The degrowth of consumption as an economic strategy: is sustainable development a fading adage?

• Autor(a) principal: Palminhas, João Carlos Correia
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/10879
• topic: Growth dilemma; Consumption patterns; Degrowth; Ecological economics; Post-development

The modern concept of ‘sustainable development’ emerged from the 1987 Bruntland Report, and was based on a growing recognition of serious environmental problems. Decision-makers worldwide began to accept the interconnections between the environment, the economy, and social well-being. However, about 30 years later the world is already overshooting the earth’s capacity and resilience. Mainstream policies of sustainable development seem to have done little to stop the unsustainable path. Some have questioned a few development myths and have highlighted the dangers of the current global economic paradigm, namely the failure, inequity, and unsustainability of contemporary economic development models. The promise was to reconcile economic growth with the environment, but this did not answer the core economic principle of an impossible everlasting growth due to biophysical limits. Given their weight, consumption patterns are in the centre of the problem. After analysing the current economic paradigm and providing insights regarding the well-established sustainable development concept as well as its offshoot, sustainable consumption and production, this dissertation focuses on the sustainable degrowth of consumption as an economic strategy. The degrowth movement emerges as an alternative, rejecting the growth fetish and advocating a strong sustainable consumption governance