From Growth to Governance: Bringing Coproductionist Critique to Degrowth

Scholarship in degrowth has primarily criticised the twinning of technoscientific and environmental policy as underwritten by an ecomodernist agenda that relies on both technological fixes and economic growth paradigms. Moving beyond such critique, we suggest that current policy discourses on the digital and environmental transition also reveal (shifting) imperatives of governance that grant society and the state a key role in the achievement of desirable futures. By focusing calls for reform on how the ecomodernist agenda is repeating capitalist frames of economic growth and technoscientific solutionism, degrowth critique misses equally important shifts in how governance is imagined in relation to science and technology, which increasingly rely on social fixes for the effects of technological innovation on the environment. In this article, we examine the European Commission’s call for ‘twin’ environmental and digital transitions as part of a Green Deal, asking how a coproductionist lens might enrich and strengthen critiques of technology and innovation in degrowth literature.