Book's launch "Post Growth Innovation: Resisting the Pursuit of Endless Economic Growth"
UAB researcher Mario Pansera, also director of the Post-Growth Innovation Lab at the University of Vigo, and Javier Lloveras, from the same laboratory, have published the book Post Growth Innovation: Resisting the Pursuit of Endless Economic Growth. The work explores how the dominant idea of innovation has become increasingly problematic when tied to the idea of infinite economic growth within a capitalist system.
Post Growth Innovation: Resisting the Pursuit of Endless Economic Growth is the result of five years of research carried out within the ERC project PROSPERA, funded by an ERC Starting Grant in 2020. The book explores how the dominant idea of innovation—commonly celebrated as the engine of progress—has become increasingly problematic when tied to economic growth, competition and technological escalation. Rather than offering solutions to today’s social and ecological crises, innovation is often deployed to reinforce unsustainable models of development and to expand the reach of global power structures.
The book highlights how advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are shaping our economies, institutions and conflicts in unprecedented ways. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, enabled by sophisticated surveillance, data infrastructures and algorithmic targeting systems, reveals the darker side of innovation and forces a collective reflection on its political and ethical implications. Far from being neutral or inherently beneficial, technology becomes a site where struggles over justice, life and environmental limits unfold.
At the same time, the book questions the organisational forms that dominate the worlds of science, policy and industry. Hierarchical, efficiency-driven models of managing knowledge production often suppress the imagination needed to build alternative futures. In contrast, the book calls for renewed spaces of social experimentation in which communities can explore diverse ways of living and organising together. Here, technology is not treated as an end in itself but as one possible means to support democratic, caring and ecologically grounded ways of inhabiting the world.
By connecting Science and Technology Studies with the growing field of degrowth research, the book offers an interdisciplinary framework to rethink progress beyond the imperatives of expansion and productivity. It invites scholars, practitioners and citizens to reconsider what innovation is for, who it serves and how it could be redirected towards more just and sustainable forms of collective flourishing.
The book is published in Open Access by Bristol University Press and is freely downloadable.
Associated Researcher
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Director of the Post-Growth Innovation Lab at the Universidad de Vigo
References
Pansera, M., & Lloveras, J. (2025). Post Growth Innovation. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Retrieved Nov 27, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529249965