"Without question, the publication of this volume edited by D'Alisa et al. is a welcome addition to the literature on degrowth, particularly in English. While a few of its fifty or so contributors, such as Tim Jackson, Serge Latouche, Juliet Schor and Peter Victor, have already published major full-length works about degrowth in Britain or North America, and while a number of others may be known to readers of this journal, many represent a new generation of scholars and activists. Degrowth advocates should be encouraged by this evidence of the vitality of their field. [...] Though the work is quite interdisciplinary, a substantial proportion of entries are directly pertinent to the ecological economics community, to which the editors themselves belong. They also contribute an historical overview in their introduction, and break new ground in their epilogue by promoting Georges Bataille's notion of dépense as an organizing concept for the degrowth movement. Squeezing so many essays into a mere 220 pages inevitably creates some strains. The most serious is the tendency throughout to resolve all contested issues within a sentence or two, while excluding author references to the losing point of view. In consequence this 'vocabulary' often seems quite normative, consolidating degrowth around a philosophical critique of the global North-South dialectic of development, coupled with projects for local and individual action. That contributors discuss inequality only as between countries, but never within them, corroborates this impression. Unfortunately, not only is this silence surprising in view of the attention given Piketty (2013) and other recent works, it doesn't do anything to counter assertions that growth is necessary for reducing intracountry inequality. The book's neglect of much of the Continental degrowth literature, especially francophone, further reinforces its normativity. In effect, the contributors treat degrowth as being congruent with décroissance. But the two concepts differ."

"This is an unusual book, comprised of 51 short (3–4 page) entries between a longer introduction and epilogue by the editors. Here we find eco-economists, anti-utilitarians, (neo)Marxists, political ecologists, co-operativists, nowtopians, back-to-the-landers, and many others. [...] While the intellectual roots are far-flung, the book emanates from a reading group on Research & Degrowth at the Institute of Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona. [...] Quite a few errors have crept into the book, most seriously in the entry on the Jevons’ paradox on p. 122, 13 lines from the bottom: ‘rebound is greater than per cent’ should be ‘100 per cent’. Apart from its wild utopianism the most important weakness in the book is its failure to deal with the transition to a degrowth society at any scale beyond the very local – which is really a failure to deal adequately with the problem of the state and hierarchy after capitalism (though the entry on depoliticization makes a start). Nevertheless, this book should be compulsory reading for all students in universities and sixth form colleges everywhere. The authorities would be well advised to ban it."