Financing the post-growth state

Julien Salama ^a

The issue of financing the state in a post-growth economy combines several facets of the general post-growth challenge. Most notably, it concentrates some of the contradictions between the social and the ecological dimensions of the post-growth program. This financing problem feeds a common criticism addressed to post-growth proponents, and while it is often mentioned by the latter, it is seldom addressed in depth, as Daniel Bailey (2015a, p. 126) remarked: 

"The biggest unacknowledged consequence of the post-growth policy approach […] relates to the effects of the end of growth on the capitalist state."

Therefore, it seems that facing the challenge of financing the state in a post-growth economy is a crucial step in strengthening its credibility, both scientifically and politically. However, the research field in the state's fiscal dependency on growth is still emerging. Bailey (2015a, 2015b, 2020) and Damien Demailly et al. (2013) have been the first authors to examine this looming problem in depth, later followed by Claudio Cattaneo and Aaron Vansintjan (2016), Timothée Parrique (2019), Ulrich Petschow et al. (2020), Martin Fritz and Katharina Bohnenberger (2020) and Christine Corlet-Walker et al. (2021). Occupying a distinctive position in this field, Eloi Laurent (2019, 2020, 2021a; 2021b) seems to be the only author to contest the assertion that states may have a problematic dependence on growth. Due to space limitations, his arguments cannot be discussed here. 

Finally, it is striking that all of these works, including Bailey's, focus on what post-growth would do specifically to the welfare state, rather than state institutions as a whole; thus the state seems to be a largely unthought issue within the field of post-growth research, as noted by Giacomo D’Alisa and Giorgos Kallis (2020).