Book Review: Routledge handbook of degrowth

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Title: Routledge Handbook of Degrowth
Editor: Anitra Nelson; Editorial Advisor: Vincent Liegey
Publisher: Routledge
Publication: July 2025 (available in print and open access)
Sustainability topics: Degrowth 📉, Social Responsibility ⚖️, Sustainable Lifestyle 🌅, Environmental Sustainability 🌿, Ethical Governance 🏛️

In a world obsessed with growth metrics  – GDP metrics, quarterly earnings, profit margins – the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth asks the critical question: what if growth itself is the problem?

This provocative handbook doesn’t begin with a manifesto or a call to arms. Instead, it opens with a quiet but powerful reflection: What would our world look like if we pursued “enough” rather than endless accumulation? It’s a question that challenges decades of mainstream economics, offering instead a vision where thriving communities and planetary health take precedence over endless production and consumption.

Why this book, why now

A 550-page academic volume on degrowth may sound like dry theory to some. What this collection delivers, however, is something closer to a battle plan for a future grounded in sufficiency rather than excess. Editors Anitra Nelson and Vincent Liegey make a compelling case that degrowth is a necessary and urgent response to ecological collapse, social inequality, and the exhaustion of our natural resources. 

The timing matters. While glaciers melt and wildfires rage, inequality keeps widening. Yet the dominant response remains: more growth will fix it. This volume says otherwise, grounding that claim in 35 chapters spanning contexts from France to Czechia, from ecofeminism to ecosocialism. In 2025, with political headwinds growing stronger and ecological tipping points approaching, that imperative has never been more urgent.

A handbook with a heartbeat

What distinguishes this collection is its refusal to be merely academic. The chapters span four parts, moving from ecological and economic contexts through theories and philosophies, into concrete practices, and finally toward forward-looking imaginaries.

Part I establishes why degrowth has evolved as a significant concept across societies worldwide. Part II traces its origins in France and expansion across different countries, languages, and cultural contexts. Part III – perhaps the most compelling – concentrates on degrowth in action: commoning, conviviality, frugal abundance, de-fashioning. These may sound like abstract principles, but they are lived practices. 

Take Cargonomia in Budapest, the research center Liegey co-coordinates. Here, degrowth goes beyond theory. It’s cargo bikes replacing delivery vans, community gardens producing food, repair workshops extending the life of objects. It’s what Nelson calls “prefigurative politicking” – creating the future you want to see, now, in miniature. 

“Degrowth is not about having less,” the editors insist, “but about living better with enough.”

Part IV projects forward through ecofeminist futures, solidary modes of living, and geopolitical reimaginings. One chapter demonstrates how degrowth is essential to address poverty –  a direct challenge to the growth-equals-development orthodoxy. 

When theory meets movement

Here’s where the handbook gets interesting – and vulnerable. Nelson and Liegey sought contributions from “engaged researchers who are concerned with agency, self-reflective, curious, critical, open.” There’s no pretense of neutral observation. They’re in it.

This creates tension. Academic handbooks usually keep their distance. This one doesn’t. It openly discusses the International Degrowth Network and struggles with diversity. It prioritizes “practical research” because “the world demands practical action.”

But what happens when the movement fragments? When degrowth advocates disagree on strategy, on compromise, on whether to engage with existing institutions or build alternatives outside them? The handbook acknowledges these tensions without fully resolving them. Contributors debate whether degrowth should seek policy influence or remain a radical critique. Can degrowth scale, or does scaling betray its core principles?

These are live debates that will determine whether degrowth remains an inspiring vision or becomes a transformative force. 

Silvia Federici's words, as quoted by Nelson, seem to animate the project: we need "movements that are acting on several fronts...the creation of new forms of solidarity, the creation of new forms of commoning of reproductive work that enable people to gain the strength, more strength, to confront the State."

That's what this handbook attempts. Not just documenting degrowth, but arming it with the intellectual resources to survive what's coming.

The challenge of enoughness

At its core, degrowth asks us to reimagine prosperity. Not as endless accumulation but as sufficiency, conviviality, and care. The handbook presents degrowth concepts like the “degrowth doughnut” – meeting human needs within planetary boundaries – not as utopian fantasies but as pragmatic necessities. 

One chapter explores “frugal abundance” – the idea that richness comes not from having more but from having enough, coupled with strong communities and meaningful relationships. Picture a neighborhood where tool libraries replace individual ownership, where time banks enable reciprocal care, and where shared spaces foster connection. Less stuff. More life. 

Another examines commoning – shared governance of resources – as an alternative to both state control and market privatization. In practice, this might look like community land trusts ensuring affordable housing, or cooperatively managed forests balancing ecological health with local livelihoods. 

These aren’t new ideas. Indigenous communities have practiced versions of them for millennia. What’s new is articulating them as a coherent alternative to growth-based capitalism, backed by interdisciplinary research and global movement organizing. 

The vulnerability question

By tying research directly to movement politics, the handbook takes a risk. If the degrowth movement falters – outmaneuvered by green growth advocates, dismissed as unrealistic, or fragmented by internal disputes – does the scholarship become irrelevant?

Nelson and Liegey seem to accept this vulnerability. “Future degrowth research,” they argue, “will closely refer to, and even be directly determined by, the degrowth movement’s agenda (2025–), and challenges to it.”

This is both the handbook’s greatest strength and its most exposed flank. In choosing engagement over detachment, the editors offer scholarship that matters, that grapples with the world as it is while imagining the world as it could be. But they also stake their intellectual project on a movement navigating increasingly hostile political terrain. 

The handbook doesn't shy from this reality. With authoritarian politics on the rise and climate denialism resurgent, can a movement advocating for less growth gain traction? The editors don't offer easy reassurance. Instead, they double down on "pluriversity" – multiple pathways, experiments, possibilities. Some will fail. Some will succeed. All are necessary.

The central question

Can degrowth transition from movement to mainstream? From critique to construction? From imaginary to infrastructure?

Nelson brings decades of activist scholarship to this project, including previous work on housing and food for degrowth. Liegey is a member of the team coordinating international degrowth conferences and runs Cargonomia. Their combined expertise shows in the handbook's scope and coherence – but also in its willingness to leave questions unresolved. The handbook's final chapter poses essential questions rather than definitive answers. How do we navigate hostility to degrowth ideas? How do we integrate diverse voices and perspectives? How do we move from theory to transformative practice?

The editors don't claim certainty. They offer horizontalist pluriversity – and close with a "youthful call for action" appropriate for those who will inherit the consequences of our growth addiction. This intergenerational dimension matters: older contributors bring activist scholarship, younger voices bring urgency. Experience meets impatience. Theory meets now.

In a world where growth has become a prison rather than a promise, the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth offers something increasingly rare: hope grounded in analysis, vision tempered by realism, and a roadmap drawn by those already walking the path.

Whether that path leads to transformation or remains a marginal alternative depends not on this handbook alone, but on the movements, communities, and individuals willing to ask: What if enough is actually enough?