Leonie Guerrero Lara and Julia Spanier present at AFPP 2022

Last week Leonie Guerrero Lara and Julia Spanier presented the paper ‘A one-sided love affair? An empirical study on the potential of a coalition between the Degrowth and Community Supported Agriculture movement in Germany‘ at the Alternative Futures & Popular Protest conference hosted by the University of Manchester.

Abstract: The degrowth community has started to pay tribute to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a grassroots response to the threat the global, industrial agri-food system poses to the agroecological practices of smallholders. CSA initiatives are commonly considered embodiments of degrowth and prefigurative illustrations of a degrowth transformation. However, this currently seems to be rather a one-sided love affair; in Germany, the national CSA network does not have a formal position towards degrowth let alone a formal partnership, and very few CSA initiatives explicitly embrace degrowth. In this article, we use the case of the German CSA movement to undertake a systematic analysis of the potential role of CSA as an ally of the degrowth movement in Germany by analysing the movements’ ideological and strategic compatebility. For this purpose, we draw on social movement theories, in particular the movements’ alignment in terms of framing, action repertoires, and already established coalitions as well as factors for coalition building that could facilitate the formation of an alliance. We performed participant observation of the German CSA network, as well as semi-structured interviews with five members of the network, four members of individual CSA initiatives, as well as with five activists and scholars of the German degrowth movement. We find that their distinct diagnostic and prognostic framing, as well as their intended audience for a long time made a formal coalition unlikely. Moreover, there is a perceived mismatch in the nature of the respective movements; the degrowth movement is perceived as an academic discourse that is too abstract for those in the CSA movement who identify as a ‘practioner movement’. At best, an informal coalition with the sufficiency-centred degrowth current seems feasible due to the personal ties with the CSA network. We argue that, embracing the broader (non-sufficiency) frame of degrowth is needed for the CSA movement to address the structural pressures and constraints the growth-based society poses.