Description
Climate breakdown is ‘unequivocally’ evidenced to be the result of human economic activities (IPCC, 2022: 33). More efforts have been dedicated to analysing the power dynamics of climate breakdown and the unequal distribution of negative impacts on specific groups, such as women, people of colour, and those facing financial deprivation. This article takes an ecofeminist-republican approach to argue for feminist decolonial degrowth as a necessary precondition for achieving socially just and ecologically sustainable futures. Firstly, from an ecofeminist perspective, climate breakdown, care depletion, and colonial injustice are inextricably linked and rooted in patriarchal and capitalist 'growth fetishism'. The care depletion, particularly but not exclusively, in the former colonies in the global South is a result of the overuse of material resources for the market economy. Secondly, from a republican perspective, degrowth is a transitional period, allowing plural, heterogeneous economies to coexist and evolve along their own unique development pathways, without dominating one another in postcolonial, post-growth politics. Therefore, degrowth is a feminist agenda, aiming to reallocate material resources and labour power from the market economy to the care economy. It is also a (postcolonial) republican concern, with the aim of incorporating the principle of ‘non-domination’ into the international political economy.
