This is an explorative text responding to a real-life issue but tying-in many different strands. It is intended as a continuation of another opinion piece and is a walk-thru diverse literature (listed in detail in References below) whilst trying to remain jargon-free.
A discussion had arisen over the past few months over what can realistically be expected by those aware of the unsustainability of the present situation, and the impotence of the contemporary societies to mitigate its catastrophic outcome. DegrowthUK, a networking site for the UK degrowth community, hosted this exchange of positions welcoming voices from Europe and further afield (“Prospects for Degrowth,” 2025). I recommend reading through these if you want to get acquainted with what degrowth’s messages for the present day are – rather than the root causes of the global predicament that are out of your lifetime and certainly out of your reach – and how different authors’ positions reflect in their vision of the meaning to be found in the immediate action. Based on the preceding live exchange and some of my research, the editor thought I could contribute something of a specific European semiperipheral position, not quite a ‘view from nowhere’, but a refreshing outlook voiced by those often passed over in the global ‘who dunnit’ spat.
Turns out I couldn’t deliver, despite gearing up to summarise what I have found in over a decade of working with Croatian and regional general population, activists and progressive researchers. One obvious reason was that – oh, you know that feeling well ye researchers of text and opinion – the different nuanced positions simply did not slot into a completed puzzle yet (for example cf. Domazet & Lubbock, 2025), too much was jarring to make a smooth blog-post in June 2025. The other was that I had recently discovered a whole new lacuna of research, the original environmentalist and social justice advocacy dating back to the early socialist organising for a modernisation alternative to capitalism some hundred years ago, and continuing in various formats to the early neoliberal transition academic sociology and philosophy in late 1990s Croatia. It seemed that something from that ‘struggle’ was missing when conceptualising the very description of the contemporary positions and practices. Furthermore, it might have been farfetched to hope for a vision out of the Euro-Atlantic mess (‘a way out of despair’) by the rural cousins from the Eastern flank (a bit like grain and timber flooded in to rescue the biomass-strapped West at the onset of its global rise).
Finally, it was increasingly becoming clear in the discussions of causes and strategies that a little more philosophy needed to be involved. Now that may be music to your ears in Kronika, but to most others it usually signals delays and cowardice to act. As if blog discussions in the face of a burning, war ravaged and highly polarised planet had not been enough, now let’s spend some more time in building a philosophy or even a political ontology. And yet, two things could not be so easily dismissed: (i) the degrowthers were looking for meaning in the chaos of lost battles, rising idiocracy, relentless destruction of biosphere and nothing-can-be-done popular apathy; and (ii) none of the transformative political strategies (broadly reformist, socialist or anarchist) seemed to cover all that needed to be included in the vision of a just sustainability. Philosophy is what we’d broadly call the intellectual work on a search for meaning and a conceptual framework in which to broadly communicate the sober and just vision and the actions to realize it. And it has, of course, been called for by louder and more prominent degrowth researchers than me for a while (Spash, 2025).
Spoiler alert: I won’t be able to give you a complete philosophy for degrowth here either. But I am increasingly convinced it is worth looking for one precisely with the transformation in mind, rather than a mere conceptual exercise. I am also convinced we can build on the cultural heritage of historical and contemporary philosophy in thinking how to make a world radically different from the present one materially and socially meaningful and desirable. Some contributions specific to Croatian and Yugoslavian intellectual history can be elements of that foundation – for an added semiperipheral pride, but also an infusion of meaning to the specific semiperipheral experience and trauma. As Oxana Lopatina says in the opening chapter of the recent volume of visions for ‘postgrowth’ futures produced in Zagreb but addressing European-wide Greens (Horvat & Pukanić, 2025), the phrase ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ doesn’t have the same power in a Western European metropolis and an Eastern European village.
She goes on to say: “What we think is possible is shaped by what we know and see around us. If the only thing we have known is capitalism and the Western standard of development, then imagining something completely different seems like an almost impossible task” (Lopatina, 2025, p. 16). For now, you may disagree with this ontological position, you may deny that we ‘see’ anything around us without it first being taught to us in language and culture, but you may at least admit that there is something in a researcher from Eastern Europe pointing out to degrowth visioning that modernisation and development pathways and choices one experienced will influence what one’s scope of expectations is. I would like you to also note that a social transformation requires a political articulation, which in turn requires a political ontology. (Don’t worry it does not get much heavier than this.)
A political ontology characterised by Matthew Abbott (Abbott, 2012) is “a form of thought that has its primary grounding not in disinterested contemplation from a standpoint of pure reason […], but rather in confrontation with an existential problem”. Is it farfetched to see survival of the plentiful and flourishing humanity (a being) as a problem, semiperipheric history as a perspective and the philosopher as researcher of the “political stakes of the question of being” (Aboott, 2012, p. 24)? Again, it has been said before by degrowth researchers. Claudio Cattaneo and colleagues wrote over 10 years ago to an ecological economics audience that degrowth is not just about reducing consumption or material throughput, but is about reconceptualising economics as emergent from the social and political ontological framework (Cattaneo et al., 2012). The practical consequence is also, says Cattaneo, a radical socio-political change to redefine the vision of the collective destiny.
Even the more pragmatic advocates and strategists, who point out that the degrowth literature often fails to acknowledge the magnitude of the material and structural transformation required to “live well in a very small fraction of the per capita resource and environmental impacts we rich countries have now” (Trainer, 2025), recognise that the issue is ‘philosophical’, in a sense of cultural, conceptual and thought-based. Ted Trainer says elsewhere that degrowth cannot be envisioned or acted upon “unless and until most people have come to see the present system needs to be dumped” because it is literally leading us to a catastrophic global breakdown (Trainer, 2024). By the system though he doesn’t mean just its material instantiation, but also what he calls the “mentality embedded in out culture” (Trainer, 2024), the philosophy generating meaning and instruments of action.
The political ontology used to envision and enact the desired transformation – the one that sees “the woods rather than the trees” (Freedman, 2013), as good strategies of transformation ought – features the community and simplicity, but also birds, bees and begonias of the living biosphere. Right now we are already experiencing another summer of hellish climate change impacts (Niranjan, 2025) and keep heaping up knowledge about how dangerous the whole set-up is in the long term (Brannen, 2025). We know how power is organised behind destructive practices and partial ontologies (Hanieh, 2024), on much more universal scale than a mere indulgence of a few preppers’ wet dreams. Even our artistic visioning is able to offer only dystopian titillations of what will happen when what we know and like breaks down, rather than how it could realistically be made more fulfilling and resilient (Hall, 2025).
There has been research trying to show how here in the semiperiphery we are not oblivious to it all for at least a decade (Dolenec et al., 2014; Brajdić Vuković et al., 2020), but now global surveys suggest that a dissatisfaction with the system (perhaps even with the ontology used to justify its processes) is prevalent, especially among the young (there is a good overview on @drjasonhickel profile on Instagram and @jasonhickel profile on X). And yet, not only does power remain concentrated with those essentially bound to biosphere destruction, but things keep getting worse. As if our hegemonic culture was ignorant of its impacts (hardly so, given the ubiquitous discussion about climate futures), disinterested in the future (hardly so, given the fetishizing of growth and improvement), or just despondent in the face of the impossible political challenge. The latter appears as a distractive daydream, but one that must be permanently maintained by the few who benefit from the status quo.
We “mostly go about our daily activities with a grumble ‘ things can’t continue as they are’, ‘the world has gone crazy’ […] that serves to remind us and our nearest we are still the sane ones” (Domazet, 2025). And we are seldom able to annunciate the meaning we attach to our drudgery or to our collective endeavours, often lacking the right terms to account for our post-existentialist despair. For we are overall neither oblivious to the climate change impacts nor the co-optation of the instruments of transformation by the ‘growth and security’ episcopal conference.
What is more, the usual political strategies, based on their respective philosophies and a political ontology of individual rational self-realisation and freedom from domination, come up short. Socialist solutions reliant on the state fail to see that the state itself is built out of ontological elements that need ‘growth’ to operate (Brand et al., 2025). Incremental reformist strategies may simply be too palliative of the status quo if they don’t empower progressive actors (but empower them for what?) and don’t provide attempts to restructure power relations (starting with what given that they hold no power?; Feola, 2025). The anarchist solutions largely focus on autarchic communities as if they were ignorant of the existing damage and ecological debt already impacting the global scale. Whilst these three strategies share a large part of their political ontologies in the popular imagination and differ in specific elements they drop in (markets and value, class consciousness and historical role, rational human liberated from domination by others – human and nature alike), they remain sociocentric (Vrdoljak, 2024).
Even invitation for what Trainer might call ‘mentality and culture change’ through conceptualisations of freedom through autonomy, frugality and self-limitation, rest on the ontological foundation in which “rational man [sic] achieves self-realisation and freedom through liberation from domination by others (whether other human humans or Nature) […based on…] the assumption that human beings produce themselves independently of Nature” (Spash, 2025, p. 202). Clive Spash sees a tension in the broader degrowth literature sees, akin to the monism-dualism debate on the Left (Saito, 2023). But social justice has for a long time had an eye on environmental justice, or at least naturalism of justice in the Croatian context. August Cesarec, author and publicist from the Great Slump 1930s, finds various role models for what a vision of a fairer and flourishing (more beautiful?) society might be like in the popular conceptions of the more-than-human nature. He found reinvigoration against despair in the understanding of life as “a struggle for justice, a struggle for freedom, but also for beauty” (Cesarec, 1939).
His invocations of solidarity or world built on principles other than domination and opportune exploitation for the sake of “growth” may have been allegorical, but today an increasing number of historical analyses invoke the role of the more-than-human in a historical unfolding towards the present state (Belich, 2022; Kennedy, 2023; Frankopan, 2024). The crisis we are in is also a crisis of life on Earth, a true exintction-boding conjuncture (Brannen, 2025), life that is likely not just to suffer, but also to act in a certain way (without needing to get into ‘intentions’ here). And just like a priori theorising the degrowth social transformation vision risks obscuring the social and political conditions from within which any socio-ecological transformation is to occur (Feola, 2025), so positing the transformation in sociocentric terms alone risks obscuring the geophysical and biospheric conditions from within which a complex transformation towards a survival vision will occur. Political ontology matters in other words, but even August Cesarec may have implicitly relied on more-than-human parallels of justice and solidarity when conceptualising a struggle that produces meaning in the bleak interwar era (Domazet, 2025).
When proposing a vision beyond the exposition of the existential danger inherent in the status quo, degrowth asks very important questions about what constitutes the good in ‘the good life’. The very conceptual tools it has at its disposal may still be overly reliant on the vagaries of the domineering rationalism and human exceptionalism As an intellectual strand of a scientifically informed environmental movement, it could combine the nascent understanding of the more-than-human agency in conditioning and maintenance of the liveable biosphere with the historical connections between social justice, environmental justice and understanding of ecological unity. In so doing it would endow meaning to individual and collective lives through struggle, a work on organising life in a way that material, social, and cultural or ideational interventions are enablers of biospheric survival, rather than violations.
Something like that has been a concern in Western philosophy before (cf. (Young, 2014) for a relatable overview), and is not entirely outrageous. And that will involve struggle too, a challenge to modes of living that will destroy their own biophysical basis (that part of historical unfolding also making us who we are today) and be “carried out at the expense of a greater number of other people” if generalised (Brand & Wissen, 2025). Degrowth can then build a conceptual apparatus to meaningfully share a story of a natural resilience that can sustain the flourishing for humans and non-humans in some sort of balance; a story that provides a template for different relations with others – both people and planet. These stories are not a decoration or entertainment, they are embedded in our practices that are in turn directed at some common goal (Perreau-Saussine, 2022). Could that goal become the survival and moral flourishing of our community on an inflamed planet, through stories that feature humans, their collectives and guardianship of a living and harmonious planet?
This review was produced within the project Ethics and Social Challenges (EDI) at the Institute of Philosophy, reviewed by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia and financed through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan 2021-2026 of the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
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