GPSS Doctoral Student Publishes Study of Structural and Discursive Power in Post-Growth Interventions

GPSS doctoral student Chris Martin, supervised by Associate Professor Hiroe Ishihara, has published an open-access article in Ecological Economics titled "Trade-offs and transitions: A scoping review of structural and discursive power in post-growth interventions."

The dialectic relationship between the production of knowledge and ongoing construction of social reality is a complex one. For decades, evidence has demonstrated that the current economic paradigm is unsustainable. Yet adoption of the increasingly broad array of viable alternatives remains remarkably slow, or has even regressed, as a result of self-reinforcing social, political, economic and institutional dynamics. This scoping review offers a preliminary analysis of how post-growth projects wield power and reproduce or transform the status quo. Drawing on a socio-ecological systems leverage points perspective, embedded within a political economy inspired mapping of social forces, the review proposes a conceptual framework for explaining strategic trade-offs made by actors to achieve various forms of depth.

Analysis of 27 interventions and 66 actor dyads point to asymmetrical relationships between executor-target pairs and a pattern of neoliberal subjectification in both intervention design and analytical focus. It also highlights that whilst interventions can readily achieve discursive depth, it is often at the cost of structural and institutional fragility. These findings point to strategies and dynamics capable of overcoming political trade-offs, in addition to future directions for research.

The full open-access article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2026.109259