Decolonizing degrowth in the post-development convergence: Questions, experiences, and proposals from two Indigenous territories
Abstract
A growing coalition of degrowth scholar-activist(s) seeks to transform degrowth into an interdisciplinary and international field bridging a rising network of social and environmental justice movements. We offer constructive decolonial and feminist critiques to foster their productive alliances with multiple feminisms, Indigenous, post-development and pluriversal thought and design (Escobar, 2018), and people on the ground. Our suggested pathway of decolonial transition includes re-situating degrowth relative to the global south and to Indigenous and other resistance movements. We see this decolonial degrowth as a profoundly material strategy of recovery, renewal, and resistance (resurgence) through practices of re-rooting and re-commoning. To illustrate what we mean by resurgence we draw from two examples where people are engaged in ongoing struggles to protect their territories from the impacts of rampant growth—Zapatista and allied Indigenous groups in Mexico, and three Adivasi communities in the Attappady region of southern India. They are building economies and ecologies of resurgence and simultaneous resistance to growth by deterritorialization. We argue that a decolonized degrowth must be what the growth paradigm is not, and imagine what does not yet exist: our separate and collective socio-ecological futures of sufficiency and celebration in the multiple worlds of the pluriverse. Together, the two cases demonstrate pathways to autonomy, sufficiency, and resurgence of territories and worlds, through persistence, innovation, and mobilization of traditional and new knowledges. We offer these as teachers for the transition to decolonial degrowth.
Introduction
Degrowth emerged from a philosophical and policy proposal for reduced consumption and voluntary simplicity, to stem the tide of economic growth and environmental destruction of late capitalism in the global North. Its divergent roots include the writings of Ivan Illich (1973) based in rural Mexico, and subsequent work by Serge Latouche (2009), to “The Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972), Herman Daly's (1977) Steady State Economics, and Georgescu-Roegen's (1993) work on entropy and economic progress. It first appeared as Descroissance (Degrowth), a European vision popularized among French intellectual and social movements by Latouche. Despite differences, degrowth advocates converge on the need for individual and collective political action to voluntarily and permanently downscale economies. Degrowth is now prominent and amplified in European and North American academic circles as a major theme of Ecological Economics (D'Alisa et al., 2015; Demaria et al. 2013; Kallis, 2017; Sekulova et al., 2013). It has expanded into a broader network of ideas and social actors (Escobar, 2017; 2018) owing to a recent wave of intellectual effort by a dynamic circle of scholar-activist(s) (faculty and graduate students) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona to popularize degrowth across academic fields and movements in USA, Europe, and increasingly, Latin America (Martínez-Alier, 2012; Martínez-Alier et al., 2010). The Barcelona school is currently engaged in conversation and partial convergence with academics in Environmental Justice, Political Ecology, Feminist Economics, Feminist Political Ecology, Ecofeminism, and Post-Development (Bauhardt, 2014; D'Alisa et al., 2015; D'Alisa and Cattaneo, 2013; Dengler and Strunk, 2017; Domínguez-Serrano, 2017; Escobar, 2018; Kothari et al., 2014; Martínez-Alier, 2012; Maraca, 2012).
Most of the published writings on degrowth call for voluntary change by people who live and consume beyond their own measures of “sufficiency” in affluent global enclaves. However, the First South/North International Degrowth Encounter in Mexico City and the linked 15th Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Economics in Puebla, Mexico in September 2018 convened academic and social movement participants across multiple lines of difference, from nation and region to areas of experience/expertise, gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, religion, and language. Indigenous participation was small in numbers but significant in the cultural, political, and theoretical contributions by those who came from Indigenous territories and various communities of African, Asian, or Middle Eastern origin (Valencia, 2017).
While we promised a critique, we wish not so much to think and write about degrowth as to think with the emergent international networks of degrowth scholar-activist(s) drawing from writings, conference presentations and conversations. We write not as degrowth economists nor as external critics. We are inspired by the shared commitment to resist and move beyond the theories, policies, and practices of capitalist and socialist/state-capitalist growth economies. We applaud the quest to make visible the viability of diverse economies at local and municipal scales, to invent vocabulary and conceptual frameworks for fair exchanges and to imagine possible futures of widespread alternative economies. Yet, we are also concerned by the continuing dominance of Western/Northern economic and political theory at the intellectual heart of this academic movement. We encounter a dearth of engagement with ontological, epistemological, and cultural difference as well as gender, class, ethnic, racial, religious, and colonial differences. To highlight and bridge this gap, in this paper, we draw from scholars, activists, and thinkers in social movements: environmental justice, feminist (eco-feminists, communitarian, Indigenous and autonomist feminists, feminist political ecologists), eco-autonomist, Indigenous, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and post-development movements. To imagine a transition to decolonial degrowth we consult the experiences and thinking of people in Mexico and India, where we have learned from being co-present and co-thinking with social and environmental movements engaged in non-violent resistance and building alternatives.
Our respective journeys have been strongly influenced, enabled, and limited by our particular privileges and positionalities. While situated as brown and white women from working class backgrounds and united by common socio-ecological-political commitments, we draw on different histories, genealogies, and place-based experiences in the global North and South. We have each engaged with social movements and communities of people-in-movement, NGOs, and academic institutions on multiple levels and for extended periods of time, in many capacities.
Author 1 has been learning from and accompanying activists in Indigenous and ethnic communities in India since 2007 and maintains an ongoing relationship with communities in Attappady, Kerala since 2010. Author 2 has previously lived and worked in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, and the United States and has spent two to nine months a year in Chiapas, Mexico since 2005, co-present and co-thinking with people in multiple institutions, networks, and communities. Our paper draws from several years of formal and informal engagement as active listeners, speakers, commentators, practical participants, students, and teachers in closed and open meetings, seminars, workshops, conferences, encounters, press conferences, “schools”, public ceremonies and protests, arts festivals and celebrations with shared song, dance and food, as well as cooking, cleaning, transportation, hospitality, translating and speaking, and practical engagement in forestry, agriculture, land, and health. The specific times, places, and persons that inform our narratives are not all annotated in the text as “references” because we draw upon a continuum of encounters as well as particular events. We selectively draw from immersive place-based observation, we take nothing without permission and we retain the right of ethnographic refusal on moral grounds.
We continue to bear witness and think together, in this paper and beyond. The peoples-in-movement whose selected experiences, thoughts, and writings we present below have taught us as much about ourselves and our worlds as they have about their own. In relation, co-thinking, we begin to think and be differently, and become ourselves more fully in communities, which is what we would hope for degrowth and its advocates.
Critique as accompaniment
The most cogent social, political, and ecological critiques of degrowth note the individualistic nature of voluntary simplicity couched as personal choice. They call on degrowth to go beyond criticism of the growth paradigm, to engage in political struggles against capitalist economics, neoliberal and imperial political regimes, extractivism and environmental pillage (Brownhill et al., 2012). Degrowth has also been criticized as being irrelevant, or potentially damaging for those, who, contrary to overconsumption, fall well below basic standards of nutrition, shelter, health and education.1
We suggest that degrowth would benefit from broadening its perspective and narrowing its reach, by positioning itself as one of many “transition discourses” (Escobar, 2016, 2017) responding to a civilizational crisis of global proportions. As Demaria and Kothari (2017) write,
Likewise, Kallis (2017) calls for “a movement of movements, an alliance of the dispossessed, including a coalition of the global social and environmental justice movements” (p. 29). Kothari et al. (2014) propose that Degrowth could provide the “platform for a network of networks beyond one-issue politics”, based on its “power to draw from and articulate different sources or streams of thought and formulate strategies at different levels” (p. 369). Likewise, Kallis (2017) states that degrowth requires a commitment to “create an alternative social-ecology and a fundamentally different basis for action” (p. 25), positioning it as a call to free the social imaginary from the ideology of a one-way future consisting only of growth (p. 99).The exploration of alternatives to development already finds concrete expression in a panoply of new or re-emerging concepts and practices such as buen vivir, degrowth, ecological swaraj, radical feminisms of various kinds, ubuntu, commoning, solidarity economy, food and energy sovereignty. [They constitute] an emergent field [trending] towards a pluriverse. (p. 2)
In a more cautious and humble framing, Joan Martínez-Alier (2012) notes:
We concur with the core of Martinez-Alier's environmental justice framing, which responds to critiques of eurocentrism and the dominance of economic discourse. However, two elements of this proposal warrant more in-depth, and explicit engagement with feminist, decolonial and Indigenous thought.The Southern [Environmental Justice organizations'] potential alliance with the small degrowth movement in Europe cannot mandate an agreement to stop economic growth everywhere. Rather, the alliance must be based on a common perspective against “debt-fuelled” economic growth and the hegemony of economic accounting in favor of a pluralism of values (as recommended by ecological economics…), the acceptance and support of bottom-up feminist neo-Malthusianism, the defense of human rights and Indigenous territorial rights along with the rights of nature, the recognition of the ecological debt, and the critique of ecologically unequal exchange. (p. 66)
Firstly, the call for “acceptance and support of bottom-up feminist Neo-Malthusianism” Martinez-Alier (2012) raises the specter of population control, which can bring a most unfeminist framing and enforcement of control over women's bodies. Betsy Hartmann's (1995) work on reproductive rights and wrongs cogently argues against equating reproductive rights with abortion rights, family planning, and population control. Likewise, decolonial and post-development scholars and activists view this from the standpoint of structural genocide, and the continuing shadow of population control and eugenics cast by many environmental movements (Smith, 2005; TallBear, 2003). The population question has distinct repercussions for women based on racial, ethnic, cultural, and class status, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. They may lack the freedom and access to prevent or terminate pregnancy, or face selective campaigns of reproductive control, through forced sterilization, abortion, and coerced use of contraception. Feminist thought on situated knowledges, intersectionality, and the politics of affinity (Crenshaw, 1991; Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki, 2017; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1986) have much to bring to this recurring thorny subject in degrowth debates.2
Martínez-Alier's (2012) proposal also calls for respecting legal rights as solutions to environmental injustice and growth economies. While we support the expansion and protection of human rights as legal rights, decolonial and resistance writings routinely question the reliance on and reification of individual legal rights adjudicated by states. They increasingly warn against the overall equation of legality with legitimacy. People subject to legal discrimination, or whose legal rights are rarely respected are unwilling to put their energy and their trust into pacts with states. The legality versus legitimacy question is crucial for Indigenous people with respect to: land as property versus territory (ILO, 1989; Nirmal, 2017; Rocheleau, 2015b3) and the authority of settler/internal colonial governments. Decolonial and liberatory Indigenous movements can offer practical and analytical approaches to legality and legitimacy that respect multiple ontologies and epistemologies (see cases below).
Beyond these specific criticisms and our proposals to expand and integrate an intersectional degrowth within convergent social and environmental justice networks, we also note the strong rationalist current of “reasonable” degrowth solutions. Some ecological economists and degrowth scholars advocate a techno-managerial approach to address problems of what they see as an actually existing “Anthropocene”. Critics refer to the “Capitalocene” and argue for a transition to post-capitalism without more capitalist geo-engineered interventions on a global scale (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013). Degrowth proponents based in political economy or scientific ecology often disparage talk of “Mother Earth” as irrational and backward. Kallis (2017) describes degrowth as “…an informed maturing of a radical environmentalism” (p. 17) and criticizes “…‘deep ecologists’ a-political misconceptions about a passive submission to an inherently balanced ‘mother earth’” (Kallis, 2017; p. 58). He continues “degrowth presents a radical political project of constructing an alternative socio-ecological future…simpler by enlightened choice, not by passive conformity to nature's laws” (Kallis, 2017).
We offer two constructive critical responses to the “environmental management” of the Anthropocene and the exclusive logical positivist posture. First, an ecofeminist response: degrowth, as a “transition discourse” (Escobar, 2018), engaged in global convergences around post-development and post-growth, has to submit itself to the actual workings of the living world, rather than trying to control it. This implies neither reliance on quantitative indicators of limits “steady state” and “carrying capacity” nor obeying static qualitative narratives of stability. It means paying careful and constant attention to often-intangible ongoing relations between various interdependent beings (animals, plants, people, spirits, land, water) in places. These relations constitute the material and physical processes that sustain ecosystems and naturecultures/living worlds.
Secondly, an ontological critique following Escobar (2016):
To expand its political and intellectual legitimacy beyond where it has already found relevance, we suggest that degrowth advocates rethink their understanding of both “nature” and “culture” in conversation with people from intellectually, geographically and economically diverse standpoints. Reference to masculinist, enlightened rationality that reasserts human independence and refuses to be limited by “nature” (Kallis, 2017: 58), calls for a close reexamination of the assumed meanings and relationships between “nature” and “culture” (Haraway, 2013; Escobar, 2008; Nirmal, 2016; Rocheleau and Nirmal, 2016).The emergence…of an array of discourses on the cultural and ecological transitions necessary to deal with the inter-related crises of climate, food, energy, and poverty is another powerful sign of the unraveling of the OWW [One-World World] and the emergence of the pluriverse. What one-worlders call the anthropocene—itself an expression of the profound effects on the biophysical integrity of the planet associated with the OWW—points at the need for a transition. In the Global North and the Global South, multiple transition narratives and forms of activism articulate veritable cultural and ecological transitions to different societal models, going beyond strategies that offer anthropocene conditions as solutions. (p. 11)
Several of the 17 principles of environmental justice identified at The First People of Color Summit on Environmental Leadership in Washington D.C. in 1991 (a founding moment in the movement) offer a roadmap towards such re-examination. One principle affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity, the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction. Another demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias. A third mandates the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet. Number 17 refers to individual habits of consumption. These principles challenge the imposition of a single enlightened rationality on movements for social and environmental justice and demand respect for people's spiritualties and the integrity of their territories as naturecultures/living worlds (Di Chiro, 1996). Drawing from these principles we contend that a reading of degrowth that divorces nature from culture carries a bias just as harmful as the growth imperative. We advocate a materially and ecologically rooted and culturally expanded understanding of degrowth from a communal, relational and pluriversal standpoint. The principles cited above and the writings and actions of Indigenous, post-colonial and feminist thinkers on transitions, alternatives, post-development and post-capitalism can reframe and refresh degrowth visions.
A decolonial degrowth (more than a metaphor (see Tuck and Yang, 2012)) would start from a situated perspective and consider its positionality, rooted in Europe and Mexico, with academic ties to philosophy and ecological economics. To join a global movement of movements as an equal would require first moving beyond imagined polarities of individualist materialism, and voluntary simplicity, which some degrowth advocates have done. Secondly, they could think with and beyond collectives and cooperatives in positions of relative privilege, to bring them into relation with communities, movements and networks of the global majority. Thirdly, it requires coming to grips with territories and coloniality. A similar path has been trodden by some feminism(s) that have become plural and self-consciously situated, to deal with intersections of gender with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, colonial positionality, and more (Combahee River Collective 2014; Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Dzodan, 2011; Mohanty, 1988). It means embracing multiple collectivities and pathways, while not assuming the sharedness of anything. We invite degrowth to walk a similar path.
We position ourselves within a politics of affinity, rather than identity, and invite degrowth to join a broader movement for decolonial justice that is grounded and rooted in place. In that spirit, we draw on examples from Mexico and India in an effort to move beyond political economy, towards political ontology, and beyond critiques of consumption to critiques of domination. Colonial, capitalist, neoliberal, and statist growth models simultaneously fuel overconsumption and deprivation in different places and among distinct groups of people. The globally skewed distribution of over-consumption and deprivation, as well as sharp local disparities, need to figure more prominently in degrowth. This also applies to disparate impacts of the proliferation of useless or harmful goods and services, and generation of vast quantities of waste and contaminants. Below we present stepping stones for a transition to decolonial degrowth, to counter an apparent enlightened economic exceptionalism of many degrowth proponents. We cite decolonial alternatives that incorporate and go beyond current degrowth principles, concerns, and proposals and follow with two case studies.
Decolonizing degrowth: Imagining and practicing resurgence
We posit that critical feminist, decolonial and race scholarship offer degrowth two key ideas for a transition to decolonial degrowth: positionality4 and intersectionality. The positionality of degrowth influences its praxis, in terms of deciding the quality and direction of actual de-growing. We emphasize situated knowledge and action, and ask how degrowth can become radically situated, starting from where it is and rising to the insights, challenges, needs, and demands of the rest of the post-development5 convergence. We also center intersectionality of identity and experience, including coloniality, and we advocate a recognition of pluriversality, with many worlds at play rather than a “one-world World” (Escobar, 2018).
Degrowth can contribute significantly to an active shared transition (Escobar, 2018), within a broad project of cultural and ecological resurgence, based on processes of re-rooting and re-commoning described below (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Esteva, 2014; Esteva and Prakash, 2014). This post-development effort takes degrowth out of the voluntaristic and more individualized domain and brings it into the communal and public (not so much state) domain. We urge degrowth to stretch beyond its current conceptual limits, shrink its sense of universality, and enter as an equal player in the post-development convergence.
Degrowth advocates could curtail capitalist expansion and prevent territorial assaults in and by their home communities on places near and far. They can align with movements to simultaneously support community banks while divesting from large banks invested in massive land grabbing and territorial assaults elsewhere (Borras and Franco, 2013). Likewise, the co-elaboration of degrowth scenarios with de- and re-linking strategies could help identify what steps are within reach in local space, and in networked spaces, to best realize sufficiency, autonomy, environmental justice, and territorial integrity in and across places.
Degrowth can also preempt further deforestation and ecological devastation of land and water by various extractive megaprojects including dams, ports, industrial agriculture, mining, oil and gas drilling, fracking,6 and tourism. These “developments” come at the expense of productive and diverse landscapes in Indigenous, farming and forest communities as well as urban centers. A networked, engaged decolonial degrowth could recover practices of conviviality (Illich, 1973) and communality/comunalidad (Esteva, 2015; Federici and Linebaugh, 2018; Martinez Luna, 2010) through practices that create more circulation and less one-way flows, while they re-scale and re-integrate production, care work and commerce. Such de- and re-linking could also contribute to positive collaborations between those on both sides of the “sufficiency” measure. Urban dwellers might coordinate efforts to re-localize networks of consumers, farms and markets and support peasant farmers and Indigenous people defending their worlds, lives, livelihoods, and best chance at sufficiency.
Such practices based on relational approaches to change from below, while not the focus of this paper, deserve further exploration. They contribute to imagining and realizing degrowth scenarios within a broader movement to foster complementarity, and connected pathways to sufficiency. To accomplish this, degrowth scholar-activist(s) could seek alliances and coalitions with Indigenous, “ethnic”, religious, racialized, migrant, low-income, workers, women's, LGBTQ, and autonomist communities near and far. Based on shared interests in alternatives to development, Degrowth researchers and activists could join the resistance to on-going environmental, economic, and territorial assaults by growth-driven projects.7
We argue that degrowth and post-development have to be decolonial or nothing at all. Degrowth has great strengths at the intersection of ecology and economics, yet it is limited by its focus on economistic categories and measures, and its apparent acceptance of the continuing primacy of economics and politics in the capitalist-colonial one-world-world. In a decolonial post-development, our futures would flow from the centrality of ecological and social relations free from legacies of environmental or cultural determinism.
Resurgence imagined: Resistance, recovery, and renewal
While the degrowth imaginary often abstracts and universalizes (Kallis, 2017), living worlds are webbed together. We argue for a place-based vision of resurgence that can accommodate a situated decolonial degrowth. We recognize that disentangling and dismantling economic connections with capitalism must happen in conjunction with restoring and reinventing lost or missing connections to support life as we wish to live it outside of the growth paradigm (see Simpson, 2016). This requires a broad time-space template to (a) design (Escobar, 2018) and construct the relations needed to live beyond or outside of the current paradigm; and (b) spatially coexist with capitalism's trajectory, whether it be a slow and involuntary descent into history, increasingly erratic ups and downs, or an abrupt and violent end.
We cannot transcend the violence and distortions of capitalism through abstraction and quantification alone, as these can engender their own epistemic violence. Structural erasures and revisions of histories, cultures and ecologies have severed or damaged ties between people and their knowledge embedded in territories. To honor multiple knowledges, the “Epistemology of the South” (De Sousa Santos, 2007) and a “Dialogo de Saberes” (De Sousa Santos, 2010), we need to think in worlds and rooted networks (Blaser, 2010, 2013, 2014; De la Cadena, 2010, 2015; Escobar, 2008, 2016, 2018; Nirmal, 2016, 2017; Rocheleau, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2011b, 2015a, 2015b; Rocheleau and Nirmal, 2015; Cantor et al. 2018; Simpson, 2014; Sundberg, 2004, 2014) in and from particular places and “worlds-in-movement” (Escobar, 2016). This implies materially rooted political ontologies and territorial political ontologies, where culture describes modes of conviviality (Illich, 1973; Esteva, 2015) and “together living” (Simpson, 2011) or interspecies communal living based on an ethics of care, love, reciprocity, and respect.
The alternative path we advocate is based on two propositions: (a) revaluing knowledges and practices in order to institute a different set of values and goals; (b) restoring knowledges and practices for the resurgence of worlds where the social and ecological are fundamentally enmeshed—with life at the center, and economy, politics, and scientific ecology in supporting roles. In the context of continuing colonial assaults on Indigenous peoples and places by state and corporate actors we support self-organized movements for the resurgence of Indigenous life and territory as a degrowth pathway that simultaneously resists growth-driven development. Below we discuss “resurgence” as a deeply rooted and material process.
Resurgence realized
We use resurgence to denote the combination of resistance with recovery, renewal, and/or reinvention of various interspecies and social relations in and across places and times (including connections with land and water). As a spatial concept with history, resurgence is about looking back to look forward, learning from that which has been, to inform that which is to come, rather than “going back” or reverting to some utopic time.
Resurgence can be achieved through processes of re-rooting and re-commoning. Re-rooting can mean a strengthening of existing roots, re-establishing rootedness in lost and recovered places, or establishing new roots of uprooted, displaced or new cultures in new spaces. Re-commoning refers to re-establishing an ethos of the commons, with increased space and scope for community, that relocalizes economic exchanges and reconstitutes them outside or alongside markets. A growing Indigenous and degrowth network is building around the related concept of “Comunalidad/Communality” (Esteva, 2018; Martinez-Luna, 2010). Remaking territory through re-rooting and re-commoning is critical to resurgence. This process also involves a language of being differently—not only rejecting the language and ethos of capitalism and colonialism, but actively (re)creating languages and practices that prioritize community, ecology and resurgence politics.
Both vertical and horizontal rootedness seem absent in academic conceptions of degrowth, except for the Illichian school which talks of soils as living, discusses rooting, and has a vocabulary and conceptual framework recognizing place and territory (Esteva, 2014; Esteva and Prakash, 2014).
Reasserting the ecological, we seek to strengthen degrowth by offering a model of resurgence that is both conceptual and profoundly material. We cannot have one set of polygons for those in the global north, and another for the south, when in fact, worlds are made of networks, webs and flows. Additionally, degrowth is often presented as “making ecological space in the south” (Kallis, 2017:22), as if this were a zero-sum game with no history, no ecological and climate debt and no case for economic reparations and ecological restoration (for colonialism, enslavement, ecocide, wars). Resurgence as a decolonial socio-ecological reimagining is material, embodied and “goes to ground” in rooted networks whose terms of connection and exchange matter (Nirmal, 2016; Rocheleau, 2011a, 2011b, 2015a, 2015b; Rocheleau and Roth, 2007). We consider historical and ecological as well as geographical positioning.
Practices of re-rooting networks reconnect and “place” people materially and ontologically in relation to land, water, people and other beings. These habit-forming connections in place (assemblages) create territories and worlds. Resurgence embraces a politics of making and maintaining territory where the landscape is actively produced and sustained through shared, intentional socio-ecological praxis. Rather than taking territory, this is ultimately about reweaving worlds and restoring relations broken or threatened by capitalist/colonial interventions. While disentangling ties from neoliberal capitalism, people reconnect, on new terms, within and between communities, in place and across distance.
Resurgence across scales implies remaking networks of shared knowledge, practice, and solidarity that operate on different terms, with an ethos of sufficiency to guide connectivity. The challenge is to regrow localized interdependent networks, and degrow colonial, dependent global networks while re-making the patterns and terms of connectivity across scales. Cultural and ecological resurgence also require horizontal political and economic structures and practices that enable pathways to sufficiency, innovation and creativity outside of the growth paradigm.
In what follows, the cases of resurgence speak for themselves.
Rooting in Mexico: The Zapatista case
What does it mean to submerge oneself in a larger context of histories and geographies beyond our own experience and understanding in order to reanimate worlds that we can barely remember or create new ones that we can only imagine?
The Zapatistas have, since the 1980s, worked to recover lands and build territories-in-resistance to the hegemonic growth of capitalism at the expense of lands, labor and self-determination of Indigenous and campesino communities (Baschet, 2013; Esteva, 2014, 2015, 2018; EZLN, 2005, 2006, 2015, 2016; Marcos, 2002, 2006, 2007; EZLN, 2015, 2016; Mora, 2007, 2017; Muñoz et al., 2008; Pérez Espinosa, 2011). Their inspirations range from 500 years of Indigenous persistence and resistance to colonialism, to the thought and actions of liberation theology advocates, rural farmers' unions and rebellions, Zapata's army in the Mexican Revolution and revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A key point in their unique history is the arrival in the rainforests of Chiapas of a small group of vanguardist activists from the north of Mexico (Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional or FLN) who planned to organize and lead resistance by campesino and Indigenous communities. When they found themselves hungry, sick and demoralized, they were taken in, nourished, healed, sheltered and re-oriented by Indigenous people who taught them to see and be differently (Esteva, 2018; Marcos, 2007; Muñoz et al., 2008). They in turn brought new dreams and connections to far away histories, economies, and cultures of resistance.
After 10 years of intensive but carefully concealed grassroots organizing, and a following of mostly Indigenous people numbering in the thousands, Zapatista insurgents (3000–5000) rose up in arms in a surprise rebellion on 1 January 1994 and occupied five town and city centers in Chiapas (Esteva, 2018). They also occupied ancestral agricultural lands in several districts that had been under debt peonage or plantation systems, generationally (de Ita, 2006; de Vos, 2002; EZLN, 2015, 2016). The uprising was timed to coincide with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which they rightly predicted would undermine Mexican family and community agriculture (Esteva, 2013). Twelve days later they began a cease fire and negotiated a truce with the federal government, hosted in the San Cristobal Cathedral by Don Samuel Ruiz, then Catholic Bishop of the San Cristobal Diocese. Two years of negotiations followed, producing the Accords of San Andres, signed in 1996 by the Zapatistas and Ernesto Zedillo, then president of Mexico (Lopez y Rivas, 1998, 2010).
While their original demands included land, health care, employment, education and basic services, the Zapatistas insisted not on property or monetary compensation but on broad recognition of Indigenous rights and territories throughout Mexico. They convened the Indigenous Forum in 1996, which in turn approved the original accords and founded the Indigenous National Congress (CNI) with 135 delegates from 44 Indigenous groups. The CNI became a point of encounter, co-thinking, mutual support and leverage for indigenous peoples in Mexico, who faced a rising wave of territorial assaults on land, water and autonomy.
Meanwhile the federal government purchased several tracts of recovered land and ceded them provisionally to Zapatista communities who continued to cultivate existing and recovered lands. They reconstituted their lives not so much by “growing” the land under cultivation, but by restoring ranches and plantations to food production by and for those who worked the land. The Zapatistas' maize and bean cultivation with hoes and their production of shaded coffee and cacau (cocoa) reduced the ecological impact on forests and watersheds. They relocalized agriculture by producing for themselves and nearby communities and regional markets. Some products (honey, coffee, cacau) entered larger networks of cooperatives and collectives at national and international levels. They currently raise cattle in sustainable pasture rotation systems for community consumption. Forests were and are generally protected under Zapatista control, through community rules. They often face punitive policies and violent paramilitary reprisals if they fail to cede forest lands to clear-cutting and “development” by powerful individuals, parties or state agencies (Abraca, 2013; Baschet, 2013; Bellinghausen, 2013, 2014; Enlace Zapatista, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014; Garcia Aguirre, 2011; Global Justice Ecology Project, 2011; Maderas del Pueblo del Sureste, 2008; Muñoz et al., 2008; Rocheleau, 2015a, 2015b; for opposing views see Hernández Nava, 2012).
Although the Mexican congress refused to ratify the San Andres Accords and removed key elements of territorial, autonomous and communal tenure provisions to create a more limited Indigenous law (Lopez y Rivas, 1998, 2010) in 2001, the Zapatistas, CNI and some others still adhere to the original accords and the Zapatistas still claim territorial rights in the recovered lands. They consider original accords more legitimate than the flawed legality of the 2001 legislation. Most of the communities refused options to convert fully from communal to private property and occupy their lands with or without title, under community control.
The Zapatistas also embraced the building and defense of autonomy and have configured resistance in terms of self-provisioning local economies based on food production, food sales, cash crops and other market goods and services. While slowly bringing their own consumption to levels of sufficiency, they are growing their networks with solidarity economy cooperatives and collectives in urban centers and between their own communities. Illustrating how economic, security, and political elements submit to civil authorities that give primacy to social, ecological and subsistence concerns, the Zapatista military is governed by respected and trusted adult women and men of every age group and ethnicity, from communities across all five Caracoles (districts).8 They respect territorial integrity, including the maintenance of forests, rivers, lakes, and diverse communities of plants and animals cohabiting with people (Baschet, 2013; Juntas de Buen Gobierno Zapatista (JdBGZ) 2013a, 2013b).
While they prefer to talk in terms of autonomy rather than food sovereignty, they share several principles and practices9 (Altieri, 2009; Altieri and Toledo, 2011; Patel, 2009; Rosset, 2008, Rosset and Martinez-Torres, 2012), but are more explicitly anti-capitalist. This articulates with cultural resurgence, self-determination, and recovery and defense of shared living worlds. As part of their project of autonomy they work full-time, producing food for themselves and for processing and sale, using agroecological and other low-input technologies, usually without herbicides and pesticides. They cultivate mixed crops (grains, legumes, root crops, vegetables, fruit, coffee, Cacau and honey) and produce cosmetics, fruit preserves, herbal soaps, artisanal metal work, woodwork, textiles, clothing, and art (music, literature, paintings, murals, theater, and films). They build their own homes and community meeting/market places, schools, clinics, sports facilities and conference grounds, maintain their own vehicles and in some cases maintain horses in shared pastures. Clinics staffed by community members and solidarity volunteers (from doctors and nurses to pharmacologists and nutritionists) have created medical centers combining locally produced herbal medicines and traditional healing skills with pharmaceutical products and modern technologies to meet most medical needs. These networks constitute experimental transitions to low input and innovative community agriculture and medicine (JdBGZ, 2013d; Esteva, 2018).
Zapatistas also pursue a parallel full time social project of dignity, solidarity and resistance, convening and coordinating efforts to resist mega-development projects and the growth-driven policies that produce them. These include a veritable epidemic of traditional extractive projects (mining of metal deposits, oil drilling, fracked gas, pipelines, and timber extraction) as well as energy and food crop plantations, industrial and solar wind farms, dams, conservation reserves, mass tourism, and elite resorts (FONATUR, 2008). All operate under extractivist regimes of production, management and governance, including militarized private and state policing, and repression of resistance by affected communities (Otros Mundos 2014 a, b; Maderas del Pueblo del Sureste A. C. 2008; CIEPAC 2010, Garcia Aguirre 2011). Economic and political autonomy requires vigilance and the ability to mobilize shared non-violent defense of territories against environmental destruction, depletion of resources, land grabbing, and subversion of local government.
The resistance to growth is focused not on local consumption but on externally conceived and managed, growth-driven projects of private and government entities, from national to international levels. While some may reduce consumption as an individual choice or voluntary social endeavor, the Zapatistas resist capitalist development as moral and survival imperative. Survival in this case refers to establishing or protecting life in communities of networked socio-ecologies in place, i.e. territories. While capitalism treats everything and everyone as exchangeable and interchangeable, Indigenous and many other worlds depend on a relational ethos that values particular beings, and all their relations, in place(s) (LaDuke, 1999).
Similar to degrowth practices of redistributing surplus to build solidarity and promote cultural expression, the Zapatistas have mobilized to protect their world and to connect to other worlds based on solidarity. They recently diverted over 10 tons of rice, beans, maize, sugar, coffee as well as 60,000 toasted corn tortillas from the five caracoles (districts), with a value of 290,000 pesos (about 14,000 US dollars), to support the teacher's strike blockades in Chiapas in 2015. In 2016 they shipped tons of coffee for sale to support threatened immigrant and refugee groups in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Since 1996 they have convened, sponsored, and hosted encounters, arts festivals, science, social, and political conferences, and recently, an international encounter for 5,000 women in struggle (Zapatista Women, 2018). They have demonstrated that degrowth and autonomy need not mean austerity and isolation, nor are they limited to people of great wealth. It is not only possible but necessary to commit to struggle and resist while building economic autonomy and relations of reciprocity and solidarity across difference and great distance (JdBGZ, 2013d; CNI and CIG, 2018; Muñoz, 2018).
Among the more salient features of Zapatista autonomy is a principled and practical pursuit of gender equality, from local to regional governance, education, agriculture, medicine, community policing, defense, and communications. The widespread and deeply rooted traditions of parallel women's domains of knowledge, authority, and spirituality (Marcos, 2010, 2011, 2018), along with the experience of resistance, uprising, and public political action served as distinct and important channels to cultivate women's leadership (Zapatista Women, 2018). The complementary gender divisions of labor in the everyday domestic economies of production and “reproduction” (biological, social, and care-work) both support and challenge the pursuit of gender equity (paredad). Women and their communities work to reconcile social and ecological reproduction (territories/living worlds) with the demands of communal production and the work of good government, from community assemblies to the municipal and caracol10 boards (JdBGZ, 2013c; Marcos, 2011). Since the establishment of the civil governments in caracoles in 2003, and a previous women's encounter in 2007, the boards of good government have gradually instituted equal representation in civilian governing bodies, in teaching, clinics, and the civilian command structure (comandancia) that oversees and guides the military. Women formed farming collectives on communal plots to raise money to support the expenses of local governance and community, from construction of meeting places, to food and transportation for the delegates to municipal and district level administrative boards, conflict resolution commissions, fact finding commissions, and assembly meetings. Now they also serve directly in governance positions, with equal presence of women in rotating leadership roles at every level. When a woman leaves home to engage in governing tasks, it requires new forms of reciprocity within and between families to take over her farming, water management, childcare, health care and cooking duties. Degrowing capitalism and patriarchy has required constant reinvention and rethinking of just governing bodies, and relinking of gendered labor exchanges within and between communities (JdBGZ, 2013c; Marcos, 2011; Marcos, 2010; Millan, 2014; Mora, 2014, 2017; Olivera, 2005; Pérez Espinosa, 2011). Women's collectives now venture into non-traditional activities such as small-scale cattle production collectives (Votan Yeni, 2013; Personal communication at The Little Zapatista School, San Cristobal). The struggle for parity (paredad) has brought women into new positions of visibility, representation, authority, and expertise (Marcos, 2011; Mora, 2017; Olivera, 2005; Pérez Espinosa, 2011).
Since 2012, the Zapatistas and the CNI have reconvened and initiated a process to bring both the plight and the insight of Indigenous communities throughout Mexico into the national political sphere and popular media. Between fall of 2015 and 2017 they maintained a constant consultative assembly to constitute principles and complete a process to nominate 17 women and 17 men consejalas/es and an Indigenous spokeswoman (vocera) to form the National Indigenous Governing Council of Mexico (CIG). Local and regional assemblies of over 40 Indigenous peoples chose the delegates and selected Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez (Marichuy), a respected Nahua woman leader and herbalist, as the CIG spokeswoman and 2018 independent presidential candidate (Baschet, 2017; Dangl, 2017). In the pre-campaign to seek over 800,000 signatures to appear on the ballot, she traveled with the full council (expanded to 67) to Indigenous communities and territories to listen to testimonies about everyday conditions and existing or immanent threats to health and wellbeing of communities as well as land, water, wildlife, forests, beaches, fisheries, and mountains. In Chiapas the onslaught of mega projects from the Mesoamerica Meta-Project (Bartra, 2001, 2004; Pickard, 2011; Wilson, 2008; Zunino, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c) provoked widespread protests, pilgrimages, and social movement convergence from 2006 to the present (AP News, 2014; Henríquez, 2011a, 2011b; Mandujano, 2011, 2014; Rieublanc, 2014) as well as controversy (Hernandez Nava, 2012; La Cronica de Hoy, 2011) and mobilized interest in Marichuy's 2017/2018 campaign.11 The CIG tour enabled an intensive encounter, and mutual learning, through visits to remote communities and sites of territorial threats, from narco takeovers to open pit mines (CNI and CIG, 2018; Esteva, 2016; Muñoz, 2018). Communities discussed economic growth for the few at the expense of the livelihoods, lives and living worlds of the many, and called out the expansion of narco-capitalism as driving, or following megaprojects (CNI and CIG, 2018; Esteva, 2016; Muñoz, 2018). The degrowth enacted in this context is resistance to particular kinds of growth, scales of development and types of domination, all rolled into one.
The threats, insecurity, and violence against the communities in recent decades have required many to form community police to rid themselves of the scourge of narco-capitalism and complicit police and military, and regain control of their streets, fields, forests, homes, water, and small businesses (McDonnell, 2017). For their trouble community police in diverse movements have been targeted, besieged by police and military, and leaders have been imprisoned or killed by narco-affiliated para-militaries, police or military forces. During 2017 and 2018 attacks sometimes targeted scheduled visits of the CIG campaign. One case left 11 dead, 5 of them were community police (Patricio Martinez, 2018). Degrowth from this positionality of resisting externally imposed economic growth, development, and related criminal enterprises, requires new institutions simply to speak and act safely in public (Gil Olmos, 2013). The CIG has created a national platform to discuss and act on resistance to the megaprojects of the growth economy and the related depredations of narcocapitalism (Esteva, 2018).
Several regional Indigenous organizations and local groups, with prominent intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, social and environmental justice activists, and religious leaders mobilized to support the continuing work of the CNI and CIG, beyond their symbolic 2018 campaign. Their discourse focuses on resistance to growth-driven development and mega-projects that threaten livelihoods, lives, and ecological integrity and the potential of autonomous Indigenous communities (Muñoz, 2018). Today's 300,000 Zapatistas, with the CNI, the CIG and allied Indigenous groups, supported by social movements (Liberation Theology,12 human rights, autonomy, and care for the Earth) continue to build a territorial resurgence. They are restoring worlds through re-commoning land, water, forests and governing structures. They are pruning connections with growth-economies and re-rooting within and between place(s) through rhizomatic networks of freely circulating people, goods, services, ideas and practices. By reinventing rooted networks, while nested within hostile fields of power, they provide powerful examples of resurgence through resistance, persistence, autonomy and solidarity (Esteva, 2018; JdBGZ, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2013d; Marcos, 2007; Marcos, 2011; EZLN, 2015, 2016; Mora, 2017; Muñoz, 2018; Pérez Espinosa, 2011; Rocheleau, 2015a, 2015b).
Many less visible movements and peoples throughout the world are also engaged in resurgence as they reconnect to reach or to recover sufficiency and remake territories and worlds threatened by growth-driven development, neoliberal globalization and climate change (Barkin, 2018; Escobar, 2016, 2018; Kothari et al., 2014; Stephen, 2002). In Attappady, in southern India, three Indigenous communities find themselves inhabiting the remnants of their prior world, while facing the onslaught of multiple waves of settlers, the forest department, and various state and NGO development agencies. Their resistance and strategies for resurgence provide distinct lessons and raise several crucial questions for decolonial degrowth and post-development.
Rooting in Adivasi India
Within the lush evergreen highlands of the Western Ghats, and in its neighboring dry lowlands, three Indigenous communities (or Adivasis)—the Mudugar, Kurumbar, and Irular—have been battling erasure and displacement since the late 1950s. The primary harbingers of such violence against Adivasis come in the form of state-led and state-supported “development” projects of extraction, rural settlers and agriculturalists, and commercial real-estate developers. While rural settlers systematically grabbed Adivasi lands using both legal and illegal, and usually illegitimate means, they marked the beginning of an era of “settler colonialism” (when colonialism is ongoing and structural: Wolfe, 2006) in Attappady.
In the past 60 odd years, Adivasis have been structurally removed from their lands through various public and private processes that have made such settler colonialism possible. Chief among these processes has been the coming of “development”, with a keen focus on economic growth. Development projects in the region have included hydroelectric and wind infrastructure projects, and other intervention-based projects targeting schooling and education, public and community health, employment, income generation, and social policy. At the state level, the “success” of such interventions has therefore been estimated through commonly used mainstream development indicators such as education levels, public health status including infant and neonatal morality rates, employment levels, gender ratios, and so on.
In the 1970s, the state began work on a proposed hydroelectric project on one of the main rivers in the region. Fearing flooding-related displacement and loss of biodiversity, conservationists and environmentalists from urban India allied themselves with local activists and Adivasis, in an attempt to stop dam construction. In the late 1970s, the resistance won the legal battle, effectively shutting down the project and changing the national discourse from “development” to “sustainable development”. This victory also led to the establishment of a biodiversity conservation zone in Attappady called the Silent Valley National Park, bringing it into the perimeter of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve that spans the Western Ghats.
Over the past several decades, this sustainable development imperative has, in large part, pushed for ecologically viable economic growth strategies and initiatives to be implemented among the Adivasi communities. Yet, despite such evolved policy focus, Attappady, even when assessed using the development indicators of the state, continues to fall well below in health and wellbeing in particular, especially in the past decade.
On the one hand, the state has recognized Adivasis' historical relationship to their forest lands13 through particular legislative action via the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers “Recognition of Forest Rights Act” in 2006 (De, 2011). However, despite the granting of communal rights of access to ancestral lands (on paper, in many cases) to few claimants, several others have yet to regain any kind of relationship with the lands and places some of them have occupied in their rooted networks for thousands of years.
At the same time, disputes between settlers and Adivasis continue to grow and take legal forms, as Adivasis demand access and control over territories they have been forcibly and structurally removed from. In 2016 alone, 127 police cases were filed between the groups, a figure that continues to grow as outside groups also vie for prime forestlands14 (Author's Field Notes, November 2016). While Adivasi resistance has therefore historically given territorial integrity its primary focus, it has sometimes also argued claims of and for ecological viability of Attappady and its Adivasis. For instance, in several land-related protests, Adivasis argue for their right to access their ancestral lands for particular ceremonies, or relatedly, for the cultivation of particular crops, using scientific reasoning to delineate the complex ecological relationships between particular soils, climatic conditions, conditions of shared use with other animals and peoples, and other socio-environmental factors. Despite these nuanced political positions and their underlying material conditions, land conflicts have continued to be pervasive (Nirmal, 2017). The loss of control and access to land is a serious concern for the socio-ecological continuity of many Adivasis (Satish, 2013; Shaji, 2016). Not only has this loss manifested in significant landscape change, it has also had material effects on Adivasis individual and collective lives.
Adivasis' socio-ecological networks are rooted in particular ancestral places, and connected to other living beings including plants, animals, rivers, mountains, spirits, and so on, in their living worlds. The violence of the forcible removal of Adivasis from their living worlds, or their “disembodiment” has thus far produced material and ontological effects (or “deworlding”, see Nirmal, 2017). Some of these material, bodily effects have been caused by disruptions in and destruction of agroecological knowledges and practices, particularly as state, NGO and settler cultivation practices and strategies have either cut off Adivasis from cultivation and foraging areas, or replaced Indigenous crops and trees with exogenous varieties. Decades of nutritional loss have now resulted in sharp increases in neonatal and maternal mortality from chronic malnutrition in women and children, and alcohol-related deaths, particularly in men (Philip, 2014; Shaji, 2015; Suchitra, 2014).
In a renewed effort to address the problem of land within the critical and urgent context of neonatal and infant malnutrition and mortality, community leaders, land rights activists, and their allies have been advocating for a shift in political and policy focus from land sovereignty and ownership, to food sovereignty. Those promoting food sovereignty practice in the region do not refer to it as such. Instead, they show causality between the restoration of Indigenous food systems and restoring bodily and ecological health. In various public and private accounts, several Adivasis, public health officials, rural extension officers, and local educators, alluded to a necessary revitalization of lost ecological knowledges and practices as a key way forward for Indigenous survival and prosperity.
A focus on food sovereignty is therefore a focus on an ecologically, and territorially viable future that can only be made possible by extending Adivasis' access and control over appropriate lands, seeds, and other necessities. It unites claims for territorial integrity (in the form of autonomy and sovereignty), with claims for ecological viability, through a recognition of the particular ecologies of place, and their existence as ecologies of resistance, resurgence, and transformation. For instance, while I was waiting for a bus on the street after attending a community meeting about increasing agroecological challenges, a woman approached me anonymously to share a deep personal and communal loss. She explained that traditional medicines or “pacha marundu” she regularly used in her 30 years as a midwife to ensure safe births were increasingly unavailable, poisoned with harmful pesticides (through air and water transfers from neighboring fields) and ineffective in the face of modern illnesses (Field Notes, 2016). In doing so, she identified a clear line of connection between the need to revitalize these critical ecological knowledges and the actual, bodily regeneration of local Indigenous communities. Several Indigenous healers, gardeners, agriculturalists, botanists, activists, teachers, and other experts have also identified scientific links between loss of traditional food crops, foraged fruit, berries and roots, as well as certain animal products, and the increase in chronic and terminal illnesses in the region. Several farmers have also pointed to the problematic ties between pesticide use and increase in cases of respiratory illnesses in the neighboring regions.
Hence, regeneration in Attappady could also mean replacing toxic pesticides and fertilizers, and genetically modified crops, with locally appropriate and vernacular knowledges, practices, and technologies. Degrowing the scale of commercial cultivation, by, for instance limiting pesticide and fertilizer intensive large-scale banana plantations (produced primarily for export), could also be regenerative in the near future. (Such toxic monocultures have multiplied since 1970s through targeted state agricultural policy.) Not only would this restore genetic and nutritional diversity in the region, it would also provide for positive avenues for socio-ecological change in the future.
Food sovereignty praxis can also serve as a pathway for re-commoning lands previously enclosed by the state and private actors. This could facilitate a regeneration of lost nodes in Adivasis' rooted networks. For instance, this might involve gaining access and control over cultivable lands lying within the boundaries controlled by the Forest Department. When the state initially territorialized Attappady for purposes of governance and forest revenue management, they systematically ignored all areas within Adivasis' spatial networks other than their home spaces within an identifiable cluster of homes (or “Ooru”). This specialized view omitted the histories of circulation and movement common to Indigenous societies in other parts of the country and the world (Nirmal, 2017). Regenerating links with these spaces, especially those within the purview of the state could have a deep impact on the kinds of cultivation practices and crops that can be revived and revitalized for better communal health and wellbeing.
Several activists at the federal and local levels have advocated for devolution of power in the forest department, which currently serves as a colonial wing of the (supposedly post-colonial) Indian state (Nirmal, 2017). The forest department (legally, but not legitimately) controls and regulates forest use and access, policing the bounds of a significant portion of alienated ancestral lands. This also obstructs the cultivation of crops in their complementary socio-ecological lands. A significant mandate therefore, has been to regain control over use and access to ancestral forestlands and establishing self-governance in the region, both of which local land rights movements have tried to achieve by influencing land policy. In many ways, degrowing the power of the forest department, and limiting its territorializing powers in particular are central to achieving food sovereignty in the region. At the same time, a successful food sovereignty model would regenerate lost connections to ancestral lands, while generating new and positive connection with a decentralized forest department, and an allied local government, continuing to work towards improving education levels and public health in the region.
While many of the key arguments for degrowth (such as reduced consumption/waste) bear no relevance in Attappady, several groups of Adivasis, activists, and allies are engaged in a convergent, degrowth movement of their own. Their movement is decolonial, in that it is aimed at the same nexus of capitalism, colonialism, and their lovechild development. Food sovereignty as resurgence in Attappady imagines a post-development world that carries many of the ecological and economic principles of degrowth. For many, it envisions a revitalization of regenerative practices such as kambalakkadu, a celebration of life at the first harvest, that require particular ancestral lands and seeds. As an elder Mudugar reminisced,
By paying keen attention to what such cultures/communities-in-resistance wish to regenerate, and bringing a decolonial rooted focus back to the ecological, a decolonized degrowth could contribute to territorial resurgence by extending solidarity networks capable of influencing both policy and politics in Attappady.During Kambalakkadu the women and men dance together and celebrate for many days. We used to do this every year… it was a massive celebration but now we don't do it anymore. The circumstances have changed. The forest has taken over the lands that we used to cultivate, and we need particular spaces to do these ceremonies that we don't have access to. (Nirmal, 2016: 172)
Conclusion
We offer concepts, empirical examples, and reflections from feminist, decolonial, and post-development movements and thinkers to consciously situate degrowth in relation to this broad convergence. We urge degrowth scholar-activists to enter that process in a decolonial mode of seeing and being-in-relation, bringing their best skills and creative powers to co-design future alternatives, as peers, in a horizontal movement of movements (Escobar, 2018). Based on the cases we suggest how degrowth can transcend its current limitations and bring its strengths into a new alignment to bridge vast differences in ontology and epistemology as well as power and possibilities. These derive from nationality, colonial experience, race, class, ethnicity, gender, and other elements of intersectional identities and affinities. Our working roadmap includes the following imperatives:
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To recognize territories as living worlds
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To recognize assaults on living worlds of places, peoples, and naturecultures beyond visible, legible and formally published “environmental conflicts”
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To recognize struggles over dignity, autonomy, integrity of ecologies and territories as extensions of bodies/lives
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To recognize dispossession and displacement as corporeal, “disembodiment and deworlding”, mundocidio
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To recognize assaults on the biosphere and cultures beyond commodities and resources and cases linked to large, vocal, visible, and legible social movements
At present, degrowth does not do the work of dismantling structures of violence, debt, and death, but rather offers a systemic critique, alongside grassroots radical political strategies for degrowth. The work to dismantle structures, de- and re-link global and local webs and flows, and dismantle the growth-driven elite enclaves in the global north and south is necessary to realize a post-extractivist world. We offer practical suggestions to imagine and realize post-capitalist futures that are locally based and horizontally networked through rhizomatic connections that support life and livelihoods:
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Mapping the trajectories and pathways of growth and its intersection with actually existing ecologies/cultures/territories.
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Mapping sites and pathways of extraction, processing, transport, storage, distribution, consumption/use, and disposal; Collaborating with ecologists, geographers, ecological economists, social metabolism, and post-development to develop datasets of financial and material flows, as well as ethnographic studies of advertising, use/consumption, and disposal of residuals/waste.
•
Prepare visuals that make these relationships clear/legible to broad publics.
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Develop replicable/adaptive methods to document/diagram/illustrate the connections of different groups of people in commodity-webs, and/or consumption-webs of those interested in de-linking from growth economies.
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Develop graphic interactive tools and group processes to identify concrete pathways to de- and re-linking based on empirical connection and dependence at multiple scales. Create multi-scalar case studies and demonstrations in plain language with accessible illustrations, and interactive learning tools such as games.
The Zapatista and Attappady examples also offer ways to imagine future worlds and build conditional autonomy while simultaneously living alongside and resisting the depredations of neoliberal capitalism. We have argued for a positive focus on resurgence, as a collective response to the extractive politics of capitalist colonialism, built on relational territories and the relationality of territory. Being plural, rooted, autonomous, material, and embodied, it offers a degrowth pathway and recognizes that privileging economy and market over land and territory perpetuates violence against those who are “being differently” as well as those enmeshed in global capitalism. Decolonizing degrowth in this context means re-centering resistance within the discourse, while recognizing that most autonomists are committed to other worlds, not to armed violence and violent resistance. A decolonized degrowth must be what the growth paradigm is not, and imagine what does not yet exist: our separate, networked, and collective socio-ecological futures of sufficiency and celebration in the multiple worlds of the pluriverse.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge research support from the National Science Foundation s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (DDRI) Grant and a Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Footnotes
1. We refer to conditions that threaten health and wellbeing, not modernist state measures of “poverty”.
2. The politics of affinity allow bridging distinct ethnic and religious identities and socio-ecological contexts, enabling women to defend each other's reproductive rights. That implies respect for both collective and individual decisions about reproductive trends as well as women's personal choices and corporeal autonomy.
3. Thursday Seminar Discussion, Cideci Unitierra, 2013.
4. Positionality is where we are and where we stand in relation to beings and things around us.
5. Post-development movements and theories demand/foresee the end of modernist, neocolonial, capitalist Development projects, and imagine communitarian/noncapitalist futures in their stead (see Ziai, 2007).
6. Hydraulic fracturing.
7. The Barcelona Group's Environmental Justice Atlas of environmental conflicts is a positive step, but its selection criteria exclude many egregious cases of territorial assault. We suggest mapping territorial assaults on Indigenous, peasant, common and public lands in collaboration with land grab documentation, and organized opposition, citing sources beyond commercial press and academic accounts.
8. While they maintain their right to bear arms, since the truce in January of 1994 the Zapatistas have consistently refrained from using them, even during lethal attacks by paramilitaries and incursions by police and military forces (anonymous former investigator, 2012; Marcos, 2014).
9. Food sovereignty is a global and geographically diverse movement that recognizes the rights of people to control their own food systems using local agroecological knowledges and practices. It is also a local solution to food insecurity and economic crises.
10. The caracol or seashell is the district unit that coordinates and reconciles policies and practices across municipalities; the power of decision flows from and back to community assemblies through municipalities, which reconcile differences in needs and production between communities (EZLN, 2015).
11. The campaign was a means not an end. The national tour gained signatures, but did not approach 800,000.
12. The Papal Encyclical Laudato Si (Francis, 2015) affected global development discourse (Kallis, 2017) and enabled a revival of Liberation Theology and Catholic solidarity in convergence with Indigenous and other movements in Chiapas against growth-driven economic development projects that threaten campesino and Indigenous worlds.
13. This move has been commended and recognized by several law scholars and court systems as a step in the right direction for Indigenous rights laws everywhere.
14. This is further complicated by the constitutional mandate marking Adivasi lands as “scheduled areas” thereby preventing their market exchange. This mandate was created to protect Adivasi lands from illegal sale by land grabbers, but is often ignored in practice.
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