Decrescimento: elementos para politizar o debate global sobre desenvolvimento e ambiente

This chapter aims to introduce and contextualize the current debate on degrowth, its main concepts and influences. The notion of degrowth, debated by social movements and academics in Europe since the mid-1970s, has gained new strength since the 2000s, driven by the economic crisis and the dissemination of the English term "degrowth" in academic literature. Degrowth points out the problems arising from the growth-development binomial as a global socioeconomic imperative and breaks with the dominant conciliatory environmental discourse of ‘‘green growth’’. In order to meet the proposed objectives, a scope review on degrowth is presented, aiming to obtain indications about the potential and limits of the literature available in English. We chose to organize the results in two main lines of thought that make up the argument for degrowth: the biophysical critique on the scale of the economy and the cultural critique to (sustainable) development and the utilitarian imaginary. In the end, a research agenda is suggested to include peripheral countries in this debate.