(Post-)growth infrastructures

Abstract

This introductory paper outlines and situates the special issue’s core concept of growth infrastructures, defined as socio-material arrangements oriented towards or facilitating the pursuit of economic growth. We argue that the quest for continuous economic growth is not merely a matter of policy or institutional design, but instead more deeply embedded in intersections of ‘hard’ physical objects and ‘softer’ social relations. Mobilizing scholarship from across the social sciences, we bridge the study of infrastructures with the study of (post-)growth, two research agendas whose disconnect has inhibited deeper insights into the infrastructural relations underpinning (post-)growth regimes. Deliberate foregrounding of the relational underpinnings of growth is necessary, we contend, to better account for how infrastructures and the politics of (post-)growth are socio-materially entangled.