The Limits to Degrowth : A Systematic Analysis of Monetary and Distributional Policy Proposals in the Degrowth Literature

In academia and political debates, the notion of ‘degrowth’ has gained traction since the dawn of the 21st century. While some uncertainty around its exact definition remains, research on degrowth revolves around ‘a planned reduction of energy and resource use’ (Hickel 2021, 1105) as a unifying theme. Here, we employ a mixed-methods design and systematically review the scientific peer-reviewed English literature on degrowth published in the period 2007 – 2019 (N = 341). We find a wide lack of concrete distributional and monetary policy proposals in the sample analyzed. Moreover, we find that the scientific peer-reviewed literature on degrowth can be grouped into four major clusters along two major gradients, one along methodology (qualitative-quantitative) and the other along spatial scale (local-global). We conclude that degrowth scholarship would benefit from a more prominent discussion of the political implications of its ideas and proposals, and that in particular the debate about distributional policy implications of degrowth should be more prominent and concrete, with a stronger focus on distributional policies that enable a steady-state economy