Degrowth has evolved within a decade from an activist movement into a multi-disciplinary academic paradigm. However, an overview taking stock of the peer-refereed degrowth literature is yet missing. Here, we review 91 articles that were published between 2006 and 2015. We find that the academic degrowth discourse occupies a small but expanding niche at the intersection of social and applied environmental sciences. The discourse is shaped by authors from high-income, mainly Mediterranean, countries. Until 2012, articles largely constitute conceptual essays endorsed by normative claims. More recently, degrowth has branched out into modelling, empirical assessments, and the study of concrete implementations. Authors tend to agree in that economic growth cannot be sustained ad infinitum on a resource constraint planet and that degrowth requires far reaching societal change. Whether degrowth should be considered as a collectively consented choice or an environmentally-imposed inevitability constitutes a major debate among degrowth thinkers. We argue that the academic discourse could benefit from rigid hypotheses testing through input-output modelling, material flow analysis, life-cycle assessments, or social surveys. By analyzing the potentials for non-market value creation and identifying concrete well-being benefits, the degrowth discourse could receive wider public support and contribute to a paradigmatic change in the social sciences.

Within the context of the ecological crisis and technocratic drift of western nations whose overarching goal is economic growth, a plea for degrowth is emerging. In this essay, the concept of degrowth is adopted as an interpretative frame to describe a variety of forms of grassroots activism, mainly across crisis-ridden Europe. Particular attention is devoted to the distinction between forms of alternative activism that respect conventional societal norms and forms of resistance that fundamentally reject some of the key tenets of contemporary market economies. These two forms of grassroots mobilization, whose actors we define, respectively, as ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’, constitute different (albeit perhaps complementary) imaginaries emerging out of the civil society arena, thus likely to lead to a profound reconsideration of authority (and legitimacy). The integration of both dimensions may contribute to the construction of a new degrowth society.