Prospering without growth: Science, Technology and Innovation in a post-growth era

Project Information

PROSPERA

Grant agreement ID: 947713

DOI

10.3030/947713

Project closed

EC signature date 30 November 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 31 January 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 424 375,00

EU contribution

€ 1 424 375,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD DE VIGO
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - PROSPERA (Prospering without growth: Science, Technology and Innovation in a post-growth era)

Reporting period: 2025-08-01 to 2026-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The feasibility and desirability of endless economic growth is increasingly being questioned by scholars and activists. While envisioning alternative economic models is key to assure the sustainability and wellbeing of present and future generations, few studies have analysed what might be the role of ‘innovation’ in a postgrowth era. Innovating has become the imperative for the survival and expansion of any form of organisation. But this ‘innovate or die mania’ underpins assumptions – such as technological determinism and productivism - that neglect the socially constructed character of technological development, its politics and its capacity to enable just and equitable societies but also dystopian technocratic futures. This project posits that untangling innovation from growth is key to imagining a post-growth era. If growth is going to be unsustainable, we need new narratives for innovation that would accordingly also have to change and increase the scope of the innovation concept itself, beyond technology, into cultural and institutional change, and indeed social life and social order. Organizations – in particular capitalist enterprises - are the core of modern industrial societies but are also one of the places in which the discourse of growth is legitimised and constantly reproduced. However, they can also be the places in which people can start to build the capacity for developing alternatives to challenges the growth ideology. But how organizations would look like in a different paradigm, in a system that is not based on and doesn’t not rely on endless growth? Under which conditions STI without growth would be able to flourish? What levels of technological complexity can we reach in a non-growing economy? What policies, infrastructures and organizational forms are needed or are more likely to facilitate this new paradigm of STI? These are questions, rarely asked by innovation, management and organization scholars, that PROSPERA will address.


The concepts exposed above suggest that beyond a certain point, and for a variety of reasons, relentless economic growth may be neither desirable nor indeed feasible. Based on these reflections PROSPERA aspires to explore what STI would look like in a society that is not dominated by the imperative of pursuing endless economic growth. In the specific, this project will address the following four objectives:

OB1: To formulate a robust and coherent theoretical understanding of how the processes and institutions that emerged around the development of science, technology and innovation should be reconfigured to address the challenged posed by a post-growth era.

OB2: To identify the organizational settings – and the conditions needed for their emergence - in which non growth-oriented science, technology and innovation practices are more likely to flourish.

OB3: To understand under which conditions non-growth-oriented organizations can create – or reconfigure pre-existing- networks in which knowledge and value are produced outside the logic of maximization of economic growth.

OB4: To identify what social actors and their related institutions are the most adequate, capable and probable to trigger a transition towards a post-growth mode of innovating; the alliances, the political struggles and the institutional changes that are needed for this change to occur.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

PROSPERA's scientific activities focused on four major research areas:

1. Theoretical Foundations of Post-growth
PROSPERA reviewed and critically re‑elaborated the critique of science, technology and innovation (STI) discourses coming from disciplines such as STS, political ecology, ecological economics and post‑development studies.

2. Organizational Settings for Post-growth
PROSPERA focused on understanding the organisational settings and conditions that enable or disable post‑growth innovation in companies, co‑operatives and other organisations. The research team conducted case studies in Germany, the UK, France, Spain and Italy, using a mix of qualitative methods including ethnography, semi‑structured interviews, document analysis and participatory research.

3. Systems and Social Movements
PROSPERA examined social movements as agents of change. In particular, the team conducted in‑depth ethnographic case studies of the student movement End Fossil Fuel, the Right to Repair movement, and the Anti‑Eucalyptus brigades in Galicia, northern Spain.

4. Reconfiguring STI Systems for Post-growth
PROSPERA investigated the configuration of research institutions to understand built‑in growth lock‑ins. The team conducted ethnographic research at the EU's JRC in Ispra (Italy), as well as extensive fieldwork in STI institutions in the EU, India and the USA.

Over five years, the team produced 12 scientific papers, 2 books (Critical Perspectives on Growth by University of Vigo Press and Post‑growth Innovation by Bristol University Press), 1 conference proceedings, and 3 PhD theses. Notably, in 2025 the group published a special issue in the journal Science, Technology and Society titled “Science, Technology and Innovation for a Post‑growth Society”, which summarises key theoretical and empirical debates around post‑growth. The project also launched a dedicated website and social media accounts on LinkedIn and YouTube, disseminating PROSPERA’s outcomes freely to a wider audience.

Team members actively presented their work at major international conferences, including 4S, EASST, STS Graz, and the European Ecological Economics conference. The lab also organised and chaired the ESEE‑Degrowth 2024 Conference, producing proceedings and video recordings of all sessions, which are freely available online.

The Principal Investigator laid the foundations for an international network on this topic. Over the project’s duration, the research group hosted more than eight visiting researchers (both early‑stage and experienced), organised 34 internal workshops, and held nine external seminars open to the general public.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

PROSPERA aspired to trigger a non‑incremental leap forward in the way organisations and STI institutions conceptualise economic growth as a source of success and progress. The challenge was to disrupt and undermine well‑established beliefs about progress and modernity that have turned the idea of endless economic growth into a goal in itself. This is a high‑risk task, because the entire architecture of modern economies is designed to maximise growth – of GDP, profits, investments, industrial output, and so on. The project indeed found that reconfiguring the economic system toward a post‑growth paradigm is often strongly opposed by the academic, industrial and political elites who benefit from and promote the ideology of growth. On the other hand, by reframing the role of organisations in the production of science and innovation, the project showed that over the last decade the perception of different stakeholders – including civil society, youth, and activists – has significantly shifted toward a more open dialogue about the possibility of exploring the critiques and solutions proposed by post‑growth proponents.

Specifically, PROSPERA advanced the state of the art in the field of Organisational Studies and STS in three main aspects: It investigated the organisational settings for post‑growth with case studies spanning self‑managed organisations, co‑operatives, and occupied or recuperated companies; It explored how social movements draw on post‑growth principles to reimagine discourses of science and technology, with a specific emphasis on student, youth, and rural movements; It provided new insights into the reformulation of S&T institutions in the context of the post‑growth debate, focusing on movements like the Right to Repair and on science‑art interactions within European Union research institutions such as the Joint Research Centre. Furthermore, one of the main achievements of PROSPERA has been establishing an excellent research group that built critical mass within the academic community to explore alternatives to growth‑oriented science, technology and innovation theories and practices.

PROSPERA