Do responses to the COVID-19 pandemic anticipate a long-lasting shift towards peer-to-peer production or degrowth?

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously triggered a sudden, substantial increase in demand for items such as personal protection equipment and hospital ventilators whilst also disrupting the means of mass-production and international transport in established supply chains. Furthermore, under stay-at-home orders and with bricks-and-mortar retailers closed, consumers were also forced to adapt. Thus the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to study shifts in behaviour during disruption to industrialised manufacturing and economic contraction, in order to understand the role peer-to-peer production may play in a transition to long-term sustainability of production and consumption, or degrowth. Here, we analyse publicly-available datasets on internet search traffic and corporation financial returns to track the shifts in public interest and consumer behaviour over 2019 – 2020. We find a jump in interest in home-making and small-scale production at the beginning of the pandemic, as well as a substantial and sustained shift in consumer preference for peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms relative to more-established online vendors. In particular we present two case studies – the home-made facemasks supplied through Etsy, and the decentralised efforts of the 3D printer community – to assess the effectiveness of their responses to the pandemic. These patterns of behaviour are related to new modes of production in line with ecological economics and as such add capacity to a broader prefiguration of degrowth. We suggest an adoption of a new “fourth wave” of DIY culture defined by enhanced resilience and degrowth to continue to add capacity to a prefigurative politic of degrowth.

Values as Hypotheses and Messy Institutions: What Ethicists Can Learn from the COVID-19 Crisis

“…The arrival of COVID-19 could have been taken up as an opportunity to reconsider the lock-in of vested interests and incumbent practices; instead, policy decisions primarily served the continuation of the existing economic status quo, urging producers to produce more and consumers to consume more (cf. Dartnell & Kish, 2021;Heintz et al, 2021). Not only does this reveal the reproduction of incumbent institutional practices, but it also testifies the unwillingness of political leaders to address issues that give rise to societal contestation.…”

“…The academic field of ethics has contributed substantively to tackling these challenges regarding the evaluation of practices and policies and the determination of the correct values (Dartnell & Kish, 2021;Kim & Grady, 2020;Verweij et al, 2020). Such evaluations usually aim to clarify ongoing discussions about policy measures, by isolating the underlying problem from its political and societal contexts.…”

Could practices of reduced consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic facilitate transformative change for sustainability? Experiences from Sweden and Ireland

“…Can such or similar support continue after the pandemic, and facilitate a transition toward more sustainable consumption? Some COVID-19 literature stressed the positive role of new DIY competences in relation to cooking, baking, gardening, repairing and digital technology (Borsellino et al, 2020;Bin et al, 2021;Dartnell and Kish, 2021;Perkins et al, 2021;Forno et al, 2022). Another area is increase of physical activity, which in turn could serve to legitimize more outdoor activities and conservation of nature reserves in the local community (Zwanka and Buff, 2020;Collins and Welsh, 2022), and facilities for biking and bike-sharing (de Haas et al, 2020;Bergantino et al, 2021).…”

“…6). Another positive scenario is pictured by Collins and Welsh (2022) suggesting, by experiences from the UK context, that the pandemic could catalyze a "green recovery" on the local level, including support for more localized economies (see also Dartnell and Kish, 2021;Nemes et al, 2021;Forno et al, 2022). Experience with networks and neighborhood groups providing essential practical and emotional support for the most vulnerable could strengthen local social capital and a sense of care for the local, thus creating a preparedness for future health/environmental crises.…”

“…Whereas some kinds of consumption and consumer activities have been, in periods, impossible or greatly restricted (e.g., air travel, shopping, clothes, restaurants, hotels, visiting amusement parks and public events), others continued as before or increased (food, online shopping, traveling to nearby nature parks, furniture, household articles including services for the household, communication devices) (see Echegaray et al, 2021;Holmberg, 2022). Viewing the pandemic crisis as a "window of opportunity" for transformative change (de Haas et al, 2020;Almeida et al, 2021;Dartnell and Kish, 2021;Orîndaru et al, 2021;Forno et al, 2022;O'Garra and Fouquet, 2022;Schmidt et al, 2022) this disruption to consumer practices offers an interesting opportunity to explore experiences and the potential for "switching actions toward a more responsible, lower footprint way of living", (Echegaray, 2021 p. 568; see also Greene et al, 2022). A key question is if new consumption patterns brought on by the pandemic have the potential to institutionalize, i.e., if they can result in durable change.…”