Green and gold

: crises of ecology and economy, and paths for degrowth in Australia

Abstract

Degrowth is understood as a politics that includes the reduction of material and energy throughput to within biophysical limits. It offers a clear articulation of the realities of the climate crisis and potential paths for mitigating the worst of the crisis while adapting to the rest. Whereas mainstream ecopolitics has failed to meaningfully limit greenhouse emissions or offer a plausible strategy for doing so in the future, I argue that this failure can be best understood by exploring the narratives that emerge around key concepts in this mainstream. I therefore explore the key concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘ecological modernisation’ – the assumption that environmental ‘costs’ are best mitigated through green technologies and market mechanisms – and examine the narratives that emerge around them. I argue in turn that these narratives fail to produce a coherent articulation of our current climate catastrophe – let alone an explanation of how it can be ameliorated – because the structural and institutional factors that cause and deepen these catastrophic circumstances are elided by the modernist ontology to which these concepts adhere. I understand ‘narrative’, in this sense, as a generative phenomenon, and an attempt at worldbuilding. The capacity for a politics to build the world it desires is dependent in part on the coherence of the narratives and relationships of cause and effect that are expressed within and through said politics. While a politics of degrowth may be able to respond to the climate crisis, doing so would require articulating strategies that account for the structural and institutional elements of the crisis.
This thesis offers important contributions to several literatures. It contributes to degrowth literature by demonstrating the importance of narrative coherence in degrowth thought, particularly around the relationships between desirable degrowth futures and practices in the present context. It contributes to Australian ecosocialist and degrowth literature by offering recent case explorations of two major policy areas – energy policy and the future of work and workers – that delineate the challenges and opportunities for labour organisation to catalyse systemic change. Finally, it contributes to Critical Discourse Studies literature by presenting a novel approach to narrative as a feature of public discourses, in which narrative (in)coherence functions to limit or facilitate the performative capacities of public discourses.

Date of Award	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Stephen Healy (Supervisor)