Narratives and pathways

Stories or say narratives are chains of events that people have in mind, events linked by logical implications. They are lines of thought that manage to link various issues in a coherent way, while creating a system where every item has a meaning and a justification. Narratives can be individual or collective, they can tackle personal trajectories as well as social and political issues.

 In the case of collective narratives, all narratives are not on the same level : hegemonic, or at least dominant narratives, diffuse and reinforce establishment forces, while presenting the political choices of the dominant as the only possible and logical chain of events. All dominant narratives tend to pretend being exclusive, while creating imaginaries that block any possible change (Castoriadis, Latouche). 

In the context of degrowth, the growth dominant narrative is the promise of an endless growth, synonymous of development and progress. As far as growth narratives are omnipresent, degrowth policies are discarded by default[1]: the lack of storylines outside the growth paradigm impedes the possibility of alternative policies (Berg & Hukkinen 2011). In the present situation degrowth is a “non-story” that cannot act as a policy motivator. The colonization of the imaginary, as described by Latouche (2005) or the existing mental infrastructure as described by Welzer (2011) are blocking the entry of degrowth into the political and policy horizon.  

Our first task as degrowers would be to change the imaginaries. One way to break through is to understand current narratives and to identify other pathways. We need to work on them collectively, building together stories that touch us, stories that make sense in order to make a new reality a new reality possible. While narratives are certainly not descriptions of the “truth”, pathways, are not descriptions of the future. Rather they are hypotheses of future paths, used for generating  a societal debate. The pathways here presented are a result of the collective intelligence of members of academia, policy-makers, and civil society representatives.  The combination of all degrowth proposals leads to coherent results and synergies between them, while the simultaneous development and implementation of degrowth and growth-based proposals creates a tension. The pathway is a good way to illustrate the links between the “bottom” and the “collective” levels as well as between different dimensions (and disciplines).