(also at: https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2026-0017)
Abstract: This article contributes to the ongoing efforts to develop a more globally attuned degrowth perspective by placing it in dialogue with post-development schol-arship. Together, these two critical frameworks challenge dominant growth-oriented paradigms in distinct geopolitical and epistemological contexts. While degrowth, rooted in the Global North, critiques capitalist expansion and advocates for demo-cratically led downscaling, post-developmentemerges from the Global South in resistance to colonial legacies and imposed development models. Despite their dif-ferences, both approaches convergeon the importance of direct democracy as a foundation for ecological sustainability. Through a cross-reading of these literatures focused on this convergence,the article identifies key divergences – particularly in their epistemological foundations, visions of democracy, and understandings of hu-man–nature relations– and in the process points to issues that arguably limit the global attunement of a degrowth perspective. Despite their differences, both the degrowth and post-development frameworks share a commitment to the commons and commoning as transformative practices. This article argues that by linking localized democratic practices for ecological sustainability with plural epistemologies and solidarities, commoning offers a pathway toward a more globally attuned degrowth.
*Corresponding author: Lone Riisgaard, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark, E-mail: [email protected]. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8827-3227
Jacob Rasmussen, Emilia Lewartowska and Peter Nielsen, Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark, E-mail: [email protected] ( J. Rasmussen),[email protected] (E. Lewartowska), [email protected] (P. Nielsen). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8590-2094 ( J. Rasmussen). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7242-7466 (E. Lewartowska)
Ashish Kothari, Kalpavriksh and Global Tapestry of Alternatives, Pune, India, E-mail: [email protected]
Keywords: post-development; direct democracy; degrowth; commoning; ecological sustainability; Global North and South
1 Introduction
Degrowth thinking is confronted with a paradox: although the growth-based roots of the ecological challenges are global, degrowth ideas still have limitedglobal reach, and the scholarship has yet to fully integrate Global South1 realities and knowledge. Two prom-inent scholarly approaches to non-growthdriven change are degrowth and post-development, both advocating for direct democratic modes of organizing as central to achieving just and sustainable greentransitions (Avritzer 2002; Cattaneo et al. 2012; Kallis et al. 2018). Both post-development and degrowth scholars blame the one-sided focus on globaldevelopment fueled by economic growth, industrial production, and mass con-sumption as the main manifestations causing the steady worsening of planetaryecological conditions and the deterioration of social and cultural conditions (Radcliffe 2015; Martínez-Alier et al. 2016; Kallis et al. 2018; Tzekou and Gritaz2023; Beling et al. 2018). The two approaches are generally attributed to different regional anchoring that informs their global proliferation, as degrowth ismainly associated with the Global North and post-development with the Global South. While we aim to foster dialogues across such global divides to enhance theglobal attentiveness of degrowth, it is nonetheless important to note that the two approaches emerge from radically different contexts. Degrowth emerges inthe context of widespread affluence, whereas post-development comes from a long history of colonialization, marginalization and ecological destruction,which is closely intertwined with the establishment of northern economic and political domi-nance, extraction and accumulation of wealth. Therefore, whenseeking to think about degrowth from a global perspective and foster dialogue between degrowth and post-development, the specific historical and economic contexts of emergence and conceptual proliferation are important, as they provide quite different perspectives.
While degrowth is strongly based in academia it does have numerous activist expressions, post-developmental approaches have – despite its post-structural lean-ings – emerged more directly from and prioritize grassroots movements. However, common to both degrowth and post-development is thatwhen translated into practice they tend to emphasize collaborative direct democratic practices (Avritzer 2002). By direct democracy in this article, we referto a form of governance in which people actively participate in decision-making processes that affect important aspects of their
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- The terms Global North and Global South reflect economic and political inequalities rather than strict geography. Hence, elites in the South may align with Northern interests,consumption habits, and lifestyles, and marginalized groups in the North may share struggles with those in the South.
lives, and a form of governance that emphasizes local autonomy and horizontal power (Kothari 2014; Esteva 2007; Asara et al. 2013).
From a predominantly intellectual position in the Global North, degrowth is opposing the dominant growth oriented economic understanding and“calls for a democratically led redistributive downscaling of production and consumption as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and well-being” (Demaria et al. 2013, 209; Akbulut et al. 2019; Martínez-Alier et al. 2016). In the Global South, growth-critical ideas are oftensecondary to struggles for social and envi-ronmental justice or they are innate sub-components of indigenous movements’ struggles to defend non-Western ways of life (Akbulut et al. 2018). Here, ideas of growth and progress are associated with colonial and externally imposed notions of developmentand modernity, and growth-critical ideas are therefore often linked to post-development frameworks (Escobar 2015) and culturally specific conceptions of valuepractices as expressed by Buen Vivir, Ubuntu, or Swaraj (Gerber and Raina 2018). While the term post-development does not capture the richness of movements from the Global South, we use it here to describe a myriad of systemic critiques that counter the dominant Western development model (Kothari etal. 2019). Character-istic for post-development approaches is their challenge of dominant and homoge-nizing development discourses following the idea of aPluriverse – “a world where many worlds fit” (Kothari et al. 2019, xxviii).
While both approaches center on ecological sustainability, the Global South perspective frames this through a focus on justice – often manifestedthrough calls for decolonization that embrace issues of recognition, voice, and knowledge. Therefore, in this article, we understand ecologicalsustainability not only as the capacity of ecosystems to regain or maintain their essential functions and biodi-versity over the long term, but also asnecessitating the transformation of socio-economic systems that drive ecological degradation toward a more globally equal and socially just system (Asaraet al. 2013; Demaria and Kothari 2020).
In this article, we bring the two approaches into conversation, arguing that in the current context of global ecological crises – exacerbated bydecades of neoliberal economic globalization – we can nurture dialogues across scholarly approaches associated with the Global North and Southrespectively to facilitate cross-learnings and strengthen the understanding of alternatives.
However, as presented in the introduction to this special issue, there are important global dimensions of degrowth that remain underexplored or under-represented, particularly in degrowth visions and proposals, which often suffer from methodological localism or nationalism (Ufer et al. 2026; see also Hanaček et al. 2020). Such underexplored areas include the ramifications of degrowth policies on power imbalances between the Global North and South, and the challenges of degrowth scholarship to integrate decolonial perspectives. Furthermore, there is a general lack
of intellectual acknowledgment of the inspiration that degrowth scholars have drawn from scholarly traditions and everyday practices of the Global South focusing on alternative economic models, local sustainability, and critiques of Western development paradigms (Latouche 2009; Muraca 2013;Gerber and Raina 2018; Dengler and Seebacher 2019). The latter suggests an even stronger conceptual interconnection than is usually acknowledged.Finally, despite the wealth of social movements focused on degrowth, the degrowth literature does not fully explore the potential to foster broader dialogues and coalesce with potential allies and enable global movements and networks (Rodríguez-Labajos et al. 2019; Martínez-Alier 2012; Singh 2019).
We contribute to the exploration of this broader and more globally attentive potential of degrowth by placing it in dialogue with post-development, focusing on a shared priority, namely direct democracy, as a prerequisite for ecological sustain-ability. Apart from a few exceptions, theselinks between direct democracy and ecological sustainability are often simply assumed and are neither well explored nor conceptualized in the current scholarly literature.2 Hence, by reading the two strands of literature with this particular focus, we contribute to a global perspective on how direct democratic practices can positively impact ecological sustainability. To achieve this, we consult the practice focused literature on commons and commoning because it encompasses everyday political action with localized participatory governance and ecological care while pointing to questionsof power, voice and knowledge in both degrowth and post-development perspectives.
The authors of this article reflect different degrees of activist engagement rooted in contexts across the geographical North and South, spanning intellectual traditions from degrowth to post-development. Hence, the author collective is well positioned to contribute to emerging efforts to bring degrowth and post-development discourses and practical enactments into dialogue (Escobar 2015; Martínez-Alier 2012; Singh 2019; Gerber and Raina 2018; Beling et al. 2018, Nirmal and Rocheleau 2019; Demaria and Kothari 2020; Kothari 2024; Lewartowskaet al. 2026).
Following this introduction, we present a brief historical and institutional introduction to how issues of direct democracy, ecological sustainabilityand com-moning practices emerge as intellectual and activist agendas from the late 1980s and onwards. From here, the paper is organized into two mainreview Sections 3 and 4 (respectively on degrowth and post-development). These sections have corre-sponding structure, each opens with a briefconceptual history followed by discus-sions on the interlinkages between direct democracy and ecological sustainability.
- Exceptions include research relating to community-led nature conservation, a few philosophical and activist writings, and more broadly the research on the commons and commoning (Bookchin 1982; Borrini-Feyerabend et al. 2004; Kothari and Pathak 2006; Ocalan 2023).
These two sections build up to a discussion across the two approaches focused on commoning as a pluriversal and potentially transformative practice (Section5). The article concludes by highlighting the divergencies and convergencies in how degrowth and post-development approaches arrive at directdemocracy at the local level as an essential avenue for ecological sustainability. This discussion teases out potential oversights of degrowth with regards toglobal interconnections, pluri-versality, and justice and leads to a discussion of commoning that indicates synergies across global divides and possible avenues for cohesion. On the one hand, this article presents the first step toward conceptualizing the intersection between degrowth and post-development in relation to direct democracy and ecological sustainability; on the other hand, it advances a globally attuned perspective on non-growth driven green transitions with a focus on commoning.
2 Emerging Opposition to the Institutionalization of Sustainable Growth
Links between direct democracy and ecological sustainability constitute a shared priority between degrowth and post-development which is weaklyexplored in existing literature. In addition, the focus on positive interlinkages is also acutely relevant in the face of escalating global crises in bothdemocratic and ecological systems. As highlighted by authors such as Fraser (2021, 2022), Martínez-Alier et al. (2016), Asara et al. (2013) and Cattaneo etal. (2012), these political and ecological crises are historically and structurally intertwined and this underscores the need for exploring moreparticipatory, egalitarian democratic forms and how they might be more ecologically attuned.
In our cross-reading we tease out the divergences and convergences between degrowth and post-development thinking in terms of how they link direct democracy and ecological sustainability. This inadvertently illuminates some of the underlying rationalities of both perspectives. While post-development is inherently pluriversal, degrowth has a largely singular epistemological orientation that arguably constrains its global attunement. Despitethis overall divergence, both perspectives share ideas of the commons that build on direct democratic governance models which hold the potential to fosterecological sustainability even if these links are more strongly conceptualized and explored in post-development traditions.
Both ecological sustainability and direct democracy have distinct historical and institutional trajectories within degrowth and post-development scholarship. The critique of economic growth gained institutional support with the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 2013 [1972]),which demonstrated how
continued, industry-driven growth led to environmental degradation. In the 1980s, however, free-market ideologies in the U.S. and UK shifted the discoursetoward economic growth. Our Common Future (known as the Brundtland Report) reinforced this shift by arguing that economic growth andenvironmental protection were not mutually exclusive, and that growth was necessary for long-term poverty alleviation in developing countries (WorldCommission on Environment and Development 1987). The report not only shaped the institutionalization of sustainable develop-ment; it also consolidated Northern influence over global environmental governance (Sachs 1992; Escobar 1995; Rist 2014).
These discursive and institutional shifts heavily influenced the proliferation of degrowth scholarship and informed the formulation of post-development.Both ap-proaches argue for more collective engagements and locally anchored participation and decision making rather than individualized, market driven andinternationally institutionalized modes of governance, hence their emphasis on direct democratic governance as a foundation for ecological sustainability.While they share an op-position to the dominance of global institutional governance of sustainability and development marked by the Brundtland report andlater exemplified by the Euro-pean Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals, there are important dif-ferences which we unfold in Section 3 and4.
Motivated by a similar skepticism of top-down global environmental governance in the 1990s, scholars working on resource and knowledge commons, challenged the dominant policy discourses that favored either state-led or market-driven resource governance by arguing for a poly-centric,locally anchored and collaborative focus on ecological governance of the common resources (Akbulut 2017; Agrawal et al. 2023). In other words,collective management of shared natural resources connects direct democracy with ecological sustainability exemplified through empirical cases acrossthe geographical North and South (Ostrom 1999).
Both degrowth and post-development scholarship draw on commons to chal-lenge dominant state-centric and market-centric developmentparadigms. The commons are highlighted as an alternative and robust institutional form of social organization that demonstrates sustainable management of resources without centralized control. For degrowth, the commons highlight viable nonmarket econ-omies and challenge the notion that prosperity depends on economic growth (Latouche 1996; Martínez Alier 2002) while post-development uses it to emphasize local and plural ways ofliving and critique the universalism of modernization and development (Esteva 1992; Escobar 1995).
In Section 5, we therefore engage in a brief and selective reading of the wider literature on commons and commoning – not a comprehensive review, butas a pre-liminary step toward considering how these bodies of work might offer conceptual inspiration for future, more globally attuned degrowthframeworks. We argue that, by
foregrounding collective democratic practices, ecological subjectivities, and social jus-tice, a deeper focus on commoning will help conceptualize degrowthin pluriversal and relational terms – enhancing its global attunement and addressing some of its current blind spots.
3 Degrowth
3.1 A Brief Conceptual History
As noted in the intro to this special issue, issues of global justice, and ecologically unequal exchange are central to many degrowth debates (Hickel et al. 2022; Latouche 2009). Nonetheless, in most degrowth visions it remains within a methodological localism or nationalism.
However, this neglect extends deeper. As noted by several scholars, degrowth has drawn intellectual inspiration from post-development traditions(Muraca 2013; Gerber and Raina 2018; Dengler and Seebacher 2019), but this is rarely acknowledged within the contemporary degrowth community. Latouche (2009) for example referred to the work of the Beninese scholar and politician Albert Tévoédjrè from the 1970s, who focusedon alternative economic models, local sustainability, and cri-tiques of Western development paradigms. More recently, Gerber and Raina (2018) have highlighted several Indian philosophical perspectives from the 1930s, including Radhakamal Mukerjee’s work, ”The Regional Balance of Man.”Mukerjee’s early ecological critique of the Western “imperial model of living” (1930, 459) is noted as a foundational concept in degrowth thinking, whichsuggests a stronger conceptual interconnection than typically acknowledged.
While there are regional differences in the genealogies of degrowth, as well as ongoing disagreements about its contemporary meaning, acomprehensive treat-ment of these issues is beyond the scope of this paper. However, in a widely used definition, referred to as a “broad consensus” by Buch-Hansen et al. (2024, 5), degrowth is depicted as a sustainability and wellbeing transition involving a decrease in the energy and matterthroughput to be organized democratically (see also e.g. Kallis et al. 2020; Asara 2021). Such an approach to degrowth assumes an ecological overshoot, which is the case in the Global North and globally aggregated. However, this is not generally the case in the Global South. It implicitly refers to possibilitiesfor non-material improvements related to wellbeing and democracy in advanced capitalist societies. Such understandings of degrowth are increasinglyvoiced in discussions rooted in Western intellectual traditions such as Marxism, critical theory, and ecological economics (see e.g. Saito 2024; Gorz 1989; Jackson 2009). However, it is commonly acknowledged that what should degrow (e.g. extractive
industries and consumption) and what should grow (e.g. wellbeing and community engagement) is not universal (Hickel 2020; Buch-Hansen et al. 2024). Nonetheless, most current writing on degrowth is thus almost completely devoid of references to non-Western thinking and mainly aimed at Western audiences providing degrowth visions for the Global North in local or national contexts and is based on Western scientific formats and ideals (Demaria etal. 2019; Dunlap et al. 2021).
The Southern influence on the origins of degrowth are barely mentioned or simply forgotten in most contemporary degrowth debates. This iscriticized by Southern scholars as yet another form of colonial disregard that highlights the lack of genuine engagement with both the concept’s historical roots and current expressions of non-growth modes of organization across the Global South (Brototi 2020; Kothari et al. 2014). Likewise, whilethe term ‘decolonizing’ has become widely used in degrowth scholarship, often building on the work by Latouche, Varvarousis (2020) notes that it is typically used as a reference to the process of unmaking the imaginary of growth without explicitly connecting the term to the colonial project or linking it to post-development literature. Furthermore, when degrowth proponents engage with policies, it is most often the case that these policies are framed within existing regulatory frameworks related to nation-states. While there are local advantages to this, it has global shortcomings. As weexplore later, this nation-state reliance of policy work on degrowth often results in narrowly confined notions of justice and democratic participation, which hampers its global attunement.
3.2 Degrowth and Links Between Direct Democracy and Ecological Sustainability
The favouring of more direct democratic practices by most degrowth scholars needs to be seen in the context of the critiques of liberal representative democracy as it is practiced in capitalist systems (e.g. Fraser 2021; Martínez-Alier et al. 2016; Asara et al. 2013; Cattaneo et al. 2012; Castoriadis1999). For example, it is argued that liberal democracies have left important areas of exploitation untouched as key institutional structures are placedbeyond democratic control. These include structures driving accumulation, private property, the market, and industrial production, which have detrimentalenvironmental impacts (Asara 2021; Castodioradis 1999; Illic 1973). Hence, this is not merely a critique of democracy, it is a critique of power and knowledge regimes where the desirability and inevitability of growth is not ques-tioned, and economic decision-making has become the domain of experts and not an area for collective deliberation (van den Boom 2021; Cattaneo et al. 2012; Castoriadis 1999; Gorz 1993).
This understanding of power and knowledge provides the basis for degrowth’s call for more direct and deliberative democratic self-institution even ifexplicit ar-guments for this favoring are less commonly articulated as noted by Asara et al. (2013), van den Boom (2021), Riisgaard and Rasmussen (2021), Kallis et al. (2018), and Tzekou and Gritaz (2023). Below, we explore major arguments put forward by degrowth scholars in support of more direct democratic practices as a foundation for ecological sustainability.
To illustrate the diversity of degrowth perspectives relating to direct democracy and ecological sustainability, it is noteworthy that in a single specialissue (Cattaneo et al. 2012) we find arguments ranging from advocating a Habermasian deliberative democracy perspective (Ott 2012) to papers arguing foreconomic democracy (Joha-nishova and Wolf 2012) and local scale participatory democracy as best suited for realizing degrowth visions (Trainer 2012). While this can seem contradictory, it is not necessarily so when viewed in light of the degrowth thinking on autonomy and heteronomy that is essential to the approach instituted by Illich, Castoriadis, and most forcefully articulated by Gorz. Below we explore the widespread dual (as opposed to plural) thinking in current debates on democracy, ecological sustainability, and degrowth.
For Castoriadis, ecological concern about the detrimental impact of economic growth necessitates the collective institutionalization of self-limitation(Asara 2021). However, for him, such self-limitation only becomes possible if society is autono-mous and, hence, able to question the way things are, including its laws, institutions, and dominant imaginary. In this sense, ecological sustainability requires expanded autonomy and direct democraticdeliberation to question and confront entrenched power regimes and dominant imaginaries that reproduce growth as unquestionable. While autonomyfor Castoriadis (1987) mainly concerns collective processes of deliberation), for Gorz (1999) it is also linked to an existential dimension related to individual actions in concrete settings, more akin to the work of Illich (Illich 1971, 1973; Cattaneo et al. 2012). Gorz (1982, 1999) in particular,underlines a Marxist informed perspective that autonomy can never stand alone in complex modern societies that are premised on the existence of heteronomy. Heteronomy spans all specialized activities that individuals must perform in pre-established organizations from outside, summarized asthe capitalism-state megamachine, where limitless growth is an unquestionable imperative (Gorz 1982, 1989).
Gorz’s idea is of a dual, interlinked society where heteronomy is to some extent necessary but where the ecological and political task is to continuouslyexpand autonomy, both individually and collectively; as such, it entails implicit elements of collective justice. For this to come about, direct democracy andself-limitation are essential (both for Gorz and Castoriadis) (Asara 2021; Castoriadis 1987; Gorz 1993; Tzekou and Gritzas 2023). While the critique ofcapitalist hegemony is at the core of
these arguments, the institutional boundaries of organizations are largely within a nation-state framework.
The roots of the ecological movement long predates the current levels of life-threatening ecological destruction, and Gorz affirms that “the existentialautonomy of individuals and groups or communities, lies at the origin of the specific compo-nents of the ecological movement: self- and mutual-aid networks” (Gorz 1993, 59) and that the concern is “to ‘change’ life, to get it back from the system and the managers of the system by seeking to reoccupy lost areas of former autonomy and social conviviality” (Gorz 1993, 59). As we explore in more detail in Section 5, this focus on self-governance and collective autonomy resembles the notion of the commons as being controlled neither by the market nor by the state.
Putting democracy at the heart of the ecological cause and anti-establishment sentiments is crucial to Gorz, as it is the foundation of democracy in the autonomous sphere of individuals and their shared life-worlds (Gorz 1993, 61–64). However, although direct democracy takes normative precedence,a dual vision of autonomy and heteronomy means that it cannot stand alone. Prioritizing small-scale de-mocracy in ecological struggles does not exclude economic or deliberative de-mocracy at other scales in society. Neither Gorz nor other like-minded degrowth thinkers envisioned a completedescent into localism, however democratic. In a highly complex and differentiated society, spaces of autonomy can also be carved out within orthrough the sphere of heteronomy, for instance, in industrial relations or large-scale representative democracy (Gorz 1989, 1993).
Even if implicit, this dual thinking is widespread in current debates on de-mocracy, ecological sustainability, and degrowth. Emphasizing a local foundation of autonomy in direct democracy involving self-limitation, such as eco-communities, while also acknowledging the need for broader societalreforms through heterono-mous institutions, frames most degrowth writings. For instance, Latouche (2009) envisions local autonomy as a node in a network of solidaric relations that act as both laboratories for democratic regeneration and bulwarks against growthism. He writes that we can look ata multitude of local self-governance initiatives, rural or urban, for inspiration. Moreover, he also calls for a variety of structural changes in a degrowth society,such as a reduction in working hours and the restoration of sus-tainable farming, as well as taxes on financial transactions and CO2 emissions (see also Kalliset al. 2020). Similarly, Jackson (2009) points to numerous small-scale initiatives at the grassroots level that go against the treadmill of material growth and experiment with more ecologically sustainable lives, even if such developments remain quite marginal and are “destined to failure”(Jackson 2009, 152) without structural changes like resource and emissions caps (see also Litfin 2014; Nielsen and Riisgaard 2026). While theseperspectives allow for a rich diversity of localized or-ganizations within a broader collective system of common guidelines and goals, they
conceptualize larger society in a naturalized frame of nation-states. This we shall argue, limits the level of institutional diversity that degrowth can encompass, and thus, its global attunement. In the following section we turn to the post-development literature but we return to the rich degrowthscholarship on self-governance and collective autonomy in Section 5 where we bring it into dialogue with notions on commons and commoning.
4 Post-Development
4.1 A Brief Conceptual History
What has become known in academia as the post-development school was essen-tially framed around Wolfgang Sachs edited volume from 1992 “Thedevelopment Dictionary – a Guide to Knowledge as Power” and Arturo Escobar’s and Gustavo Esteva’s associated work, that not only proclaimed the end to development as we know it, but also refocused critical attention to non-Western alternatives3 and to local knowledge (Sachs 1992; Escobar 2011;Esteva and Prakash 1998). As mentioned in Section 2, post-development ideas were direct responses to Western institutional dominance throughframeworks like the Washington Consensus and the Structural Adjustment Programs in the Global South that forwarded neoliberal economic ideas, privatization, and limited local autonomy (Ziai 2017, 2548). Central to these debates were Latin American scholar activists and engaged scholars who drewinspiration from social movements and local initiatives in their region (e.g. Buen Vivir). Similar to degrowth scholarship, post-development thinkers alsodrew inspiration from much older heritage cultures and community practices in Africa and India, as well as early anti-colonial struggles and writingssuch as Gandhi, Tagore, and Mukerjee in the Indian context. Since the early 1990s, post-development has presented a pluri-versal and Global Southperspective on global structural injustices, non-growth alternative modes of local production, and a general critique of growth-driven capitalist logics.Many of these perspectives are centrally organized around aspects of the commons, whether in the form of property, production, or knowledge sharing. Theoretically, post-development scholarship is inspired by post-structuralist and de-constructivist ideas, especially in how these were expressed in thepost-
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- The term “alternatives” is used only in the context of currently dominant systems, denoting those that offer fundamental, systemic transformations in these systems. Many initiativeslabeled as al-ternatives are actually part of every-day life of communities and consider themselves as normal or even “mainstream.” For a more elaborate explanation of what could be considered an alternative see https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/weavers:criteria.
colonial literature at the time. The post-colonial scholars point to the representa-tional imbalance between North and South (former colonizers and colonized) where notions of the Orient or the subaltern are revealed as Western constructions rather than objective truths (Escobar 1995; Said 1978;Spivak 1999). As such, post-development incorporates important elements of post- and de-colonial thinking, especially questions of local agency,representation, multivocality and epistemo-logical emancipation.
The scholarly post-development critique of power and economic growth from the late 1980s and the early 1990s has later been criticized for being purely theoretical and overly de-constructivist (Asher and Wainwright 2019, 30). Furthermore, these post-development perspectives were criticized for romanticizing and being too niche in their ethnographic attention to local specificities and for lacking practical di-rections for action (Kiely 1999; Pieterse 2000; Rapley 2004). However, local initiatives capable of displaying political and economic alternatives continued to exist despite the explosionof free-market-capitalism. Since the 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent realization of the global environmental crisis, the existence of such alternatives has gained prominence, and many new alternatives have emerged worldwide. This recent upsurge in alternative modes of economic, social, and po-litical organization has not only informed a renewed interest in post-development perspectives, but the global proliferation of such alternatives is to some extent challenging existing divides between the Global North and South inherent to mainstream development discourse.
Even post-development scholars tend to maintain a global divide. For example, Escobar considers both post-development and degrowth as transition discourses and identifies in each a similar mode of critique of growth; nevertheless, he maintains the Global North-South distinction by localizing post-growth debates in the North and broader post-capitalist and post-extraction debates in the South (Escobar 2015, 452–53). However, early post-development debates included prominent degrowth scholars such as Ivan Illich and Serge Latouche, both of whom contributed to Sachs’ anthology on post-development. In an attempt to explain the existence of these divides, Ziai argues that because development was never considered the principle for social change in the Global North the relevant critiques from post-development never gained widespread traction in either academic debates or practice in the North (Ziai 2014, 149), and in a similar way, the inclusion of degrowth aspects in post-development debates have been largelyoverlooked in the Global South.
Some post-development thinkers have emphasized a Marxist-inspired critique of the development regime as rooted in Eurocentric and North American teleological ideas of progress, resource extraction and growth (Rist 2014, 16; Bowles and Velt-meyer 2022, 6). A key argument from thisperspective is the central role of extraction to
empire and coloniality, which ultimately sees the growth of modern Euro-American democracies as based in and fueled by extraction. Hence, theoreticalperspectives, such as degrowth as structurally bounded by the nation-state are difficult to reconcile with Global South perspectives rooted in local practices andpluriversality. Within post-development literature, the so-called skeptical post-development perspective is less rigid in rejecting modernity and is open to a more critical evaluation of local communities and traditional knowledge (Ziai 2007). This illustrates the broad theoretical and ideological specter captured underthe heading post-development and points to the existence of significant differences, not least with regards to the view on modernity versus tradi-tional cultures and local communities (Ziai 2007; Kiely 1999).
Nonetheless, to reconcile the perspectives of degrowth and post-development an ontological continuity between them is needed, and some post-development scholars argue that degrowth must include multiple knowledges of the Global South (Demaria and Kothari 2020; Lang 2024; Singh 2019). To mitigate the risk of reproducing neocolonial asymmetries and other dualist logics, this includes complementing degrowth with perspectives from decolonial scholarship and post-development (Dengler and Seebacher 2019).
4.2 Post-Development and Links Between Direct Democracy and Ecological Sustainability
The search for direct democracy is intimately linked to epistemological decentral-ization and the decolonization of knowledge. According to Banuri (1990, 96cited in Ziai 2007), the aim of the post-development skeptical perspective is to “transfer the power of defining the problems and goals of a society fromthe hands of outside experts to the members of the society itself.” This refers to the rejection of the idea of development or lack of it, but as Ziai argues,the proposition also inevitably leads to the promotion of local level autonomous organizations and direct democracy (Ziai 2007, 121).
Distancing itself from the teleological idea of growth that is associated with progress and development is inherent in the critique of the Western idea of devel-opment. As post-development opposes the imposition of “development” and any other dualist logics, it equally rejects the U.S.-led attempt toexport the Western liberal representative democracy as the only legitimate governance model globally (Conway and Singh 2011). Post-development drawsstrongly on the concept and practice of “pluriverse” in all spheres of life (Kothari et al. 2019), including the political one. This unequivocal rejectionof universal “truth” for the sake of pluralism
has led some scholars to call post-development a “manifesto of radical democracy” (Ziai 2004, 1057). Therefore, post-development scholars and activists tend to privilege a multiplicity of grassroots self-governance practices, shifting attention toward deeper, radical visions of democracy rootedin land-based and local governance traditions (Alfred 2005). These bottom-up initiatives struggle to create new sources of power through decentralizeddemocratic governance, with examples including the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Nash 1997), the Kurdish autonomous movement in Rojava (Piccardi and Barca 2022), and many Indigenous nations practicing self-determination. Indeed, at a 2025 gathering of over 20 such communities in South Africa, a joint declaration asserted the practices of radical democracy and autonomy, noting many manifestations but with common elements such as respectful rela-tionship with the rest of nature, collective custodianship of land and water, social justice, an economy of caring and sharing, cultural identity, local knowledge, and holistic well-being over externally imposed “development.”4
Post-development is also concerned with the attempts to reclaim traditional forms of governance and decision-making processes that have survived at the margins of modernity, capitalism, and colonialism (Bajpai et al. 2022; Esteva and Prakash 2014; Pathak Broome et al. 2024; Lewartowska et al. forthcoming). While the authors acknowledge that the possible problems of such traditional systems (e.g. forms of discrimination) must be addressed and not all forms of modern democracy necessarily rejected, such community governance systems are valued for their ecologicalembeddedness. Somewhat generalized, this includes a focus on resource sharing and regeneration, rather than accumulation and growth. In this regard, localization is particularly important, as it “constantly responds to ecological feed-back from nature, and political and cultural feedback from people”(Shiva 2016, 83). In fact, indigenous peoples and other traditional communities worldwide often present a strong focus on relationality and responsibility toward all life, including the more-than-human. Globally diverse examples include ”Sumac kawsay (in Quechua), kametsa asaike (inAsháninka), buen vivir (for the Andean peoples), minobimaati-siiwin (in the Americas, or Abya Yala), ubuntu and botho (in Central and SouthernAfrica), vasudhaiva kutumbakam, swaraj and kyosei (in Asia), Country (in Australia), and many others” (Bajpai 2024, citing Kothari et al. 2019).
The importance of the ecological element is strongly linked to the quest to defend self-reliance against all forms of extraction in societies inwhich survival largely depends on nature (Conway and Singh 2011; Shiva 2016). As a result, direct democracy is often about re-rooting governance within the ecological commons, relational ways of life, and holistic worldviews, highlighting the interconnectedness of all beings, as opposed to extractiveand growth-oriented decisions (Bajpai 2024). Such articulations
- https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/events:radasd:declaration.
stand in sheer contrast to what is seen as false fixes often originating from the imperialist core (e.g., nature-based solutions, green growth, carbon trading, and geoengineering), which view nature as subjected to human domination and funda-mentally do not challenge Global North-South inequities.
An example of a contemporary grounded theorization on the interlinkages be-tween the elements of direct democracy and ecological wellbeing is Radical Ecological Democracy (RED), a framework based on articulations and practices of a multitude of grassroots initiatives in India (called eco-swaraj).5Conceptually, RED proposes that every person has the right, capacity, and access to forums of mean-ingful decision-making in the collectives they are partof (villages, urban neighbor-hoods, nomadic communities, and institutions), as well as the capacity to make larger scale decision-making bodiesaccountable (Kothari 2024). Rather than the state and corporations, swaraj places collectives and communities at the center of governance and the economy.Another, often referred, grounded example of direct democracy and ecological sustainability is the Latin American idea of the good life – Buen Vivir (SumakKawsay in vernacular) – which combines community-centric organization with an ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive mode of production (Gudynas 2014).6 In short, it is centered on the harmonious relationship between humans and nature, where the individual is always seen as existing in thewider context of the community and ecological surroundings.
Overall, bottom-up struggles and grassroots resistance that combine practice and worldviews, form the basis for re-imagining and re-theorizingdemocracy in post-development literature. Contrary to the degrowth scholarship in which some theorizing has been done on the interlinkages between direct democracy and ecological sustainability (possibly due to its modernist bias), the post-development literature emerging from the Global South seems to take this interrelation for granted, as the two are obviously connected within more holistic and relational societies (Ziai 2004). Post-developmentscholars have termed this intimate conjunc-ture in a diversity of ways, including Radical Ecological Democracy (Kothari 2014), Earth Democracy (Shiva2016), or Earthy Governance (Bajpai 2024), emphasizing the inseparability between the two.
- Swaraj is an ancient Indian concept, loosely translated as “self-rule,” that encompasses freedom and autonomy (individual or collective) with responsibility toward the freedom and autonomy of others. The prefix “eco” denotes that the responsibility extends to all of life, beyond humans.
- For other examples see www.vikalpsangam.org, and https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org.
5 Practices of Commoning Across Degrowth and Post-Development
5.1 Ideas of the Commons in Degrowth and Post-Development
In the two previous sections, we have shown that the role of direct democracy and its connection to environmental sustainability varies across degrowth and post-development literatures. However, the potential for mutual pollination becomes clear when we explore how the ideas of commonsand commoning as collective practices are referred to in both literatures. The global applicability of bottom-up and localized governance of thecommons, as opposed to state regulation or market led capitalism, speaks to both the pluriversal focus of post-development thinking and the anti-growth aspect in degrowth movements. Both degrowth and post-development literatures refer to ideas of the commons, or commoning as a collective practice, which resonates with aspects of direct democracy as the organizing principle. While the two approaches differ in their underlying rationalities and regional relevance, their shared emphasis on commoning and democratic participation invites explo-ration of whether these ideas can serve as a bridge thatopens pathways toward global ecological sustainability, because it ultimately reconnects humans with the rest of nature (Federici 2018, 188–90). In thefollowing, we contrast how degrowth and post-development scholars conceptualize the commons and highlight the ten-sions each faces when addressing global justice and redistribution. Furthermore, we reflect on the global distribution of the commons and how it simultaneously broadens (ingeographical and pluriversal terms) and complicates (e.g. through de-politicization and privatization) the notions of the commons, before we turn to a morepractice and political orientated perspective focusing the practices of com-moning as potentially transformative in the second part of this section.
Theoretically, commons is typically defined as a third space outside both the market and state; therefore, some degrowth scholars see the potential for non-growth driven direct democratic practices, such as cooperative production and sharing of resources (Akbulut 2017) while others highlightdimensions of commons embedded in national welfare systems, such as free healthcare, education, and public infrastructure (Kallis et al. 2020). Post-development scholars typically connect to the commons as situated and localized approaches to collective access to and governance of resources andknowledge sharing; herein, they see a potential for pluriversality (Kothari et al. 2019; Ziai 2017). In these views, commons present alternative modes of grounded social organization rooted in local ecological practices. Many of these collective indigenous practices predate the idea of the
nation-state, and today, they are often presented as geographically evacuated in the South or in peripheral spaces of the North (Villamayor-Tomas and Garcia-Lopez 2021).
Post-development scholars tend to critique the Northern welfare state for being based on economic growth and for historically benefiting from globalpatterns of colonial extraction, thereby discrediting the commons aspect entailed in redistri-bution through national taxation systems (Sachs 2004, 47; DeAngelis 2017, 147). By contrast, degrowth scholars often try to evacuate these commons aspects of the welfare state, but they fall short whenchallenged to think about redistributive justice beyond the nation-state, and thus end up having certain constraints in thinking globally, also when it concerns the commons (Latouche 2009; Kallis et al. 2020).
However, expressions of the commons are more globally distributed than we often tend to think. Within the Global North context, degrowth scholars highlight cooperative models, such as businesses, housing initiatives, and open knowledge production, owing to their needs-based orientation and alignment with commons practices (Johanisova and Wolf 2012, 565). These are often focused on needs rather than growth and, with few exceptions, they tend toprioritize environmental sus-tainability, low energy consumption, low material throughput and high ecological efficiency (Sarukha´n and Larson 2001 in Johanisova and Wolf 2012). Elinor Ostroms’s work on the commons speaks to both the pluriversal dimension of post-development thinking and the anti-growth aspect of the degrowth movement. Her research group’s work on the commons bridges the theoretical and practical and partly overcomes the geographical North-South divides (Ostrom 1999). Exhibiting the wealth of collectively organized and locally governed empirical cases ofcommons from around the world, their efforts challenged mainstream and dominant policy discourses which for decades has legitimized centralization and marketization of the commons (Akbulut 2017, 398; Agrawal et al. 2023, 17). Federici’s perspective on the commons is equally global in pointing tothematic issues of primitive enclosures taking place in post-colonial African societies and her radical feminist view emphasize women as frontrunners in commons struggles through creative modes of collective care and as victims of privatization of farming lands (Federici 2020). Yet, she is critical of Ostrom’s neglect of the anti-capitalist and political dimensions of the commons as a means of transformation because the appropriation of Ostrom’s relatively bounded notions of the commons by international institutions like the World Bank reduces the commons to issues of managing and conserving land for the market (Federici 2018, 29).
5.2 From Commons to Commoning
More recent tendencies in the commons literature concern a shift from commons to commoning as a political practice. Commoning as a practice entails the protection of the commons (property, resources, knowledge etc.) from the state and the market and directed mobilization around such issues (Federici2018). Such multiple and politicized practice speaks to issues of direct democracy identified in both degrowth and post-development literatures.Furthermore, the emphasis on practice expands the type of spaces traditionally thought of as commons to include urban spaces and networks of relations.Several such initiatives (e.g., urban food cooperatives, time and seed banks, energy collectives, and repair centers) are not only organized around theideals of flat hierarchies and direct participatory decision making, but at their core, they are focused on degrowth. This has recently led scholars to identify a strategic alliance between commons and degrowth (Amaduzzi and Cayuela 2025; Euler 2019; Gauditz and Euler 2017). In particular, degrowth can appear useful to the commons to keep them within ecological limits, avoiding cooptation for profit or growth and commoning as a practice isnecessarily based on direct democracy (Cayuela 2022). Finally, commoning offers a practical way of thinking about the organization of the degrowthsociety in the making.
A further analytical spin-off from the shift from commons towards commoning, is the focus on the mobilizing drive around an issue (the commons) andthe prefig-urative collective ambition entailed in this. If we think of commons as deeply anchored in social practices associated with alternative modes oforganization and production and social movements deeply associated with practices of resistance, the notion of “commons movement” becomes a setof prefigurative practices around social struggles for the commons in opposition to corporate and state-led control of environmental and natural resources(Varvarousis et al. 2021, 4; Villamayor-Tomas and Garcia-Lopes 2021, 529). A rhizomatic notion of commons movements organized around directdemocratic ideals is one way of conceptually speaking to both pluri-versal and localized perspectives from post-development and to an alternativeprefiguration of a less market-driven economy from degrowth in the Global North (De Angelis 2017, 173; Varvarousis et al. 2021). Notions of social justice (understood as redistributive and participatory) emerge when the inherent collective and redis-tributive dimension of the commons (centered around shared resources, values, and knowledge) is combined with a perspective of commoning as an inclusive and col-lective practice.
A final important link between commoning, direct democracy, and ecological sustainability is the potential of the commoning practices in creatingalternative, other-than-capitalist and environmental subjectivities (Lewartowska et al.
forthcoming; Villamyor-Tomas & Garcia-Lopez et al. 2021; Singh 2019). Buch-Hansen and Nesterova identify the ability to transform people’s worldviews as the central weakness in most degrowth literature, yet commoning potentially addresses this (2024). Participation in commoning practicesenables a transformation of the col-lective identity of the commoners focused on their interdependence with the rest of nature, based on principles ofsolidarity, cooperation, and empathy, as opposed to capitalist individualism (Borrini-Feyerabend et al. 2007).
Thinking across degrowth and post-development perspectives through the commons offers a way to focus on descriptive and analytical commonalitiesthat are not restricted to North-South divides but rather emphasize the global relevance and applicability of the commons for ecological sustainability anddirect democratic organization. The mobilizing potential entailed in the localized and direct demo-cratic organization further presents the commons andcommoning as holding a prospect for pluriversal politics centered on social justice (globally diverse and in-clusive), while simultaneously encouraging the local transformation of subjectivities towards non-growth or degrowth-centered lifestyles.
6 Conclusions
In this article, we have explored pathways for a more inclusive and globally attuned degrowth by placing it in dialogue with post-development, whilefocusing on a shared priority, namely, linkages between direct democracy and ecological sus-tainability. Cross-reading has taken us through both divergences and convergences, especially those expressed in relation to the notion of commoning and has led us to the recommendations suggested above.Below, we clarify our arguments.
We start with the particular issues in degrowth that we argue restrict its global relevance and reduce its ability to bridge global divides.
A first divergence concern what challenges needs to be questioned. In emphasizing the need to institute self-limitation, which can only be achieved if growth is no longer simply assumed but rather questioned, many degrowth scholars argue that auton-omy and direct democracy are necessary pathways. However, post-development scholars arrive at direct democracy as a necessary means to question the larger discourse of development and modernity, including the growth imperative, but see it as equally important to claim epistemological freedom. Hence, for post-development thinkers, the abilityto question the larger project of development and modernity necessitates the rejection of universalism and the insistence on heterogeneity and poly-epistemologies. In this sense, the explicit embracement of pluriversality opens up a room for diversity that is not always expressed in degrowth approaches,which tend to be more bound by the imperative to degrow and emphasize a planetary
boundary. Hence, while degrowth problematizes growth as a universal guiding principle, it does not necessarily question other universalisms.
A second divergence concerns how radically direct democracy is imagined in the two approaches. Democratic ideals are most often dual indegrowth thinking. On the one hand, they emphasize direct democracy based on locally founded autonomy that involves self-limitation, while alsoacknowledging the need for broader societal re-forms through heterogeneous institutions, mostly within the frame of the nation state (Gorz 1993).Conversely, in post development, especially when considering approaches emerging from grounded struggles for autonomy, there is a greater focus ondirect democracy that questions the legitimacy of nation-states. In other words, post-development approaches push the radicality of democracy further; for example, swaraj, in its fullest expression, would not have a state at all. Hence, we identify limits to pluriversality in degrowth approaches, which tendto be bound within a modernist frame that assumes the existence of the nation-state, and possibly also perceives the nation-state as necessary for ecological sustainability.
A third divergence appears in the understanding of the relations between humans and the rest of nature. The literature shows that degrowth discourses often struggle to escape the epistemological monopoly of modernity, resulting in an implicit con-ceptual duality in which humans and the restof nature are seen as separate, yet interdependent. Conversely, for post-development, the link between direct de-mocracy and regenerative practices isstrongest in the (often indigenous) episte-mologies that they draw on, which tend to have a more holistic and relational perception of the relationshipbetween humans and the rest of nature than the modernist perspective. The holistic view does not separate humans and nature, but emphasizes humans innature, thereby perceiving all things and creatures as living and equally worthy of inclusion. Some holistic worldviews referred to in post-development thinking explicitly link the spiritual with the material, an aspect that is most often absent from degrowth scholarship, which further underlines how degrowth is primarily thought of within a modernist frame and its intrinsic dualisms.
Having identified issues that we argue limit the global attunement of degrowth and sustain global divides, we now turn to the convergences between degrowth and post-development with regard to direct democracy and ecological sustainability. The goal is to identify synergies across global divides and develop a more globally attuned degrowth approach.
As argued, the degrowth and post-development perspectives share the idea that direct democracy (a decentralized local autonomous organization) is essential for ecological sustainability. Even if degrowth and post-development arrive at this point through different routes, it is precisely in thecoupling of direct democracy and ecological sustainability that the synergies are strongest, and it is from here that
interactions between them could evolve. We argue that the potential for mutual pollination becomes even more evident when looking at the potential synergies that emerge when we explore ideas of the commons and commoning as a collective practice that resonates with aspects of direct democracyand ecological sustain-ability, as referred to in both degrowth and post-development literatures.
First, the global applicability of bottom-up and localized governance of the commons, as opposed to state regulation or market led capitalism, speaks to both the pluriversal focus of post-development thinking and the anti-growth aspect in degrowth movements. Following this, we argue that notions of commons movements and commoning as a collective practice organized around direct democratic ideals are one way of conceptually bridgingboth pluriversal and localized perspectives from post-development and alternative prefigurations of less market-driven econ-omies from degrowth in a manner that points towards synergies across global di-vides, thereby contributing towards fostering global alliances and cohesion.
Second, the merging of multiplicity and alternatives to capitalist markets can envision alternative futures and politicized practices, where sociality is built around direct democratic participation in experimental and engaging ways that push counter-hegemonic norms and promote more just and equalrelationships. As such, there is potential for a strong justice dimension. Nonetheless, it is important to remain critically aware that the prefigurative spacesof localized commons practices do not automatically address global injustices or power imbalances, particularly in the context of the Global North. However,with a stronger rooting in plural episte-mologies linked to global solidarity, commoning can become a vehicle for cohesion across the North–South divide.
Third, commoning practices and processes have the potential to create and nurture other-than-capitalist and potentially ecological subjectivities(Lewartowska et al. Forthcomoing; García-López et al. 2021; Singh 2013). Participation in commoning practices and processes enables atransformation of the collective identity of the commoners that centers on interdependence with nature, as well as between col-lective and individual well-being, based on principles of solidarity, cooperation, and empathy as opposed to capitalist individualism and modernist dualisms. This is especially relevant in Global North contexts, where individualism, dualisms and middle-class growth ideals pose one of the greatest barriers to sustainability (see also Nielsen and Riisgaard 2026) and to social justice. In post-development, such collective subjectivities need to be actively upheld as they risk erasure, in the case of degrowth they often must be created anew.
To conclude, our exploration of the degrowth and post-development perspec-tives on interlinkages between direct democracy and ecological sustainability has not only provided insights into why direct democracy is important for ecological sustainability, but has also helped us elucidateand propose pathways to
conceptualize degrowth in more pluriversal and relational terms – enhancing its global attunement.
Research funding: This work was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark under grant 1127-00212B.
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