Economic Geographies of Post-Growth

Recent debates around accumulating "crises" in the fields of climate change, energy supply, biodiversity, forced migration, and (not least) food security-partly marked by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and certainly reinforced by the war in Ukraine-have led to a new dynamic in growth-critical discourses. Although dating back to the late 1960s/early 1970s, the latter have gained traction over the past decade, both in political and mediatic realms as well as in the scholarly literature. In the English-speaking context, for example, a series of seminal book publications starting with Tim Jackson's (2009) "Prosperity Without Growth" and continuing with Kate Raworth's (2017) "Doughnut Economics", Jason Hickel's (2020) "Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World" and (once more) Jackson's (2021) "Post Growth: Life After Capitalism" have not only challenged orthodox economic thinking and neoliberal policy making. The authors have also made it to public arenas such as TV talk shows, keynotes, and roundtables at major business events, or into documentaries, and have provided activist movements with compelling and substantial evidence and arguments regarding "the case for degrowth" (Kallis, Paulson, D'Alisa, & Demaria, 2020)-that is, a pledge for a fundamental change needed to overcome the growth-fixation of the prevailing capitalist economy. More recently, the "Beyond Growth Conference 2023," a cross-party initiative of 20 members of the European Parliament held at its premises in Brussels in May 2023, included a large variety of stakeholders in search for alternative pathways for a currently unsustainable economic system and made the post-growth debate more visible in mediatic and political realms. The conference can be seen as an initiative dissenting with the goals and means of the European Union's Green Deal (European Commission, 2019), criticized for both its growth-fixated belief in the mere technological feasibility of sustainable production as well as for its partly low