Reddit mentions of Sufficiency Economy: Enough, For Everyone, Forever

First things first - I don't think the author's alternative, in this case being decolonization, would advocate for return to hunter-gatherer societies. Nor would the alternative of de-development. It would likely be decentralized communities independent from capitalist institutions, but that's not mutually exclusive to using agriculture, innovative technologies, and organizing.

Second - I have several sources indicating that decoupling works.

(A) The Zapatista movement lays an empirical blueprint from de-linking.

https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=soe_etd

Importantly, these are lessons learned through reflection on the struggle of the Zapatista’s over the past decade for dignity and autonomy against Globalization and policies like NAFTA. Furthermore, they are lessons in the Zapatista’s struggle to create autonomous and self-sustaining communities de-linked from the capitalist economy through campesino culture and direct democracy over health and school. As a transnational pedagogical movement hosting over 1700 students and bringing together many languages, Escuelita Zapatista sought from the beginning to form “a climate of fellowship (hermanamiento) among a plurality of subjects” (Zibech, 2013). Escuelita Zapatista reflects movement towards new definitions of citizenship and agency shaped in resistance to neoliberal policies. Education in each aspect is directly related to political struggle that will transform illegitimate forms of power. The Zapatistas example is concerned with the privatization, patenting and capitalist control of both knowledge and life itself. The Zapatista movement, however, is grounded in creating autonomous self-sustained communities intentionally de-linked from Western modern/ colonial ideology. Decolonial pedagogy offers the framework for a process of education committed to a restoration of economies, ecology and ecosystems managed from the bottom-up that moves toward action of politicized agency. Importantly, it is place and context specific and while their strategies may be abstracted and appropriated, it is important to understand the context out of which they emerge, and find strategy that is locally responsive. Local, then, is not an end in itself, but its own strategic political formation that cannot be appropriated simply to the terms of purchasing local, but is about responding to local and specific contexts that are not particular, but are unique in their own historical formations with specific actors and interests.

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(B) Do other such movements exist? Maybe they could reinvigorate dedevelopment.

https://www.amazon.com/Sufficiency-Economy-Enough-Everyone-Forever/dp/0994160615

The largest empirical analysis of the Voluntary Simplicity Movement (Alexander and Ussher, 2012) shows that there could now be as many as 200 million people in the developed regions of the world exploring, to varying degrees, lifestyles of reduced and restrained consumption. This signifies an emerging social movement of potentially transformative significance, especially if it were ever to radicalise and organise itself with political intent. Notably, that same empirical study showed that the movement was developing both a ‘group consciousness’ and a ‘political sensibility’, features that are arguably necessary for any social movement to use its collective power in influential ways. As more people are exposed to the type of reasoning unpacked by Kevin Anderson – that is, as more people see that responding to climate change actually requires consuming less – the Voluntary Simplicity Movement could well grow in size and influence, perhaps with surprising speed. ...

The best we can hope at this late stage is to deliberately ‘crash’ the existing fossil fuel-based system and build a permaculture alternative as the existing system deteriorates. His provocative theory, to oversimplify, is that if a new, relatively small social movement of anti-consumers were able to radically reduce their consumption, this reduction in demand for commodities could destabilise the global economy, which is already struggling. More precisely, Holmgren hypothesises that if merely 10% of people in a nation could reduce their consumption by 50%, this could signify a 5% reduction in total demand, which, although small, would likely cause havoc with any growth-based economy. It is important to emphasise that Holmgren does not romanticise the process of collapse; he acknowledges the worrying risks his strategy poses. First and foremost, it is unpredictable in its consequences. Nevertheless, he argues that whatever risks his strategy poses, there are greater risks – both socially and environmentally – in letting the existing system continue to degrade planetary ecosystems. What is most interesting about Holmgren’s strategy is that it does not rely on a mass movement. He believes that a relatively small but radical anti-consumerist movement could be a truly disruptive force.

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(C) Is it possible?

https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol21/iss4/art15/

This paper set out to explore how we can understand the economic crisis from a transitions perspective. The persistency of problems associated with our currently dominant economic regimes (e.g., unemployment, inequality, ecological degradation) seems evident and reason for concern and action. We summarized a variety of alternative perspectives or discourses from which the argument for more fundamental systemic change is made. These debates combined with the perceived effects of the crises create space and agency for transformative social innovation. We argued that there is an increasing convergence among the transformative discourses, narratives, and practices, but also that it is impossible to foresee or predict future developments. In exploring the economic crisis this way, we also sought to unpack the concept of landscape and further develop our conceptual understanding of interacting different types of change.

From a transition perspective, we argue that the combination of such different types of changes (crises internal to the presently dominant economic system, counternarratives, and a critical mass of concrete alternative practices and models) are the ingredients for a chaotic, nonlinear, and structural period of structural systemic change (Loorbach 2014). Game changers such as the economic crisis tend to give rise to (or at least coincide with) emerging social unrest, political debates, discussions about the dismantling/redefining of the state, and debates about the (re)scaling of governance mechanisms. Social innovation initiatives, such as time banks and transition movement, often go hand in hand with narratives on (re)localization (Bailey et al. 2010) and self-governance and self-organization (Boonstra and Boelens 2011, Eriksson 2012, Meerkerk et al. 2012). A pertinent question is how these narratives on new forms of governance relate to the role(s) of governments and intergovernmental institutions such as the EU, and how (the interaction between) different types of governance responses and approaches influence the dynamics of transformative social innovation. With this paper, we hope to encourage further analysis into the economic crisis as a game changer and stimulate further work on understanding societal transitions.

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