Jennifer Wilkins | Helioscene Founder, Author of the paper “The Degrowth Opportunity”
Interview given to Ms Maria Louisa Vafiadaki
-What is the background of this paper, how was it created and what is your background ?
I have a business professional background, so I don’t come from a degrowth background at all. I was originally a management accountant in motor vehicle manufacturing but switched roles and industries over the years and eventually ended up working in project proposals and then impact programming in the infrastructure sector.
I understand corporates and business sustainability from the inside, but about 5 years ago, I began to realize that, at a global level, business sustainability is not contributing effectively to sustainable development, but that’s not what gets portrayed in glossy corporate reports. I questioned if I could do anything about that.
I saw that there is this vast array of business sustainability information out there, but it is not sufficiently influencing corporate change. There is a systemic issue in the corporate world that keeps business sustainability dampened down, and I think it is to do with the fact that a lot of sustainability information is either sensationalist and doom-laden about the state of the world, which is easily externalized and ignored, or it is about piecemeal solutions addressing specific effects of business, such as carbon emissions or gender equity on the board, which are too easily internalized and therefore encourage incremental change rather than business strategic or economic systemic change. So, I began researching and writing with a focus on the best emerging sustainability ideas and actions for the business world.
The background of this particular paper is that, early in 2021, I started looking at degrowth and found it to be incredibly clever, because it exposes and resolves the systemic issue as to why sustainability is not working. I knew that this would be important to bring to the business world.
The problem with degrowth literature is that it is written by scholar-activists, so it uses academic and sometimes combative language, and also there was, at that time, hardly any literature at all on business-related degrowth. So, I decided to reframe the material there was and find an entry point for it into business. This is what this paper became about and I also had to build a new dialect to bridge these two worlds that speak so differently and seem fundamentally juxtaposed.
-Can you briefly describe us the “degrowth” imperative which is the main subject of the paper. What do we mean by “degrowth economy” ?
The degrowth imperative is this sense of urgency that our business and political class need to realize that growth and capitalism have been disastrous for the planet and people and that a growth economy is not the only possible economy. The idea of sustainable growth is not leading to a sustainable economy in our lifetimes. The imperative is to move on from this idea.
Sustainable growth relies on decoupling, slow down or stop the environmental degradation that comes with economic growth. But there is not enough evidence of past decoupling and there is a lot of nervousness about the promises and pledges for decoupling in the future. Yes, we will have some resource and energy efficiencies; yes, we will move to renewable energy; and yes, we might have some negative emissions technologies. But even when you gather these all together, they are not going to have enough scale or pace for us to resolve the sorts of crises and timelines we are facing. The sustainable growth story is really irresponsible in many ways. We need to be realistic and tell a different, more responsible story - and degrowth is that story.
Degrowth is a re-design of the economy to provision universal wellbeing to an increasing global population within planetary boundaries. It is a huge task. It is a transition phase for the economy through 21st century, so that we can reach a future post growth economy. We want to be able to look back at the end of this century and see that we have sufficiently downscaled the economy to rebalance how we live with nature, while also rebalancing inequalities, especially those between the global south and the global north.
-What are the main issues of the pre-existing growth economy which need to be tackled right away ?
There are so many perspectives... I focus on a couple of things in the paper. An idea which comes from degrowth scholar Jason Hickel is that we are always assuming poorer nations are less-developed versions of richer nations and need to emulate richer nations. But actually, it would be better to look at richer nations as bloated underperformers. They have all this income and provide wellbeing for most of their citizens, but only by overshooting planetary boundaries, and this is a hefty environmental burden on the rest of the world. There are nations with lower incomes and higher levels of wellbeing that rich countries can learn from.
The other thing to tackle is the fact that energy consumption needs to drop by 50-70% if we want to switch to renewable energy. We have to be realistic about the amount of energy there would be if we had a renewable energy-based economy. What energy output is possible based on the mix of solar, wind and hydro opportunities available to each population area? Luckily, researchers think we already have the existing technologies to live a good life in a really low energy economy (i.e. low energy lighting, water supply and hot water, domestic appliances, digital connectivity, mixed mode mobility technologies, etc). It really is possible to achieve this shift. But provisioning systems need to focus on what’s socially necessary. If goods and services are necessary, then we can justify the resources and energy they use; otherwise, we cannot justify it.
-In case of suggested changes, can you mention some realistic degrowth policies which businesses could adopt ?
Businesses first need to accept that degrowth is plausible. Degrowth is considered to be a bottom-up social change, stemming from activism. But it is also something which cannot happen without top-down change. We do need governments and agencies to adopt degrowth ideas in policy making. Business and enterprise are kind of in the middle because they serve communities but are also regulated by government. Degrowth is therefore a resilience issue in that businesses need to be prepared to adapt, if and when changes come about in their regulatory and customer contexts. Some businesses will transform ahead of the curve and actually drive degrowth change, creating a degrowth competitive context.
Businesses should be aware of, for example, the prospect of a mandated shorter working week, so they will need to think of a just transition for their staff and how they will cope with that; for instance, with job sharing schemes.
They should also be aware that how they set environmental targets is currently ineffective. At the moment, businesses set incremental targets based on internal ideas of improvement, but in a degrowth world, contextual targets will be much more important, and these will be absolute, not incremental, and set externally, scientifically and ethically.
Another aspect of degrowth for businesses is the idea of distribution and sharing. Degrowth-aligned businesses will move away from capitalist ownership through the stock market toward cooperative formats to produce societal and environmental benefits. The profit of the business would not be made for profit‘s sake, to distribute wealth to owners; the business and its profit (or surplus, if not for profit) both would serve a purpose. Rather than generating profit, some businesses might prefer to pay employees or suppliers more, to ensure people have at least a living wage.
There is a lot for businesses to think about through a degrowth lens.
-How difficult or realistic do you believe these changes are on an enterprise level and perhaps on a social level ?
For small businesses, there may not be as much of a challenge as many of them don’t really aim to grow, they serve their local community and they can be agile around purpose and benefits.
For a very large corporate though, I can see a lot of challenges to do with getting good advice and transformation. None of the big consultancies are talking about degrowth; they have no expertise in it at all, so that is a big problem because corporates habitually go to established consultancies for advice. Getting the messaging right, to get employees to change their perspective on degrowth is another problem, because getting it wrong will cause fears of recession and austerity which, ironically, are issues that belong to capitalism, which degrowth is trying to overcome. Managers will need to rebalance how people work in their organization, how many hours and days, and how to share roles, and so on. Then there’s potentially a lot to be developed around degrowth disclosure, standard setting and KPIs. How do we measure performance in degrowth? How do we demonstrate degrowth to our stakeholders? This is, of course, putting a corporate lens on degrowth.
At the same time, we could have a reform of the banking system. The stock markets would be very jittery so we will need strong individuals at the helm, who will make sure that we do this in a calm, orderly way, otherwise we will end up in economic chaos.
-Finally, what is the biggest learning of your paper ? What is special about this paper ?
The point of this paper is to help corporates understand how to step into degrowth. To me, the most important thing is to think of degrowth as a resilience issue. Degrowth is a plausible future. Businesses are busy thinking how to protect their growth strategies in different plausible climate futures, such as the orderly, disorderly, too little too late and hot house world NGFS scenarios. They also need to test how they would cope if they could not grow or had to degrow due to energy decline or if society became focused on socially necessary production. This is a real challenge for a lot of companies. Some will find that they could survive and go on to thrive with a business model that is near to their current form, while others will face radical choices. Degrowth, or the reasons why degrowth is necessary, suddenly become existential to them.
When talking about degrowth to business, it’s really important to find that entry point that makes it real for them. Speaking and writing about degrowth as a business resilience issue is an entry point I’ve found that works.
-Is there anything else you’d like to add ?
My work is trying to normalize the degrowth conversation in business. If we talk about it, it will start happening. If it remains a taboo issue, it’s not going to happen soon enough. It’s about making a safe space for people to talk about something that might be a little bit scary and opening up a new world of possibility to them.
Thank you.
Links to Videos explaining Degrowth in detail:
https://heliocene.org/reports/business-resilience-to-degrowth/
https://heliocene.org/reports/degrowth-a-theory-of-change/