What Democracy for a Post-Growth Society? Comparison and Confrontation of Repertoires of Proposals

Increasingly, it is “economic growth” that has served as collective and political target. For many reasons, the lack of growth can be suffered or desired, or be the result of a gradual and more or less conscious neglect. We can assume that if the logic of growth is no longer central to the organization of the economic system, it is because the overall situation has evolved, either because material conditions were transformed, or because intellectual frameworks and rationalities have changed. What political framework can be thought of for a post-growth society, whether the latter is the result of an evolution desired or not? How can democracy be adapted? To what extent political institutions would then be likely to take different forms compared to those known today? This type of questioning does not seem very present in political theory, even if it is likely that human communities will end up, in the years and decades to come, in situations where they will have to rethink access to physical resources and their distribution. Three steps will allow us to explore the prospects for democracy without growth and the conditions (including political) in which it could work. We will first see that problematizing the relationship between democracy and economic growth means problematizing a dominant model which tends to lock them in the same politico-economic vision. We will then propose an analytical framework to classify the possible ways to think an organization of human communities outside economic growth. This framework will be applied in a third part to distinguish four streams of proposals, the lines of structuring of which will be successively analyzed.