Shaping Policy-making Processes for a Degrowth Transition: The Role of Effective Public Participation in Fostering more Autonomous Societies and Sustainable Futures

Given the failure of strategies to decouple economic activity from environmental impacts and the broken promise of increasing wellbeing with economic growth, sustainable degrowth is increasingly being viewed as a solution to achieve sustainability at all its levels. Degrowth is a quest for building, in a voluntary way, a new post-development pattern that is socially just and within ecological limits. However, if a degrowth transition to sustainability is to occur in its idealized voluntary way, autonomy is a key aspect to work in the present representative democratic systems. For authors such as Cornelius Castoriadis, an influential author for the degrowth theory, a society able to self-limit their actions is only achieved by potentiating critical thinking and active engagement in the political processes. The importance of public policy for inducing massive change of behaviours cannot be dismissed in a degrowth transition, even acknowledging the grassroots origins of the movement. Inspired by the lack of discussion on what is the role of current democratic institutions for degrowth transition, this paper aims to explore the potential of shaping environmental policy-making processes to contribute to multiple degrowth goals and thus facilitate a transition to a more sustainable society. The paper focuses the design process of environmental policies and economic instruments were chosen as the research object due to their high potential to induce massive behaviour change if designed with that goal. They are also important to explore more in-depth since there is an inherent controversy in degrowth literature between bottom-up and top-down proposals. The expected outcomes will be to reach a deeper notion of what can be concrete steps to shape environmental decision-making in a degrowth transition, always focusing the balance between the desired policy effectiveness to address pressing environmental issues and the work towards more empowered and thus autonomous individuals and societies.