Towards a science of deep transformations: Initiating a dialogue between degrowth and critical realism

Degrowth Perspective for Sustainability in Built Environments

“…Recently, the scientific pursuits of degrowth scholars were referred to as a science of deep transformations [14]. Deep transformations concern not only scientific pursuits, but also, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of transformations in the real world.…”

“…In recent years, adventurous inter-disciplinarity has become even more evident in the broad and growing field of degrowth. For instance, degrowth has been included in dialogues with philosophies such as existentialism [3] and critical realism [14], and with diverse economies thinking [15]. Degrowth thinking has been applied to multiple phenomena, such as business and organisation [3,13,[15][16][17], housing [18], tourism [19], and technology [20].…”

Being in the World Locally: Degrowth Business, Critical Realism, and Humanistic Geography

“…However, more recently the microeconomic level has received more attention (Schmid, 2018;Nesterova, 2020a,b). An important defining feature of degrowth scholarship is its ongoing philosophical contemplation (see e.g., Heikkurinen, 2018;Buch-Hansen and Nesterova, 2021), applicable both to our scientific efforts (Buch-Hansen and Nesterova, 2021), to our mode of being (Heikkurinen, 2018) and business (Nesterova, 2021c). In this sense, the roots of degrowth compatible ideas go far back in time, to the eighteenth century idea of "sustainable use" by Hannß Carl von Carlowitz (Waas et al, 2011), the ninteenth century calls for simple living in harmony with nature (Thoreau, 2016) and as far back as to ancient China where similar thoughts were expressed (Mote, 1989;Laozi, 2001).…”

“…Explicitly inviting philosophy to participate in a dialogue which focuses on alternative ways of being and running our economies is useful as it opens spaces for more adventurous and reflective theorizing. Recently, the philosophy of critical realism was proposed as a (but importantly not "the") suitable philosophy for degrowth (Buch-Hansen and Nesterova, 2021). Some of the grounds for such proposal are the following: a deep 1 Recent dialogues on sustainable development appear to go hand in hand with many degrowth proposals.…”

“…Inter-disciplinary dialogues are not unusual for any of these three bodies of knowledge. For instance, inter-disciplinarity is central to both degrowth and critical realism (Bhaskar et al, 2010;Buch-Hansen and Nielsen, 2020;Buch-Hansen and Nesterova, 2021). Geography itself is a field which uses knowledge from a wide variety of different disciplines (see e.g., Tuan (1974; use of psychology, anthropology, and other sciences in his investigations), including the philosophy of critical realism (Sayer, 2015).…”