It takes three years to earn a bachelor of commerce degree with a major in economics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand’s highest ranked university. Scholarship by the staff of the Economics Department is published in the big five economics journals, and alumni have achieved notable career successes in the New Zealand Treasury, the New Zealand and Australia reserve banks and the ‘big name’ management consulting practices, investment houses and retail banks operating in the region.
While the university teaches a wide range of social sciences and business studies, a desktop review of the content of undergraduate economics classes suggests that many of the intersections between social studies and economics relating to emergent research questions within the wider field of economics are being omitted from the department’s core teaching. Omissions include the history of economics, critiques of neoclassical and sustainable development economics, the many areas of heterodox economics, including ecological economics, social economics, post-Keynesian economics and degrowth / post growth economics, as well as identity-based economics, such as indigenous economics, feminist economics and queer economics. A perusal of the research areas within the Economics Department unearths no evidence that such topics are even being explored. The economics being taught and learned at the University of Auckland is disappointingly orthodox.
Two things painfully stand out.
Firstly, feminist economics, a global imperative, was born in New Zealand. Dame Marilyn Waring, Professor of Public Policy at Auckland University of Technology, was born in Ngāruawāhia just 100 km from Auckland, and is globally regarded as a founder of feminist economics. Her ground-breaking paper If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, published in 1988, is a seminal criticism of the United Nations System of National Accounts. It was republished in 1999 as the book Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth. With 58 percent of students and 59 percent of university staff being female, it must be asked what is stopping this field of learning from finding its natural centrality in New Zealand’s pre-eminent school of economics.
Searching for some rays of light, the Aotearoa Centre for Enterprising Women is a research centre within the University of Auckland Business School, exploring gender, entrepreneurship and enterprising women. Entrepreneurship, however, represents only one slice of women’s economic life and feminist economics. But more importantly, the centre, while it is part of the Business School, is not part of the Economics Department.
Secondly, an understanding of the Māori economy is surely crucial to comprehending and progressing the Aotearoa New Zealand economy, yet there is no sign of a core pedagogy of Māori economics and there are only a handful of academics identifying as Māori or working on Māori issues within the faculty of Business and Economics. Māori are under-represented in the university, at just 7 percent of students and 8 percent of staff compared to 17.4 percent of the New Zealand population.
This may change in the longer term since the university now hosts New Zealand’s first dedicated Māori and Pacific research facility in business and economics, the Dame Mira Szászy Research Centre. Here, scholars conduct research and education programmes concerning Māori and Pacific economic development and aim to advance knowledge that benefits Māori business, Māori in business and the wider local economy. As with the research centre for women in enterprise, however, the Māori business and economics research centre is not part of the Economics Department.
A research centre that is part of the Economics Department is the Economic Policy Centre. A word search through the titles of the 88 peer-reviewed articles published by its members between 2011 and 2022 found that none refer to “Māori” or “women” specifically. On the other hand, venture capitalists and dairy farmers have titular recognition.
An organisation seemingly well positioned to challenge this status quo is Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga (NPM), the Māori Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE), which is hosted by the university. Yet, two issues appear to limit NPM’s power to intervene in the university’s economics syllabus. First of all, NPM’s mission is “to grow and enhance excellent Māori researchers and Māori-led research that together build the foundations for flourishing Māori futures”. While this mission might seek to enhance knowledge of the Māori economy, it does not necessarily stretch to demanding that all economics students must learn about the Māori economy. Secondly, within the NPM whānau (family) of 30 patrons, board members and research leaders, there is only one economist – a resource economist who is working outside the university to improve the incorporation of mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge and values) into local government planning.
The Economics Department appears comfortably aligned with the field’s global elite, expressing agreement with the view of a panel of eight older, white, male Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences that “economics will continue to play a significant role in identifying and solving some of the world’s most important issues”. This is an admirable goal, but it matters a great deal whose version of economics is applied in striving to achieve it.
Introduction of degrowth economics research and teaching into the University of Auckland’s core undergraduate syllabus would be a strategic step for the expansion of degrowth thinking and learning in global north nations – that is, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea and the rich economies of Europe.
Expansion of degrowth ideas and evidence into mainstream economics teaching in global north nations is important because global north nations must take responsibility for the worldwide social and environmental harms caused by their long term consumption beyond their fair share of global operating capacity within planetary boundaries, and they should be taking immediate steps to reduce their consumption to reach that fair level as soon as possible. Global north nations also have a responsibility to redistribute wealth gained through centuries of net appropriation from the global south, now amounting annually to 12 billion tonnes of raw materials, 820 million hectares of embodied land, 21 Exajoules of embodied energy and 188 person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion of unequal exchange, comprising one quarter of global north consumption.
Global north degrowth and redistribution will enable a convergence of economies within the narrow band of possibility of providing a decent standard of living to all people within the carbon budget of the Paris goals and within planetary boundaries. Humanity must progress from the assumption that hitherto socially and environmentally destructive economies can continue to grow based on the empirically unsupported argument that future carbon dioxide removal technologies will sufficiently reverse past harms. This idea, which has hegemonic strength in politics and business, if it fails, would doom all living beings, both human and non-human, to a Hothouse Earth. It is an utterly unacceptable gamble with lives of tomorrow for profit today.
While the heterodox field of ecological economics (which is not the same as mainstream environmental economics) is being taught at several universities around the world, such as the University of Vermont, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Leeds, the associated field of degrowth economics is currently only being taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The Barcelona school is now led by Professor Giorgos Kallis, who describes degrowth as “a radical political and economic reorganization leading to drastically smaller, and much more equitably shared, resource and energy use”. Degrowth scholarship points to economic policies, business models and ways of organising communities for a just transition in respect of the structural reform that this would entail.
New Zealand has a unique position as a rich global north nation that is much smaller than, and very distant from, other global north nations. It also includes a blossoming indigenous economy. New Zealand economics are culturally complex, to say the least.
Those who might introduce degrowth to the New Zealand economics curriculum, who are trained in the Barcelona school of thinking, must not fail to learn lessons from the analysis, further above, of current teaching at undergraduate level. Degrowth scholarship and teaching must be progressive, inclusive, networked and open to scrutiny, including from the establishment, but also from other schools of heterodox thought. Above all, degrowth in New Zealand must have a research agenda that is proportionally curious about the real needs, identities, aspirations and future scenarios of New Zealanders. In other words, Aotearoa degrowth economics must be an economics of, by and for all the different peoples of Aotearoa, now and in the future.
The Business School might offer to establish and fund a ‘Degrowth Economics Research Centre’ to get degrowth economics ‘started’. This would be tempting, but it could ring-fence the research agenda, creating an island of ‘specialist’ knowledge easily held back from undergraduates by the gatekeepers of the economics syllabus. It would be far better to forge strong links with key allies in academia and activism working on workers’ issues, women’s issues, queer issues and indigenous issues, and to embed degrowth across this spectrum.
Degrowth scholars establishing in New Zealand, assuming that many at first will be European, must not aim to plant ideas from the Barcelona school or other schools in Europe. They must arrive highly aware of the risks of their colonial bias and positionality and must aim to build a decolonised New Zealand school. They must bring the Barcelona school’s experience of interdisciplinary listening and collaboration. They must step humbly into the feminist and Māori economics academic-activist communities, where many of the questions that the degrowth school would like to explore have already been asked and are already being studied. Degrowth needs to join in, not rescue this work. The degrowth school must first discover where it is analogous and where it is incongruous to these other points of view. It must aim as a research school to value applied work that is non theoretical, that enhances sovereignty and indigenous methodology, such as mātauranga Māori, as Paige West has done throughout her career in marine conservation in Melanesia. In short, degrowth must earn a place of trust and equivalence among this cohort.
If the Economics Department is unwilling to provide core degrowth economics courses in the second and third years of the bachelor’s degree, a potentially strong counter-strategy could be to work together with leaders in the various social sciences departments, and possibly also several of the business school research centres, to offer a heterodox economics degree, legitimised by their broad support, as an alternative to the orthodox economics degree. This pluralist approach may be a more agile way to fund degrowth research, rather than relying on the high level of sponsorship and fund raising required to maintain a centre of research.
Badly done, the entry of the degrowth school in New Zealand may end up in round rejection, and not only by the establishment. On the other hand, a decolonised, pluralistic approach to degrowth research could be the glue that brings many strands of New Zealand’s fringe economics together into a powerful new research and teaching faculty in New Zealand’s dominant academic establishment.
The University of Auckland is ranked 85th in the world by QS and 137th in the world by Times Higher Education.
Heliocene 