“We had three main reasons for writing this book and focusing on degrowth. The first is that we’ve reached a point where growth has ended, yet we’re still dependent on growth. The second reason is about the survival of Homo sapiens, which appeared 700,000 years ago, because we might be creating a planet that will no longer be suitable for our civilization. Finally, the third reason is that wherever we look in the world – here in Hungary, in Australia, France, or the United States – the majority of people support the principle of degrowth,” said Vincent Liegey, engineer and interdisciplinary researcher, one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth, during the book launch at Corvinus University of Budapest. According to him, more and more people today realize that their lives are like a hamster wheel: no matter how much faster they run to acquire the things they desire, nothing really changes once they have them, as most of those things are not truly necessary. Vincent Liegey observes that people are looking for contentment, solidarity, meaningful work, and quality time with their loved ones, while the everyday rush negatively impacts all of these. 

Her co-editor, Anitra Nelson, activist scholar and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) at the University of Melbourne, stated that degrowth directly addresses two main challenges facing humanity: socio-economic inequalities among people and ecological unsustainability. She described the latter as a much more comprehensive and profound issue than uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions. 

One of the authors of the book, Alexandra Köves, ecological economist and associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, pointed out that there is no clear guide to achieving degrowth: “You can’t say that if we do A, then B will happen, and if we do C, then D will follow. That’s why a handbook is a good method to see the many different perspectives in one place. Degrowth cannot be viewed the same way in Western Europe as in other parts of the world. We need to consider different social groups, geopolitical, and geographical situations. Therefore, there is a need for an approach that examines these many different contexts and asks: ‘Okay, they tried this, but did it make sense? Can we offer any insights into the system through their approach? If yes, great; if not, it’s still worth discussing.'” 

The 35 chapters of the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth come from 55 authors, with the youngest authors being around 20 years old and the oldest in their seventies. According to Anitra Nelson, the edited collection on degrowth is ideal because it allows many different opinions to be heard, and experts can present their own arguments and perspectives. The authors include psychotherapists, psychologists, political economists, social ecologists, sociologists, philosophers, climate activists, anthropologists, poverty experts, ethnographers, engineers, and geographers, meaning they have aimed to cover all academic disciplines. 

The editor also mentioned that the authors were advised to establish the closest possible connection between theory and practice in their papers. “The handbook can be used at university level, but also in high schools and extracurricular institutions. It could provide a useful foundation for a reading group interested in the topic, where members read one chapter at a time. It could also be of interest to policymakers, advisors, and journalists, or anyone who wants to gain in-depth background knowledge on degrowth.”  

Alexandra Köves’s chapter is about the role of utopian thinking. “I argue that on an individual level, we need to be able to imagine an alternative future in order to influence our present actions. In fact, we do this in our everyday lives as well, because we first imagine where we want to be or what kind of people we want to be, and only then do we act. For some strange reason, however, we have forgotten that we do the same thing in society.” The economist explained that when we decide what to do or not to do as citizens or in our work, we actually have something that the French economist-philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis calls social imagination, which contributes to the formation of institutions. Köves Alexandra emphasized that this process doesn’t take place consciously in us. Imagining ideal social institutions is actually a way for us to critically assess what we are currently living in, and with this constructive critique, we can define some strategies for where we want to go. Köves Alexandra concluded by saying: “Degrowth is, in fact, a utopia, but it is a fantastically important given, because for social dialogue, we need utopias. Without them, we cannot find new solutions to our social problems.”