41 3. Leaving development behind: the case for degrowth Federico Demaria and Erik Gómez-Baggethun 1. INTRODUCTION: LEAVING DEVELOPMENT BEHIND Western industrial civilization rests on widespread beliefs regarding the virtues of development and growth as pathways to improved human welfare, prosperity, and happiness. Within this logic, continued expansion of production and technology are presumed to make the future self-evidently better. These presumptions, however, are being destabilized from fields like ecological economics, post-development, and degrowth, which point to the unrecognized costs of growth and to the accelerating destruction of biocultural diversity justified in the name of development and progress (Castoriadis, 1985; Escobar, 1995; Daly, 1996; Victor 2013). Many attempts have been made to make growth and development greener and more humane. Post-development and degrowth mistrust such attempts as mostly rhetorical exercises that sustain status quo. Rather than just adding different adjec- tives (green, inclusive, sustainable) that keep the expansive core of development and growth unchecked, they call for changing the system’s structure and functions, and to envision and put into practice political alternatives where development and growth are not seen as ends in themselves (Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997; D’Alisa et al., 2015). According to Gudynas and Acosta (2011: 75), post-development thinking strives ‘to search for alternatives in a deeper sense, that is, aiming to break away from the cultural and ideological bases of development, bringing forth other imaginaries, goals, and practices’. Hence, this chapter does not argue for making development greener or more inclusive, but for leaving development behind, undertaking a rupture with its ideological and ontological underpinnings to search for post-development alternatives. Degrowth, we will argue, is one among those alternatives. It represents a means of braking apart from the imaginary of development and to open a passage to other forms of imagining and organizing society (Castoriadis, 1985). In so doing, this chapter makes a case for abandoning development and growth as organizing princi- ples of social and economic life. Following this introduction, the chapter is organized in six main parts. First, we examine the emergence of the development doctrine, scrutinizing its origins and philosophical underpinnings. Second, we undertake a critical analysis of the ideas of