The concept of degrowth aligns with the principles of Climate and Environmental Justice (CEJ) in significant aspects. Both frameworks underline the need for new global structures and social movements that promote ecological conservation, local economic regeneration, and social well-being that goes beyond material accumulation. Therefore, degrowth can reinforce the pursuit of transformative global climate justice. However, I contend that significant contradictions remain between degrowth and North–South climate justice. I argue that on both conceptual and policy grounds, a ‘strong version’ of the green economy provides a better foundation for seeking international climate justice for Africa than degrowth. I also contend that green growth is a more pragmatic and realistic approach to global climate justice because it is more sensitive to the norms, structures, and dynamics of global politics.

Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths toward ecosocial transformation. Based on a Latin American post-development and post-extractivist perspective and drawing on dependency theory, this article suggests another approach: first, it argues that the growth imperative, which in the peripheral world translates into the imperative to develop, also causes harm in societies of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, in the last decades, economic growth has mainly been achieved through extractivism with negative impacts, which are now being pushed further by green growth strategies. Second, I explore some possibilities for a cross-fertilisation between degrowth and International Relations scholarship, calling into question the assumption that degrowth in high-income countries would automatically ‘make space’ for the Global South to engage in self-determined paths of ecosocial transformation, as long as the structures, institutions, and rules of global governance and trade which secure profoundly asymmetric, colonial relations are not challenged.

The urgency of climate change has never been greater, nor the moral case for responding to it more compelling. This review essay critically compares Darrel Moellendorf's Mobilizing Hope and Catriona McKinnon's Climate Change and Political Theory. Moellendorf's book defends the moral importance of poverty alleviation through sustainable economic growth and argues for a mass climate movement based on the promise of a more prosperous future. By contrast, McKinnon provides a political vocabulary to articulate the many faces of climate injustice, and to critically examine proposed policy solutions—notably including the indefinite pursuit of economic growth. While both find reasons to be hopeful, their wide-ranging accounts reflect different visions of what a just and sustainable future might look like. They reflect different understandings of sustainable development and the significance of environmental values; the scope of permissible climate activism; and the ethics of geoengineering. Building upon them, I argue in favor of a more pluralistic vision of a just climate future, one that is capable of speaking to the range of moral interests bearing upon the climate and biodiversity crises, and that supports sustainable development that is inclusive of diverse human-nature relationships.

A green economic recovery from Covid-19 cannot be built in the image of a pre-Covid era. Green growth must be abandoned.