English references

In a selective history of the evolution of the degrowth movement, his chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) offers a collective and subjective reflection revealing tensions between academics, practitioners and activists. Its four co-authors have lived in and with these tensions, analysing practical experiences in the degrowth cooperative Cargonomia (Budapest, Hungary) and the low-tech ecosystem Can Decreix (Cerbère, France). The chapter aims to launch a formal, respectful and significant dialogue between degrowth academics and practitioners. How did an initial public perception of degrowth as activists who experiment-by-doing based in a radical epistemological critique of traditional academia evolve more and more into an academia-dominated movement? We reflect on the movement’s organisation to suggest how deeper collaborative relationships between researchers, activism and practitioners might strengthen degrowth as an academic field, enhance the credibility and robustness of grounded prefigurat

Chapter 5 in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) sketches the French origins of, and approaches to, décroissance. In France, décroissance emerged early – as part of the long history of debates on the industrialisation of the world and its impacts, and of a shorter history of political ecology over the last half-century. Although inspired by a long genealogy questioning the Western industrial trajectory, the word décroissance really came to the fore in the French protest and intellectual scene in 2002, with a convergence between anti-development and anti-advertising movements. Even if degrowth as a slogan and as a movement only emerged recently, its origins, influences, pioneers, pillars and debates were already very strong in the 1970s. After a long hiatus in the 1980s and 1990s, the term décroissance spread spectacularly, entering the political and activist arena at the beginning of the 21st century, designating a sub-group of political ecologists committed to criticising economic development as the do