After decades under the green-growth paradigm, global environmental and social-humanitarian crises (still) abound. First, some background: The quantity at the core of the growth paradigm is the gross domestic product (GDP) of a national economy. GDP (Y) is an economy-wide measure where all market goods and services are included, and it is calculated as the sum of consumption (C), investment (I), government expenditures (G) of final commodities and net exports of all commodities (X − M): Y = C + I + G + (X − M). With this definition, GDP measures the total consumption of marketable final goods and services in a national economy plus the net export (export minus import) of final and intermediate commodities. [1] Put simply, green growth means a continued increase of the national GDP under widespread adoption of efficient low-pollution and low-carbon (‘green’) technologies to meet environmental sustainability goals, while the growth itself provides goods and services in increasing amounts to meet various social development goals. A recent review, however, concludes that “there are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable” (Kallis et al., 2025).
Why the post-growth perspective?
GDP growth is a mainstay of standard economic policy, and growth is a major policy goal irrespective of GDP’s composition and what purposes the different goods and commodities serve. The growth paradigm requires a steady increase of GDP, both as proxy for increased societal utility and welfare as well as for economic and political stability. The green growth-mediated decoupling between social goals and environmental protection does not happen fast enough, however. In their seminal review, Haberl et al. (2020) conclude that “large rapid absolute reductions of resource use and GHG emissions cannot be achieved through observed decoupling rates, hence decoupling needs to be complemented by sufficiency-oriented strategies and strict enforcement of absolute reduction targets. More research is needed on interdependencies between wellbeing, resources and emissions.” In light of the environmental and social challenges that economies in high-income countries face and the limited evidence on the overall efficacy of green growth alone in addressing global challenges, scholars have started investigating “post-growth” futures from a variety of different angles (Kallis et al., 2025).
In line with the literature (Kallis et al., 2025), I see post-growth as a pluralistic umbrella term that encompasses a number of concepts, including those that demand or analyse an explicit shrinking of the economy for de-growth futures that stay within planetary boundaries (Kallis et al., 2018), including GDP degrowth, consumption degrowth, working time degrowth, radical degrowth, and physical degrowth as listed by van den Bergh (2011), as well as wellbeing- and inequality-focussed approaches (‘a-growth’ or growth-agnostic) that don’t explicitly target GDP but “focus instead on sound environmental, social, and economic policies independently of their effects on economic growth” (van den Bergh & Kallis, 2012).
In my opinion, a call for and focus on post-growth sustainability science and subsequent policy-relevant claims is not an ideological choice but a scientific and ethical necessity. This is for the following reasons.
Because economic growth is failing on core promises to an increasingly large share of the population in high-income countries. High income countries exhibit high and sometimes increasing levels of inequality in income and – even more so – in wealth (Chancel et al., 2022). Inequality drives status consumption, while the marginal gains in wellbeing and other social indicators derived from this consumption shrink once GDP moves beyond a certain threshold [2] (Fanning & O’Neill, 2019; Kallis et al., 2025). In their review, Kallis et al. (2025) also conclude that once GDP exceeds a threshold of around $15 000 per person (measured in 2011 US purchasing power parity dollars), other factors than further growth drive wellbeing, including full employment policies, strong social safety nets, and de-commodified public services. Two possible mechanisms behind this decoupling between GDP and wellbeing are being investigated. First, the social limits hypothesis holds that “there is a limit to the extent that growth improves subjective wellbeing, because humans adapt to higher levels of income, and compare themselves to others who are also getting richer, or because additional production goes towards zero-sum status goods” (Kallis et al., 2025). Second, the social cost hypothesis holds that “above a certain level of GDP, the costs of growth (e.g., congestion, pollution, mental health, social upheaval) might offset its wellbeing benefits. Growth is said to become uneconomic” (Kallis et al., 2025).
Because economic growth leads to environmental externalities many of which cannot be curbed fast enough or otherwise managed in an ever-growing economy. The challenges in bringing down aggregate resource use and GHG emissions were already discussed above. Energy use and the associated environmental impacts are driven by the most affluent, inter- and intra-nationally (Steinberger et al., 2025), which drives status consumption across socio-economic strata. Contrarily, satisfying human needs does not require high or increasing energy consumption and could be achieved globally with less than half of current total energy use (Steinberger et al., 2025). Another important point is that our material and energy-intensive lifestyle only works because environmental and social standards are low or ignored in many extracting countries in the global South, Russia, and China. If one assumes that civil rights expand along with a high-income and more resource-intensive lifestyle, the possibility and acceptance of mining and extraction damage decreases. Under these circumstances, copper or nickel mining, for example, could not continue to grow at current speed, simply due to a lack of acceptance in many extractive economies in the future.
Because post-growth will happen anyway. Ageing societies, population decline, shifting values and consumption habits, climate change impacts, natural disasters, economic and geopolitical conflicts, and war will have major impacts on the economy in high-income countries and particularly strong impacts in vulnerable regions. Moreover, after decades of efficiency gains in global supply chains, resilience to the impacts of the above-mentioned conflicts receives revived attention. Resilience measures require large buffers at different stages of socioeconomic metabolism, such as stockpiles, emergency infrastructure, backup or strategic production capacity, and defence infrastructure. These infrastructures temporarily contribute to GDP during their build-up, but since they are productive only during crises, the do not represent productive assets during normal operating conditions, and their contribution to GDP is likely to be smaller than the contribution of assets built purely for reasons of economic efficiency. This efficiency-resilience trade-off is a core characteristic of the post-growth economy.
Because a post-growth perspective opens up a whole new universe of strategies for sustainable development. To not fall into a doom-and gloom agony in light of these conflicts and the transformations they trigger, sustainability science can take a proactive stance on identifying adaptation and transformation pathways for the economies in vulnerable regions. This involves futures with a largely different economic structure. Many of these scenarios involve so-called demand-side solutions, where different wellbeing constituents, different aspirations and lifestyles, and different systems of providing services to people change the composition and quantity of private consumption, investment, and government expenditures and thereby lead to different GDP futures.
Socio-metabolic research and industrial ecology in a post-growth world
A post-growth perspective opens up important new research directions, some of which are briefly described here. The linked references provide more detail. In general, when everything grows, many systemic effects can be neglected, as in the end, there will simply be more of everything. For example, an ever-growing material throughput can better absorb and dilute low-quality recycled material than a closed-loop system with high recycled content. When we limit resource use and turnover, system linkages that previously did not matter that much become more relevant: Examples include the just-mentioned need to establish high-quality recycling loops, the need to maintain and transform existing rather than simply replace or expand in-use stocks, or the massive co-benefits in reduced transport volumes and infrastructure needs when shifting from single-family to multi-family housing. Below, I briefly describe a number of research topics related to socio-metabolic research and industrial ecology that are highly relevant in a post-growth setting.
Beyond LCA: Design and assess high-with-low provisioning systems – urban, intermediate, and rural: In a post-growth world, the question of why we consume or for what purpose will play a role in sustainability assessments. Unlike contemporary LCA, which starts with a service description, future sustainability assessments will move beyond service or product-level assessments and cover provisioning systems, an assessment of the benefits of services/products and by whom, plus transformative aspects (co-benefits) and an explicit time dimension. With such an expanded scope, high-with-low provisioning systems – urban, intermediate, and rural, can be assessed comprehensively, as well as their socio-metabolic transformation, service provision and contribution to human wellbeing under resilience and malleability (Haberl et al., 2026). New urban forms, mixed use housing, and new transport modes and business models can provide services to people with much lower environmental impacts than sprawled single family houses and the infrastructure that serves them. If well designed, social co-benefits, such as better social cohesion, may arise (Sugiyama et al., 2024).
Next level MFA: Material cycle management with stable or shrinking in-use stocks: In a post-growth setting, material stocks stabilize or even decline, which opens up the opportunity for a meeting large parts of material demand from recycling. Therefore, material quality and contamination plays a much larger role than today (Daehn et al., 2017). Future waste streams will have to be recycled into higher quality material than today, which requires circular design principles and waste treatment technologies to be co-developed and deployed, following the vision of a performance economy (Stahel & Clift, 2016). Dynamic material flow analysis, combined with life cycle costing and legal analyses, can help identify viable strategies for circular product life cycle design.
Broaden the systems perspective by integrating supply and demand-side solutions into low-impact provisioning systems: While supply-side solutions (in industry and energy supply system) don’t scale fast enough for tackling global environmental crises and often lead to high marginal abatement costs (like for deep emissions reductions in the chemical industry), demand-side solutions (in households and cities) can be quickly scaled up but often lack acceptance and cause conflict with established social patterns. Because of the many co-dependencies of supply and demand-side strategies, “rather than establishing a dichotomy between supply-side technological change and the reduction of energy demand, the provisioning systems perspective frames production and consumption as coupled systems across various sectors” (Pichler et al., 2025). The provisioning system perspective puts the benefits to and wellbeing of people at the core, and shows how incentives, regulations, business models, physical infrastructure and supply chains can work together to transform routines and cultures that co-develop around specific commodities and services (Pichler et al., 2025).
Quantify and justify inequality and develop consumption corridors: Under planetary boundaries, a new socio-metabolic regime will unfold that supersedes the current industrial metabolism. Global caps for the use of certain resources (land, water, some materials) as well as caps to emissions to the environment (GHG, nitrogen, phosphorous) trigger questions about the distribution of these resources and on limits to further growth. Under such limits, questions of distribution and inequality emerge with new vigour, as the prospect of obtaining more for everybody vanishes. Consumption corridors (Fuchs et al., 2021; Sahakian et al., 2021) are one salient approach to link social requirements via decent living standards to minimum levels of goods and service consumption (and the associated resource use and emissions (Franks et al., 2023; Vélez-Henao & Pauliuk, 2023)) to environmental boundaries via introducing maximum levels of such consumption. The existence of social requirements and ecological limits triggers new questions of distribution (across space, time, and within nations), introduces new constraints (Pauliuk, 2024), and requires comprehensive assessments of the social benefits and ecological impacts of the provisioning systems that operate such corridors.
Contribute socio-metabolic and supply chain detail to post-growth climate mitigation scenarios: Finally, there is a urgent need to include insights from the approaches above into climate mitigation scenarios (Hickel et al., 2021; Edwards et al., 2025). This is because “established climate mitigation scenario [models] assume continued economic growth in all countries, and reconcile this with the Paris targets [partly] by betting on speculative technological change” (quoted from Hickel et al., 2021, see also Edwards et al., 2025). Post-growth approaches focus on needs satisfaction and wellbeing, which can in principle be achieved with lower material and energy use than today, which will lead to lower demand for carbon-intensive materials and energy carriers, in particular. Reduced need for bulk industrial output, in particular, “may make it easier to achieve rapid mitigation while improving social outcomes, and should be explored by climate modellers” (Hickel et al., 2021). Such approaches should include consumption corridors, as lined out above, to tackle distributional questions. At the floor, the corridors define/require decent living standards and ways to fill the gap in countries where decent living standards for the vast majority of the population haven’t been achieved yet (Streeck et al., 2025). Consumption corridors also need to define acceptable ceilings beyond which consumption should be strongly discouraged, and desirable levels of prosperous inequality within the corridor (Pauliuk, 2024) to allow for societies to flourish under planetary boundaries.
PS: I wrote this blog entry as contribution to a new section of the Industrial Ecology Open Online Course (IEooc) [3]: “Application 5: Socio-metabolic research for a post-growth economy”.
Footnotes:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product
[2] Easterlin RA, O’Connor KJ. The Easterlin paradox. In: Zimmermann KF, ed. Handbook of labor, human resources and population economics. Springer, 2022: 1–25.
[3] https://www.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/teaching.aspx/
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