Reimagining collaboration: Degrowth practitioners, scholars and activists

In a selective history of the evolution of the degrowth movement, his chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025) offers a collective and subjective reflection revealing tensions between academics, practitioners and activists. Its four co-authors have lived in and with these tensions, analysing practical experiences in the degrowth cooperative Cargonomia (Budapest, Hungary) and the low-tech ecosystem Can Decreix (Cerbère, France). The chapter aims to launch a formal, respectful and significant dialogue between degrowth academics and practitioners. How did an initial public perception of degrowth as activists who experiment-by-doing based in a radical epistemological critique of traditional academia evolve more and more into an academia-dominated movement? We reflect on the movement's organisation to suggest how deeper collaborative relationships between researchers, activism and practitioners might strengthen degrowth as an academic field, enhance the credibility and robustness of grounded prefigurative activities, and facilitate conditions for diversity within the movement, preventing Identitarian closure. We recommend how academia, activism and the politics of degrowth might be connected with practitioners in mutually beneficial, pluralistic and participatory ways, while re-embracing epistemological considerations in the formation of the original pillars of degrowth and associated challenges.