From Growth to Degrowth

This post is part of a series that examines how colonial knowledge systems in libraries, archives, and museums erase Indigenous, oral, and ecological ways of knowing — and explores how they might be dismantled and reimagined from the perspective of the Global South and the margins. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Introduction

For more than a century, growth has functioned as both a metric of success and a guiding ethos in Library and Information Science (LIS). Institutions have measured their prestige by the size of their collections, the scale of their facilities, and the sophistication of their technological infrastructures. Expansion has been synonymous with progress, signaling professional achievement and institutional relevance. Yet in the context of climate crisis and resource scarcity, this growth paradigm raises pressing questions about sustainability. The energy-intensive and resource-heavy infrastructures of libraries and archives cannot remain detached from the ecological realities that define the present century.

This post argues for the introduction of degrowth epistemologies into LIS discourse. Degrowth, a framework emerging from ecological economics and critical social theory, does not denote decline but proposes alternative measures of value based on sufficiency, repair, and resilience. By reorienting library and archival practices away from accumulation and toward ecological integration, LIS can begin to address both its material dependencies and its broader social responsibilities.

The Growth Imperative in LIS

The imperative of growth has deep roots in LIS history. From the Carnegie-funded public libraries of the early twentieth century to the construction of vast archival repositories, professional identity has often been tied to accumulation. Collection size, measured in linear meters or digital terabytes, has served as a primary indicator of institutional worth. Similarly, the construction of large-scale, climate-controlled facilities has symbolized professional modernity and authority.

However, these growth-oriented models come at significant ecological cost. Expanding collections require increasingly energy-intensive preservation strategies, from high-capacity HVAC systems to specialized digital storage servers. The global supply chains that support these technologies are vulnerable to disruption and often rely on extractive industries. In a period of escalating climate instability, these infrastructures risk becoming both unsustainable and inequitable.

Degrowth as a Framework for LIS

Degrowth offers an alternative framework that challenges the centrality of accumulation. In ecological thought, degrowth emphasizes sufficiency over excess, repair over replacement, and adaptability over standardization. Translated into LIS, these principles suggest that professional success might be measured not by growth in holdings or square footage, but by the institution's ability to remain materially sustainable and socially relevant under ecological constraint.

Unlike "efficiency" discourses, which often frame sustainability as a technical optimization within existing systems, degrowth calls for a redefinition of institutional goals. It asks not how libraries and archives can grow more sustainably, but whether growth itself should remain the central objective. This shift reframes the LIS field within broader ecological and political struggles, positioning knowledge and memory work as part of the infrastructures that sustain life rather than as neutral containers of information.

Real-World Examples of Degrowth

Although still emergent, several initiatives illustrate how degrowth principles are already shaping library and archival practice.

One example is the Anythink Library District in Colorado (USA), which has incorporated LEED-certified facilities designed with renewable energy systems and locally sourced materials. While embedded in a growth-oriented economy, Anythink's design demonstrates how ecological considerations can reshape institutional form, privileging sufficiency and reduced environmental impact.

In professional discourse, the recognition that "degrowth is coming" is slowly entered mainstream LIS debates. I published a 2023 text in American Libraries Magazine where I explicitly argued that libraries must begin planning for scenarios of reduced energy availability and scaled-back operations. Such reflections propose new evaluative criteria, suggesting that resilience and ecological responsibility should replace collection size or service expansion as dominant metrics of institutional achievement.

At the international level, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has engaged directly with degrowth in its sessions on environmental sustainability. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and "true cost accounting," these discussions highlight the need for libraries to measure their ecological and social impact alongside conventional bibliometric indicators. Such interventions represent important steps toward embedding ecological accountability within professional standards.

Localism, Commoning, and Library Practices

Degrowth theory emphasizes localism and commoning as strategies for reducing dependence on extractive systems. Applied to LIS, these principles suggest a shift from centralized accumulation toward distributed, community-rooted practices.

One manifestation of this approach can be observed in the proliferation of Little Free Libraries across diverse regions. While modest in scale, these community-driven initiatives embody principles of sufficiency, circulation, and shared stewardship. They challenge the idea that legitimate library work must always be large, centralized, and professionally administered.

At a more formal level, libraries that experiment with localized service provision —through resource-sharing consortia, community archives, or participatory governance structures— illustrate how LIS can adopt models of open localism. These approaches reduce dependence on long supply chains and reinforce the resilience of local knowledge infrastructures.

Collections Reconsidered: Sufficiency and Relevance

Rethinking growth also requires reconsidering what it means to build collections. Traditional models often valorize expansion without sufficient regard for ecological cost or long-term relevance. A degrowth perspective suggests privileging sufficiency and contextual relevance over accumulation.

This entails curating collections that directly support ecological resilience and local knowledge practices, rather than indiscriminately expanding holdings. It also requires rethinking metadata and classification systems to adequately represent temporality, seasonality, and relational knowledge forms. Such adjustments move LIS toward a practice that values depth and context, rather than scale, as indicators of professional success.

Repair, Maintenance, and Resilience in LIS

Degrowth prioritizes cultures of maintenance and repair. For LIS, this implies a professional identity centered not on continuous expansion but on sustaining infrastructures over time. Staff roles could shift toward caretaking functions: repairing digital repositories, maintaining community archives, and ensuring that existing collections remain accessible and usable under ecological constraint.

This orientation also foregrounds resilience as a key professional value. Rather than striving for permanent preservation through resource-intensive means, institutions might emphasize adaptive strategies that accept impermanence, redundancy, and repair as integral to archival and library practice.

Implications for LIS Theory, Education, and Policy

Embedding degrowth into LIS has significant implications for theory, education, and policy. Conceptually, it reframes libraries and archives as ecological infrastructures, inseparable from the material conditions in which they operate. Professionally, it suggests new metrics of success: for eample, carbon footprint reduction, community integration, and resilience to disruption.

For LIS education, this requires integrating ecological literacy and degrowth frameworks into curricula, preparing future professionals to manage institutions under conditions of scarcity rather than abundance. For policy, it calls for standards that account not only for informational value but also for ecological responsibility and social justice.

Conclusion

The growth paradigm has long shaped the trajectory of LIS, but it is increasingly unsustainable in the context of ecological crisis. Degrowth offers an alternative: a framework that prioritizes sufficiency, repair, and resilience over accumulation and expansion.

By reorienting their infrastructures, collections, and professional practices around ecological responsibility, libraries and archives can redefine their role for the twenty-first century. They need not be measured by quantitative parameters, but by their capacity to sustain communities, support local knowledge practices, and remain viable under ecological constraint.

In this sense, libraries and archives become spaces of care — ecological, social, and political actors embedded in the struggles that will define the future of knowledge and memory.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "Future Spaces," a narrative reflection on the same theme.