Are we practising what we preach? The degrowth academic trap

Abstract

As a degrowth scholar, I confront an uncomfortable irony: I built my early career through the very “growth” behaviours that degrowth scholarship critiques, i.e., publishing prolifically, accumulating citations, and competing for recognition and funding. This reflects a broader “degrowth academic trap” in which scholars committed to sufficiency, conviviality, and care find themselves rewarded for contradictory behaviours. Thus, it is not arbitrary to say that the field's exponential rise may mirror the growth patterns we critique. We build personal academic brands while preaching collective action, allow corporate oligopolies to commodify our critiques of capitalism, and compete within metrics-obsessed systems while advocating alternatives. Drawing from my trajectory—initially chasing conventional metrics before shifting toward participatory action research—I examine how structural pressures trap even critical scholars. I explore emerging alternatives: narrative CVs, triennial conferences, diamond open-access publishing, and other institutional experiments. The challenge remains whether we can collectively redesign academic structures to make degrowth principles professionally viable, ultimately embodying the sufficiency and care we advocate for broader society.

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Vasilis Kostakis a,b 

a Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia 

b Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States   

http://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.12    

Creative Commons license - Attribution to the creator - Non-commercial - No derivative works

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How to cite

APA

Are we practising what we preach? The degrowth academic trap . (2025). In Degrowth Journal (Vol. 3). https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.12

MLA

“Are We Practising What We Preach? The Degrowth Academic Trap .” Degrowth Journal, vol. 3, Dec. 2025, https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.12 .

Chicago

“Are We Practising What We Preach? The Degrowth Academic Trap .” 2025. In Degrowth Journal, vol. 3. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.12 .

Harvard

“Are we practising what we preach? The degrowth academic trap ”(2025) Degrowth Journal. Available at: https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.12 .