ABSTRACT
This introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) outlines the volume’s structure and offers chapter summaries. Thirty-five chapters respond variously to key questions on the meaning and characteristics of ‘degrowth’ and its future. Those in Part I establish the ecological, economic and political contexts for understanding how and why degrowth has evolved as a significant concept for societies worldwide facing 21st-century challenges of growing socio-political inequities and ecological unsustainabilities. Chapters comprising Part II underscore themes characterising degrowth theories, philosophies and activist movements in a sample of different countries, discrete cultural and political contexts, languages and regions – starting with its origins in France. Chapters in Part III concentrate on degrowth practices, presenting key degrowth concepts in action – such as commoning, conviviality, the degrowth doughnut, frugal abundance and defashioning. They show activists and practitioners applying specific degrowth values, principles and philosophical approaches to demonstrate their unique contributions. Part IV chapters offer a selection of forward-looking imaginaries for the degrowth project from the perspectives of distinctive agents, agendas and theoretical frameworks, such as ecofeminist futures; solidary modes of living; showing how degrowth is essential to address poverty; on geopolitics and the nonaligned movement, utopian thought, commoning and a youthful call for action.
