Sustaining power through economic growth: A Régulation theory of growth dependence

Economic growth is both essential and detrimental to modern Global North societies. When growth disappears, or becomes negative, debt overhang, unemployment, impoverishment destabilise societies. But ecological fallout from growth can also undermine societies in the long term. So why and how are economies and societies dependent on growth? Many scholars have conceptualised growth dependence as the need to achieve growth to serve general wellbeing and economic functioning. In this article, we take a different view considering growth as a part of social reproduction, arguing that growth dependence emerges when growth is needed to reproduce a stable regime of power relations. We operationalise this approach using Régulation Theory, a political economy framework anchored in but expanding Marxist political economy, and aimed at explaining how capitalism manages to reproduce itself despite its contradictions. We show that economic institutions and institutional systems (in the language of Régulation theory, structural forms and modes of regulation) depend on growth because they crystallise certain balances of power within so-called “institutionalised compromises”. An economic institution may require varying levels of growth to reproduce itself, depending on the type of compromises it embeds. We propose that, in a given national economy, combinations and interactions between such institutions shape the overall character of growth dependence. Régulation Theory enables us to build a bottom-up analysis - from institutions to the national economy - of growth dependence. This novel conceptualisation opens new and fruitful research opportunities for understanding growth dependence.