jackson (Prosperity without Growth, 2009) argues that rich societies must make their prosperity independent of growth – in work, finance and social security – because they cannot count on growth continuing within ecological limits. Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” (Doughnut Economics, 2017) defines the goal as meeting everyone’s basic needs without overshooting planetary boundaries, and recommends being “agnostic” about growth; Jeroen van den Bergh (2011) similarly pleads for “a-growth”, indifference to GDP. On this view the quarrel between growth and degrowth distracts from the policies – carbon pricing, regulation, public investment – that both sides could support.
The compulsion to grow
Sociologists ask why modern societies find it so hard to stop growing. Rosa argues that they can only stabilise themselves dynamically: their institutions – markets, welfare states, science, careers – need constant growth, acceleration and innovation merely to preserve the status quo, so that every pause appears as a crisis. Long before, Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944) had described how a market economy “disembedded” from society treats land and labour as commodities and so endangers its own natural and social foundations. On this view neither technical decoupling nor appeals to moderation are enough: a society beyond growth would need different institutions that no longer depend on escalation.
Held by
- Hartmut Rosab. 1965
- Karl Polanyi1886–1964
Read more
- Jefim Vogel, Jason Hickel: Is green growth happening? An empirical analysis of achieved versus Paris-compliant CO2–GDP decoupling in high-income countries (Lancet Planetary Health 7, 2023)
- Helmut Haberl et al.: A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II (Environmental Research Letters 15, 2020)
- Corinne Le Quéré et al.: Drivers of declining CO2 emissions in 18 developed economies (Nature Climate Change 9, 2019)
- An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015)
- Branko Milanović: Degrowth – Solving the Impasse by Magical Thinking (Global Policy, 2021)
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change (2022)
As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made