Land commodification as a barrier to political and economic agency : a degrowth perspective

In response to today’s political, ecological, social and economic crises, a broadly anti-capitalist ‘degrowth’ movement has emerged. This critical body of literature and activism sees the growth imperatives of capitalism as being fundamentally incompatible with our finite and increasingly degraded planet (Weiss and Cattaneo 2017; Kallis et al. 2018; Alexander and Gleeson 2019). Degrowth advocates are virtually united in their call for the developed – or, rather over-developed – regions of the world to initiate a process of planned and equitable contraction of their energy and resource demands, with the goal of moving toward a stable, broadly egalitarian, steady state (or zero-growth) economy that operates within the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet (D’Alisa et al. 2015).