Exploring degrowth strategies in agrifood systems: Critical reflections and practical applications

The emergence-and revival-of new economic paradigms, such as green growth, post-growth, and degrowth, are a response to the growing limitations of current economic growth models. They enable societal actors to understand ongoing developments in agrifood systems that involve the rearrangement and redistribution of resources towards equality and equity in the access, distribution and control of food with the aim to remain within planetary boundaries and safeguard a socioeconomic minimum. Currently, there is limited understanding of the strategies that can be employed to decrease material and energy use throughout while simultaneously improving social well-being and ecological sustainability, both central elements of the degrowth paradigm. This paper sheds a light on various alternative economic initiatives employed in five cases in India and Aotearoa New Zealand, and connects their activities and strategies to fundamental strategies identified in the degrowth discourse: de-economization, de-accumulation, de-commodification, de-construction, and de-colonization of the imaginary. The cases in India and Aotearoa New Zealand show a tendency to reallocate economic activities in social systems. Involved actors mainly find their motivation in values on social justice. The resignification of traditional values ensures intrinsic motivation for environmental justice. More empirical research is needed to verify these preliminary findings, which suggest that fostering values centred on equality may stimulate intrinsic motivation to reform agrifood systems, ensuring they operate within the planetary boundaries. However, it is difficult to assess the cases on what they aim for and what they accomplish in terms of regenerating the natural environment. First, a better understanding on the definitions and implementation pathways of the fundamental strategies are needed. Using the fundamental strategies as a lens allowed for a visualisation of the reorientation towards traditional values, and the creation of intrinsic motivation for environmental justice. But a deeper exploration of the governance is needed to understand how this 'space for change' was created by grassroots actors, governmental institutions and other societal actors. All cases still operate in a neoliberal context that determines the room for manoeuvre, and the question is whether or not that ensures sufficient space for accelerating the changes needed to stay within the planetary boundaries without compromising human well-being, including equality; universal food security and nutrition, as well as sustainably produced, balanced food.