By Kelly Gingrich

This project began when I realized, during my studies of climate education, that the literature kept skirting around directly questioning economic growth. We know that continuous economic growth cannot be maintained on a finite planet without overshooting Earth’s biocapacity (which is already well underway). Continuing to run into this roadblock in climate education literature while also studying degrowth with EUC’s degrowth team (Dr. Lina Brand-Correa, Elaine Howarth and Anna Stratton), made it obvious to me that degrowth and climate education needed to talk to each other more. Education is not covered very much in the degrowth literature either. So, I decided that my Major Research Project for my MES Program needed to first and foremost bring these two areas into conversation with each other.

Evidence continues to suggest that a green growth scenario is inadequate for reducing carbon emissions in the timeframe necessary to avert the worst of runaway climate change (Haberl et al., 2020; Keyßer & Lenzen, 2021; Mastini et al., 2021; Meadows et al., 2004; Victor, 2012). This ‘green growth’ results from the greenwashing and co-opting of climate discourse to continue increasing production and consumption, and thus economic growth. The societal buy-in to the pre-eminence and permanence of economic growth as universally good and desirable, due to decades now of corporations and governments pushing neoliberal ideology, has narrowed our collective ability to imagine alternative ways of organizing our economies and self-organizing each other. Dominant cultural norms of consumerism and individualism impede real climate justice. This has given rise to the assumption in both climate education and popular discourses that economic growth can and should continue into the climate emergency.

Degrowth is a movement and area of scholarship dedicated to reducing material throughput in overdeveloped countries that are consuming more than their fair share of Earth’s resources, while improving wellbeing and justice for all. Borne from critiques of capitalism and emerging from ecological economics, degrowth acknowledges planetary boundaries and the thermodynamic need to reduce material throughput in our economy and decrease production and consumption in overdeveloped countries in the Global North, particularly among the wealthiest. Degrowth signals the need for a planned contraction of our economy, challenging ‘green growth’ and ‘sustainable development’ discourses (D’Alisa et al., 2015; Hickel, 2020; Kothari et al., 2014; Mastini et al., 2021). However, degrowth faces major cultural challenges in a capitalist-colonial society where wellbeing and progress are conflated with overconsumption and the ‘imperial mode of living (Büchs & Koch, 2018). Education, particularly climate and environmental education, is a key site for grappling with these cultural challenges and shifting common senses around the perceived inevitability and necessity of economic growth and open up new possibilities for transitioning towards post-growth lifeways.

For this research, I used cellphilm as a participatory visual method (Flicker & MacEntee, 2023) – with support from my supervisor, Dr. Sarah Flicker. One of my intentions from the outset in working with youth climate activists was engaging in a project that can benefit them and their own activist work through both process and output. Creating a series of cellphilms provides this group with an output that can be used as they wish after the project. They can be created relatively quickly and easily (especially with young people who are already savvy with the technology) and they "bridge research and pedagogy." (2023, p. 5).

I then facilitated a participatory coding session, where participants collaboratively coded transcripts of their cellphilms and discussed the meanings they assigned to each code. This was a highly generative and reflexive conversation, for me and for participants. Moving through a thematic analysis of their own work allowed participants to reflect on their own ideas, talk them through with peers, and share and synthesize different perspectives. After this, participants made a second round of cellphilms that incorporated this participatory coding conversation.

The youth climate activists who took part in this research quickly identified that wellbeing is holistic, includes many dimensions, and can be hindered by consumerism in the long run. They understood justice as an integral part of wellbeing, both in terms of uneven access and that basic needs need to be met for people to have the capacity to participate in activism and creating a climate-just future. They believe that the wellbeing of people and wellbeing of the planet are deeply interconnected and that as a society, we need to practice more collaboration, cooperation and connected amongst each other and with our environments. Lastly, participants understood that long-term wellbeing and investing in oneself and one’s community and environment is more important than the short-term gratification of consumerism, exemplified in fast fashion or social media. Participants shared how they negotiate a balance between their own wellbeing and their climate activism, understanding that they need to take care of themselves to be able to have the capacity to advocate for others and fight for a climate-just future.

Wellbeing appears to be a useful entry point to introduce degrowth ideas in climate education. These workshops focused on what wellbeing means for youth climate activists in climate-just futures; I did not introduce degrowth terminology here, as this would be more appropriate for a longer-term project with more scope. The present research prompts further climate education research that proceeds from wellbeing towards exploring the various facets of degrowth. More scholarship on education in degrowth is needed to sketch out, theoretically, what this might look like and practically, reflecting on actual projects, activations and learning spaces. We need to see more educational spaces of consciousness raising around the individual and collective benefits of reducing overproduction and overconsumption in Global North countries and transitioning to autonomous, slow, local and caring communities – and realizing these communities.

This particular project, consisting of participatory workshops with youth climate activists and a review of gaps in degrowth and climate education literature, is an exploratory first step to inform the broader project of theorizing an education for degrowth. I will be building on this research in my doctoral studies in EUC’s Environmental Studies PhD Program starting this September. I look forward to continuing the interdisciplinary work of bridging climate education and degrowth over the coming years.

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