The word comes from the French décroissance (“decline” or “de-growth”), which began circulating in the early 1970s among thinkers like André Gorz and gained traction with the 1979 French translation of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s work Demain la décroissance.
In the 2000s, activists and scholars adopted the neologism “degrowth” in English to signal not a temporary recession but a political choice to exit the growth paradigm.
Degrowth weaves together ecological economics, political ecology, feminist and post-development thought to question growth as a supposedly universal measure of progress; it insists on situated, plural notions of prosperity, foregrounds biophysical limits and entropic processes, and treats care, commons, and autonomy as central categories for knowing and organizing economies beyond capitalism and the growth imperative.
Degrowth is an ecological, economic, and political project that calls for the deliberate, democratic downscaling of production and consumption—especially in wealthy countries—so that human societies stay within planetary limits while improving equity and well-being. Rather than simply “less growth,” degrowth is a critique of the ideology of economic growth and of the belief that GDP can be indefinitely “decoupled” from resource use and emissions; it argues that beyond a certain point growth becomes socially unjust and ecologically destructive, and instead promotes shorter working hours, stronger commons, care-centered economies, and more localized, convivial forms of life.