CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Massa, Cecilia |
|---|---|
| Title | From Groceries to Growth Alternatives: Characterising Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale as a Real-Existing Degrowth in Milan, Italy |
| Summary | Degrowth calls for a planned and coordinated effort to redesign our economies towards equitable wellbeing and ecological sustainability. Much attention in the movement and academic field has been devoted to analysing the ills of the current global system, and to designing wide-reaching policies to fix them. However, the way social change unfolds is geographically uneven, and to some extent unpredictable. The hope of governing it solely with top-down approaches risks being misguided. Breaking through the growth paradigm hence also requires cultivating grassroot alternatives which can independently adapt and learn in the making. The Solidarity Purchasing Groups (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, GAS) are value-driven associations of people who support a degrowth-aligned transition of the food landscape in Italy. Members merge part of their food supply by organizing group purchases directly from the producers. The network sustains short and decommodified supply chains, exemplifying non-capitalist economic activity. The thesis research explores the features and activities of GAS in Milan, Italy, through the really existing degrowth (RED) framework (Varvarousis et al. forthcoming). The framework defines three dimensions in which initiatives can oppose the growth regime: their material fabric, territorial regulation and social imaginary. Findings are based on 15 qualitative interviews with GAS members, their food suppliers, other network stakeholders and local policymakers. The interviews were deductively coded in Nvivo software, and complemented by a document analysis of GAS statutes and relevant policies of the city of Milan. GAS are thereafter characterised as an example of nowtopian real-existing degrowth, part of the wider Italian Solidarity Economy network. The network’s material fabric emerged as distinctly different from that of growth-oriented food systems, sustained by well-established but flexible and localised (mostly informal) rules, and cultivated through social imaginaries rooted in solidarity and alterity. The network’s hybridity and moderation were key to its expansion, but may also represent a barrier for calls to wider and more radical transformations of the food system. The thesis hence offers insights for structured comparison with other ventures through the RED framework. It furthermore encourages scholars to learn from time-tested experiences that were not discouraged by the intricacies and inconsistencies of challenging the growth paradigm in a still widely capitalist world, and to build on these existing practices to accelerate a Degrowth transition in the food system. |
| Supervisor | Kizos, Athanasios; Varvarousis, Angelos |
| Department | Environment Sciences and Policy MSc |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/massa_cecilia.pdf |
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