FLORENCE, Italy—Refusing to play at kingmaker, turning down 42 million euros in electoral reimbursements, and calling for the arrest of Berlusconi, Italy’s 5 Star Movement (M5S) has continued to hold the spotlight since dramatically securing third place in the Italian election.
Now, as the three main parties try to form a government in the aftermath of an election that produced no majority ruling party, M5S, led by former comedian Beppe Grillo, is bringing to the mainstream political debate a new economic concept: degrowth.
“We want a government with priority about public water, degrowth and smart mobility,” said Vito Crimi, leader of 5 Star for the Italian Senate in an interview with Corriere della Sera, hinting at the debates to come.
Proponents of the Degrowth movement say that current economic thinking rests upon a paradigm: that the well-being of a nation can only be measured in terms of economic growth. Degrowth theories, often described as anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist, argue that downscaling production and consumption enable the functioning of a healthier society.
Maurizio Pallante, founder and president of the Movement for a Happy Degrowth in Italy says: “Degrowth is the selective reduction of production that is not useful, limiting waste in production processes: our direction is toward food sovereignty and energy independence. It is toward a better quality of life, one that is beyond the GDP as the main—if not the only—factor in assessing the well-being of a nation.
The movement, taking up the ideas put forward by Frenchman Serge Latouche, states that applying their approaches could relieve, if not cure, the disease that afflicts Italy: unemployment. According to Istat (National Italian Institute of Statistics) nearly 3 million people today are unemployed—a 550,000 increase since the end of 2011—in a population of 60 million.
“If I was the Minister of Economy,” says Pallante “I would orient all loans and grants to reduce waste from the point of view of energy production in the building and agriculture, by supporting projects that generate virtuous circles for the local economy, investing in research to carry out technological innovations to reduce the consumption of energy and resources, thus shifting employment in these sectors.”
Some have associated the Degrowth movement with sustainable development. But proponents of the two don’t always see eye to eye.
Giovanni Andrea Cornia, professor of Development Economics at the University of Florence says, “Rather than degrowth I'd speak about a model of sustainable development enabling sustainable growth: economically, environmentally and socially.”
Professor Cornia is one of the 20 members of the Committee for Development Policies at the United Nations, which works to establish a desirable and feasible model of global economic development. Cornia thinks that problems have to be tackled globally, because of international economic and financial globalization, and not only at the local level.
“I criticize Latouche when he says that we, the rich countries, need to degrowth to make room for poorer countries. I believe that we are intertwined with those less developed countries: we import raw materials from them, so if we reduce the consumption of our goods it is necessary to implement policies to increase the prices of what they exported, otherwise they will be in even more trouble.”
“I believe that the economic mechanism is artificially warped because of the induced needs that are served up by advertising machine” says Cornia, “but nowadays there are employment effects. If we stop producing goods, which we can do without, there is a fair share of people who'll remain at home. So there are constraints, which the policy maker must take into account. Action is needed to improve the redistribution of wealth, financial sector regulation and environmental protection.”
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