Rethinking Sustainable Development through Post Growth

The conventional understanding of “sustainable development” relies on the increasingly dubious double assumption that economic growth delivers social benefits without overusing planetary resources, and that this strategy can be globalized. While a large body of post-growth scholarship has cast serious doubt on the prospects of “green growth”, it has yet to more comprehensively grapple with the political implications of this critique for global peace and prosperity. Many analysts in fact propose the pursuit of post-growth as an alternative strategy that will help advance the cause of peace and prosperity. However, existing empirical contributions typically stay at the local level, where post-growth ideas have made some inroads by shaping provisioning practices, or at the national level. Too rarely do such analyses capture global dynamics and dynamics across scales.


The working group, which is highly inter- and transdisciplinary in composition, takes on the challenging task of studying dynamics surrounding post-growth across local, national and global scales – with a particular focus on its potential contribution to global peace and prosperity. The project starts from the following main question: How can a post-growth approach to sustainable development help to foster global peace and prosperity? This question breaks down into three specific research questions, which reflect the state of academic and public debate on the peace-prosperity-sustainability nexus:

1. What post-growth policies are particularly suitable for realizing global peace and prosperity?

2. How do post-growth policies (and politics) interact across local, national and global scales?

3. How does a post-growth approach to sustainable development affect processes of (de)globalization?

The working group’s agenda comes at a critical time of poly-crisis, where continued economic growth (in almost all national economies and at the level of the global political economy) goes hand in hand with increasing environmental pressures. For example, six of the nine planetary boundaries have been confirmed as already transgressed, and various other key (socio-)ecological parameters show worrying trends. Yet the world has – on average – never been more affluent, or “developed”, than now. This constellation calls for a closer examination of the links between growth, (sustainable) development and peace.