The first major study into public attitudes toward degrowth – the notion that high-income economies should prioritise wellbeing over growing production – reveals significant public support for its key ideas across both the UK (74-84%) and US (67-73%).
Published in The Lancet Planetary (01.12.2025), the findings by academics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and ICTA-UAB, call into question the claim that such policies would not receive public backing.
Degrowth is the notion that high-income economies should stop prioritising growth and instead aim to reduce harmful and non-essential production. It stems from evidence that affluent economies far exceed their fair share of planetary boundaries. Proponents of degrowth argue that degrowth is the only way these nations will meet their ecological targets, and that wellbeing can be maintained with much lower output and resource use. Despite this, degrowth has often been dismissed as lacking popular backing and therefore being politically infeasible.
The study, which is the first large-scale and systematic investigation of public attitudes toward degrowth in two of the world's wealthiest, growth-oriented nations, challenges that view. Over 6,200 participants from the United Kingdom and United States were asked to evaluate the full degrowth proposal (including its key ideas, practices and goals), the label "degrowth" in isolation, alternative labels such as "eco-socialism" and "wellbeing economy", as well as combinations of the proposal with these labels.
Across both studies, the full proposal with or without the labels received majority support: 74–84% in the UK and 67–73% in the US. By contrast, support for the degrowth label alone was much lower, at 20–26% in the UK and 13–28% in the US. This is likely, the researchers suggest, to be due to low awareness of what degrowth entails. In such cases, people appear to draw on surface-level impressions, such as imagining income reduction, rather than engaging with the broader vision. When degrowth was communicated as a unified proposal, resistance fell sharply. This demonstrates that negative perceptions of the term "degrowth" can be overcome once people are informed about its core ideas.
Dr Dario Krpan, from the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE, said: "Far from being broadly unpopular, our findings show that the public strongly supports the vision of reducing harmful production and prioritising wellbeing. Public resistance to degrowth is therefore not rooted in opposition to its substance, but in a lack of opportunities to engage with it as a coherent, purposeful policy. This shows that politicians and policymakers in the US and UK should start more openly discussing degrowth and other alternative economic approaches with their citizens since it is clear that citizen support is not a barrier to initiating these debates."
Socioeconomic indicators such as annual income, income satisfaction, and feelings of security did not significantly predict support for degrowth. Wealthier individuals were no less supportive of its core ideas, contradicting claims that it alienates higher-income groups. Instead, the strongest predictors of support were people's drive to address global challenges with ideas and action - what the researchers call a "transformative utopian impulse" - and their belief in ecosystem integrity, sometimes described as the "new ecological paradigm".
Reflecting on the results and what this means for future work in the area, Professor Jason Hickel, Institute for Environmental Science & Technology, said: "I think all of us were surprised by the results. Very large majorities of people yearn for a radically different kind of economy. With regard the specific question of degrowth, there's a clear lesson: either invest massively in public communication to explain what the term means or pick a different term - ideally one that is invulnerable to co-optation and which signifies the necessary class antagonism."
Dr Frédéric Basso, the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE, commented: "In essence, our study shows that people support an alternative to the growthist narrative that has dominated for decades. We hope that this will stimulate collective discussion and help envision a better way of being and living that embraces post-growth principles and policies."
Professor Giorgos Kallis, ICTA-UAB, said: "This is the first empirical study to test the popularity of the full degrowth proposal. And the results really surprised us."
Article reference: Krpan, D., Basso, F., Hickel, J. E., Kallis, G. (2025) Assessing public support for degrowth: survey-based experimental and predictive studies. The Lancet Planetary Health. Volume 0, Issue 0, 101326. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(25)00204-9/fulltext
