The People Want Degrowth!

Does the word “degrowth” send chills down your spine ? Does it fill your mind with images of long-haired, dancing hippies, or a bleak, crumbling world ? If so, you are not alone. Six years ago, French president Emmanuel Macron scolded environmental activists and called them “Amish” for opposing the deployment of 5G infrastructure across France, claiming that the solution to our contemporary climate issues could not imply degrowth or “a return to oil lamps”. Degrowth is a nebulous and vague word to many people. Painting it in hyperbolic language and vivid imagery only serves to enhance people’s fear of this little known concept.

However, in a compelling new study published in the Lancet Planetary Health Journal in November 2025, a surprising 80% of participants supported the key ideas associated with degrowth as well as its implementation.

And yet, the issue of degrowth remains subject to much controversy within academic circles. Emmanuel Macron’s caricatural comment is a perfect illustration of many liberal economists’ fear that degrowth will stifle technological innovation and drag society (understand, “advanced economies”) back centuries of scientific progress. Over the past two centuries, industrialization has, among many things, lifted millions out of poverty, improved medical knowledge, made consumer goods far more accessible, raised life expectancy, and reduced infant mortality rates dramatically. Why couldn’t it also solve the climate crisis ? Liberal economists argue that reducing our consumption in order to lower our emissions and slow down the extraction of near-depleted resources isn’t necessary, since economies are bound to follow Kuznets’ Environmental Curve. This hypothesis suggests that, while environmental damage and pollution are inevitable for economic development, once a certain level of income per capita is achieved, economies will invest in cleaner technologies that will counter balance the initial environmental damage. In other words, while economic growth may not have been particularly helpful in cutting global carbon emissions up until now, new advanced technologies (yet to be invented) will soon come to our rescue and reduce the energy and carbon intensity of production. And, on some glorious day, a tipping point will be crossed beyond which economic growth will in fact reduce global greenhouse gas emissions – and we will have achieved (what economists call) absolute decoupling.

That is why, in liberal economists’ view, ever-rising GDP figures are the only way forward. But what if we’ve already gone too far ? Supporters of degrowth argue that advanced economies already have more than enough resources and wealth to thrive, only the way in which they are currently distributed may conceal that fact. Furthermore, they contend that solutions to the climate crisis are already here – and they are abundant. Waiting for a technological miracle to save us all in time before we cross all nine planetary boundaries is irresponsible and reckless: the current rate of innovation simply isn’t fast enough to be a credible and safe solution to curtail global carbon emissions before it is too late (beyond the simple fact that research is a lengthy process, ironically, this is also in part because capitalism encourages monopolies – and thus reduces competition and incentives to innovate). As for the possibility of green growth, a 2019 report by the European Environmental Bureau has debunked the claim that 32 advanced economies of the Global North have already achieved absolute decoupling of carbon emissions and economic growth. Its writers, including French environmental economist Timothée Parrique, point out a host of different reasons why this is an illusion, including cost shifting practices (globalization has outsourced carbon-intensive industries to low-income countries), rebound effects (efficiency improvements being compensated by increased consumption; eg: using a fuel-efficient car more regularly), and problem shifting (electric car batteries require the extraction of lithium).

Labels versus Ideas

But economic growth – and degrowth – is not just about GDP and innovation. Economic models shape political systems, welfare states, and inequalities. As such, any major transformation of our economic system is bound to have significant implications for our day-to-day lives. If change is to occur, then it needs to arise democratically. So what do citizens think about degrowth ? In the Lancet Planetary Health study, behavioral scientists Dario Krpan and Frédéric Basso from the London School of Economics teamed up with environmental economist Giorgos Kallis and economic anthropologist Jason E. Hickel from the Autonomous University of Barcelona to investigate public support for degrowth in advanced economies. They achieved this by disaggregating the label of degrowth from the proposal itself, which they defined as follows:

“high-income countries would scale down harmful and non-essential production and consumption to help achieve ecological goals; […] wellbeing would be improved by ensuring universal access to public services, affordable housing, gainful employment, and living wages; […] control over the economy (production, resource use, and public services) would be progressively democratised; […] countries in the Global South (ie, the developing economies of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) would be liberated from patterns of appropriation and enabled to achieve human development; and […] improvements in technological efficiency would be pursued alongside sufficiency principles.”

In a first round of surveys, they asked a representative sample of 5,454 participants from the US and the UK to rate their support for the full degrowth proposal (without any label), as well as for labels corresponding to eight different economic models either conceptually resembling degrowth (ecosocialism, post growth, well-being economy), or offering competing visions for a sustainable future (green growth, green capitalism, ecomodernism, green market economy) on a 7-point scale. In a second round, they randomly assigned and asked participants to rate their support for either the whole degrowth proposal, one of the labels often used interchangeably with this economic model (degrowth, well-being economy or ecosocialism), or a combination of the degrowth proposal with one of these three labels.

Their results are captivating: a majority of respondents found the degrowth proposal appealing (81% of support in the UK, 72% in the US). This positive response hardly wavered when the proposal was presented along with the degrowth label (74% of support in the UK, 68% in America). In other words, the degrowth proposal was popular whether the associated label was there or not. By contrast, however, the label of degrowth on its own was largely disapproved of (roughly 1 in 4 UK participants, and 1 in 5 US participants). Other labels alone were significantly more appealing, with about a third of respondents rating “ecosocialism” and three-quarters rating “well-being economy” positively. The “well-being economy” label received by far the highest support of all labels, including variations of “green growth” labels; in other words, participants preferred the well-being economy model to green capitalism. Furthermore, any combination of a label synonymous with degrowth (well-being economy or ecosocialism) with the full degrowth proposal garnered just as much support as the full proposal presented with the original, “degrowth” label. Finally, the study found that the key predictors for supporting degrowth weren’t socioeconomic distinctions such as income level or gender, but rather people’s “utopian impulse”, that is, their drive to take action and invent ideas to address global challenges, as well as their belief in a new ecological balance.

Degrowth doesn’t need a label

These findings contradict the wide-spread belief that degrowth could never mobilize sufficient civic support to be implemented in real life. The study shows that resistance to degrowth is rooted almost entirely in the label alone, not in the core substance of this economic approach. When presented with the degrowth label on its own, the combination of low public knowledge of degrowth and dislike for the term itself presumably leads people to make judgments based on surface-level impressions (e.g., reduced income). In fact, the study indicates that the label accompanying the degrowth proposal matters very little; support was high whether the accompanying label was degrowth, ecosocialism or well-being economy. Accordingly, politicians and activists who wish to raise public support for degrowth ought to shift their focus away from labels, and instead concentrate their efforts on presenting degrowth as a unified, coherent proposal for profound societal change.