The fact that a climate mitigation scenario explicitly refers to concepts such as "economic growth", "degrowth" and "sufficiency" is often a good indication of the kind of future changes it depicts. For example, "sufficiency scenarios" often contain long lists of changes reducing the consumption of certain goods of services, modelled in great technological detail.

However, it also happens that some researchers do not refer to "degrowth" or "sufficiency", but still produce scenarios that foresee reductions in consumption and production. This is for example the case of a small research team in Ireland, which produces national scenarios with strong demand reduction, without referring to such concepts (event IRENA 27/06/24). Another example is when the consultancy Vito Energyville was asked by the belgian green party to create climate mitigation scenarios. One of the scenarios included demand reductions outside of efficiency, which for some colleagues of the consultants made it a "degrowth scenario". They therefore carefully rephrased the report, to avoid displeasing the green party (event ETSAP 24/06/24). Or, in a report commissionned by the Danish government, a team from TNO modelled a scenario that was presented to me as a "degrowth scenario". However, the report contains no mention of "degrowth" nor "sufficiency" (event IRENA 27/06/24).

This is not surprising for "green growth" scenarios, as they constitute the immense majority of the research output. Economic growth is therefore naturalized, and does not need to be clearly stated in documents. It is however more intriguing with "sufficiency" and "degrowth". One explanation provided by multiple researchers and policy workers is that they feel like these words are conflictual, therefore it's easier to do research on the subject without naming their topic (EnSu1, Négawatt1, event IRENA 27/06/24). This however poses other problems, such as the possibility to capitalize on past knowledge based on a clear nomenclature (EnSu1, also pointed out in Lauer et al. 2025). A consultant mentioned a similar problem in an interview: he thinks it is completely unfeasible to reach net-zero in 2050, but still struggles to say it publically. To him, that meant being associated with "right-wing lunatics" that deny climate science (Consultancy1).

But there are also many scenarios which forecast or announce a high economic growth, without a strong empirical or theoretical basis. For example, while the European Green Deal is presented as a "growth strategy", the macroeconomic analysis shows that it will not increase economic output compared to the baseline (DG ECFIN1). Similarly, multiple modellers I encountered did not have good reasons to think that in the future, economic output would grow so much in the EU. But they chose to include an "unrealistic" economic growth, because they considered that forecasting a weak growth would spark opposition (ENTSOE3, Consultancy1). I also witnessed a fascinating scene, where modellers of the TYNDP were trying to find a good reason to forecast a strong economic growth, despite many EU countries having seen periods of recession in the last years (meeting TYNDP 04/12/24). This was because the European Commission gave instructions that no recession scenario should be modelled.

I therefore come to the conclusion that labels such as "economic growth", "sufficiency", "degrowth", but also "net-zero in 2050" or "1.5°C compatible" are included or excluded strategically. These inclusions and exclusions, because they are not necessarily foundational for the studies, have varied impacts on the research outputs. They however have an impact on a report's ability to circulate, the possibility to receive funding for studies (Consultancy1), the ability of an NGO to build alliances (Négawatt1), the ease to have discussions with colleagues (event IRENA 27/06/24), the maintenance of good relationships with administrations (meeting TYNDP 04/12/24), etc.

This confirms that systematic analyses of the scenarios literature should collect and code studies based on more than keywords. This can include projected changes and model results (as was done by Zell-Ziegler et al. 2021 ; Lauer et al. 2024). More importantly, it shows that the control exerted by funders and organizations with high political legitimacy on scientific concepts leaves room for subversion. Alternative knowledge production happens within the dominant conceptual framework of green growth, and is possible with existing tools (event IRENA 27/06/24 ; also shown by Cointe and Pottier 2023).

Bibliography

Cointe, B., & Pottier, A. (2023). Understanding why degrowth is absent from mitigation scenarios. Revue de La Régulation. Capitalisme, Institutions, Pouvoirs, 35, Article 35. https://doi.org/10.4000/regulation.23034

Lauer, A., de Castro, C., & Carpintero, Ó. (2024). Between continuous presents and disruptive futures: Identifying the ideological backbones of global environmental scenarios. Futures, 163, 103460. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103460

Lauer, A., Capellán-Pérez, I., & Wergles, N. (2025). A comparative review of de- and post-growth modeling studies. Ecological Economics, 227, 108383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108383

Zell-Ziegler, C., Thema, J., Best, B., Wiese, F., Lage, J., Schmidt, A., Toulouse, E., & Stagl, S. (2021). Enough? The role of sufficiency in European energy and climate plans. Energy Policy, 157, 112483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2021.112483

Ethnographic sources

Code	Type	Organization or context
Consultancy1	Interview	Consultancy
DG ECFIN1	Interview	European Commission - DG ECFIN
EnSu1	Interview	Energie Suffizienz
ENTSOE3	Interview	ENTSO-E
Négawatt1	Interview	Négawatt
event ETSAP 24/06/24	Observation	Summer 2024 semi-annual ETSAP meeting
event IRENA 27/06/24	Observation	International Energy Workshop 2024
meeting TYNDP 04/12/24	Observation	Meeting for the TYNDP 2026 cycle