Post-growth meets polycentric governance: Toward an interdisciplinary research program

Half a century after The Limits to Growth warned that unchecked economic expansion would breach planetary boundaries, the question remains: how can societies adjust their scale to ecological boundaries without sacrificing democracy? Scholars in the post-growth tradition have emphasized the potential of polycentric governance systems—composed of nested, partly self-governed decision-making units—to provide the necessary coordination for addressing post-growth concerns while preserving democracy and self-governance at lower political scales. However, the central aspects of a polycentric approach to post-growth transformations are only superficially addressed in the literature, and the implications of building and operationalizing this political architecture remain to be developed. This article analyzes the consistency, potential, and domain of a research program integrating both scholarships. First, it evaluates the coherence between post-growth and polycentricity's positive grounds, normative underpinnings, and boundary conditions. Second, it formulates the central concept of polycentric articulation, the process by which rights and responsibilities are polycentrically rearranged to align governance with socio-ecological problems. Third, it describes the transitional pathways through four basic rearrangement processes: pooling, cession, disaggregation, and appropriation. Finally, by mapping five interacting analytic components—concerns, actors, coordination mechanisms, overarching institutional contexts, and political-economy dynamics—the paper produces a conceptual matrix that reveals research avenues, identifies testable hypotheses, and guides practitioners designing post-growth interventions. The result is a coherent roadmap for empirical and theoretical work on governing beyond growth.