Navigating desires beyond growth: the critical role of fantasy in degrowth’s environmental politics and prefigurative ethics

As a critical environmental political project, the degrowth movement contests the hegemony of economic growth. Much scholarship has sought to unpack degrowth’s proposals to reduce matter and energy throughput and to promote socio-ecological justice, democracy and wellbeing. Few studies, however, examine how the movement sustains itself. In this article, therefore, we explore the role fantasy plays in the movement’s emergence and sustenance. We draw on semi-structured interviews and officially-disseminated documents to examine the discourse of degrowth through a Critical Fantasy Studies lens, arguing that fantasies structure supporters’ desires and sustain the energy lying behind their environmental politics and actions. We suggest that the fantasy of ‘mutual dependence and care’, in particular, affectively fortifies their efforts to contest economic growth’s hegemonic norms and, in doing so, bolsters degrowth’s distributed modes of political action while also allowing its members to cultivate a prefigurative ethics of engagement.