Business of deep transformations: How can geography contribute to understanding degrowth business?

Abstract

There is currently considerable interest in what degrowth compatible business practices may be and what they may look like. However, while the embeddedness of a degrowth business in the wider environment has been recognised, and this affects theorising of practices and principles, there remains a need to seriously consider the inter-connection between degrowth business and its surrounding environment as a physical and cultural space. To avoid merely hinting at geographical concepts such as space, place, and location, a better approach is establishing a dialogue between degrowth business and geography. To do this, I use the degrowth business framework and connect its elements with the concepts of space, place, and location. This analysis shows that each of the elements is intimately inter-related with geographical concepts and needs to be thought of, theorised, and implemented as such. I conclude that geographical concepts should not be merely implied when theorising degrowth business. Rather, looking at degrowth business through various lenses provided by geographies is indispensable for making degrowth reality in diverse locations.

Keywords

Degrowth business / Geography / Human geography / Space / Place

Declaration of Competing Interests

I declare that I have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to Hubert Buch-Hansen for his comments on the preliminary version of this manuscript.

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