The growing habit of treating Degrowth and the Wellbeing Economy as if they were cousins in the same political family risks more than harmless popular confusion: it diverts attention from capitalism’s structural pathologies and reassures audiences that the comforts of the present order can be preserved through incremental adjustment. In truth, Degrowth and Wellbeing part ways at the level of first principles: they differ fundamentally in their understandings of capitalism, economic growth, and the political mechanics of societal change.
The wellbeing agenda is, at heart, the natural heir of social democracy. It calls for stronger public services, new indicators, mission-driven investment, greener infrastructure, and a more holistic story about prosperity. It assumes the basic machinery of capitalism can be persuaded—nudged, redesigned, incentivised—into acting like a responsible adult. Its promise is that we may continue who we are, merely with better manners and a cleaner conscience.
Degrowth begins by torching that comfort. It names the capitalist growth imperative as the engine of ecological destruction, inequality, and colonial extraction. It argues—correctly—that affluent economies must produce and consume less, not differently; that throughput must fall; that property, production, and power relations must be transformed, not massaged. Degrowth is not interested in making capitalism nicer. It is interested in making a better society possible.
Every line of comparison widens the fracture. Wellbeing imagines progress through new dashboards; Degrowth measures it by absolute limits on material and energy use. Wellbeing courts business as a partner; Degrowth subordinates profit to the commons. Wellbeing promises “flourishing within limits”; Degrowth promises liberation through contraction. Their narratives do not rhyme. They cancel each other out.
Beneath practical differences lies a deeper rupture. The wellbeing worldview rests on coherence: the belief that crises stem from policy mistakes, missing data, misaligned incentives. Fix the context and the system will behave. Degrowth rests on dialectics: crises arise from the system itself—its structure, its power, its hunger for expansion. One approach wants to coordinate interests. The other confronts domination. They do not just diverge on methods; they disagree on reality.
Which means any pretence of compatibility becomes evasion. We cannot dismantle the growth regime while working within a paradigm that leaves its core architecture intact. We cannot demand contraction without a fundamental shift in how people live. We cannot call for rupture while advertising reform.
We must face up to a choice: relative comfort or disruptive conflict, system adaptation or system transformation. Degrowth and Wellbeing Economy both speak of limits, justice, dignity—but we cannot have them both.
#Leadership #Transformation #PoliticalEconomy #Sustainability #SystemChange
Selected References
Degrowth and Postgrowth - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800925003131
Well-being vs Degrowth - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800925000151