Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

Registration desk open

registration desk and welcome pack

Opening plenary

Local Organising Commimttee representatives, Support Group Representatives and City of Zagreb representatives introduce the conference and welcome the participants to Zagreb. Short speech by organisers and host city. Speakers: TBD

The Climate Case for Questioning Our Growth Paradigm

It was in 2022 when the IPCC first mentioned Degrowth and sufficiency in its reports. It is a significant move considering that most IPCC member states still struggle from meeting basic human needs. However, there are many sections in IPCC produc...

Opening reception

Cocktail reception for guests and participants
Entertainment by: Lovro Baletić https://soundcloud.com/naughty_musician

Marx meets Degrowth: On the Origin of Degrowth Communism

The relationship between Marxism and degrowth was antagonistic for quite a long time. While Marxism criticized degrowth's ambivalent attitude toward market economy, degrowth rejected Marxian productivism. This situation needs to change, however. T...

Advancing research on degrowth and post-growth organization

What are the implications of degrowth for organization(s)? How can we organize for a post-growth economy and society? An emerging scholarship on degrowth and post-growth organization is addressing these and other questions, drawing on diverse disc...

Exploring alternative economies as social innovations towards degrowth: the case of La Doume, a local currency in the Puy De Dôme department, France

Recent coronavirus pandemic has exposed the flaws in our current economic systems and highlighted the need for sustainable economic solutions (Muzio and Doh, 2020). This has led to increased reflection and interest in alternative economies from va...

Gender justice in the energy poverty challenge

Women in all their diversity are disproportionately affected by energy poverty, yet are strong actors against it. Currently, energy poverty policies are not paying sufficient attention, if any at all, to gender justice. This special session aims t...

The need for a border perspective in the Degrowth discourse

So far questions about migration and borders have been rarely touched upon within the Degrowth discourse. However, they need to be taken into consideration, particularly in debates of Degrowth and climate (in)justice, because they can be directly ...

How to teach Degrowth in economic higher education?

The grand challenges of our times are seriously interlinked: ecological demise cannot be tackled separately from social problems like inequality or the crisis of representative democracy. The role of education is undeniably crucial in such transfo...

Why degrowth needs communism, and communism needs degrowth

The workshop aims to instigate a dialogue, so far largely missing, between degrowth and communism. We understand both degrowth and communism as traditions of thinking and practicing the social-ecological transformation and the system change that a...

Degrowth in France, a conference around the book "La decroissance et ses déclinaisons. Pour sortir des clichés et des généralités" of la Maison commune de la décroissance

The french organization "La maison commune de la décroissance" dedicates itself to build and consolidate the ideology of degrowth in France, in order to reinforce the french degrowth movement and it's visibility. We define degrowth as a path, a me...

SEEDS OF DEGROWTH IN THE SOUTH?

Too often, within the framework of global theoretical and political debates, feminist, decolonial and antiracist ideas are presented as static and removed from the particular regional or national contexts in which they emerge from. Analytical pers...

Transition towards sustainable agri-food systems

Modern agro-industry, on the one hand, dominated by energy- and carbon-intensive production methods and monocultural production accounts for a significant part of GH emissions, destroys ecosystems, decreases agrobiodiversity and the overall resili...

Degrowth Getting its Hands Dirty?

Regular perusers of Degrowth scholarship frequently encounter fleeting references to alternative agriculture models cited as tangible examples of transition in practice compatible with visions of “Degrowth.” Organic and community supported agricul...

Organizing for degrowth

Research and Degrowth is a non-profit association based in Barcelona dedicated to research, training and outreach on degrowth and environmental justice since 2010. We are based in three Catalan Universities: Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Univ...

Wolves in sheep’s clothing?

Dominant narratives of green growth and sustainable development rest upon uncritical distinctions between ‘techne’ and ‘oikos’ on the one hand, and ‘oikos’ and ‘logos’ on the other. In other words, the relevance of science and technology is often ...

Diverse monies in a degrowth world: the making and lasting of alternative currencies

There has been a resurgence of research in the utility of regional, complementary, and alternative currencies in transitioning to a more economically and ecologically sound world. The dominance of supranational currencies has been shown to exacerb...

Regenerative Parallaxing: Encouraging Trans-scalar Environmental Justice Research

Environmental justice research critically explores the bridging between social and environmental problems. This paper seeks to contribute to environmental justice research by focusing on the problems and politics of scale. Scalar politics contempl...

Engineering education within a degrowth paradigm

This paper will address attempts over the past 18 years of ESJP - Engineering, Justice and Peace (https://esjp.org/about-esjp/our-commitments) to facilitate change in engineering and education structures and processes, through the critique of cont...

Updates on Degrowth & Technology: overcoming the positivist pandemic trauma

Almost 5 years have passed since the publication of the so far most extensive collection of Degrowth and Technology related articles including an extensive metanalysis defining a new research agenda. It categorized thematic angles (theory, case st...

Community passage to the degrowth society

Community passage to the degrowth society
The systemic crisis of the Planet makes important the temporal dimension within which to make a radical transition of the dominant socioeconomic paradigm, in which the social and political spheres have be...

From parking place to public space: justice principles and perceived fairness regarding public space reallocation

A degrowth city requires a reallocation of public space. Instead of parking, public space is needed for cycling and walking (street as link), for non-commercial areas to meet, swap and repair (street as place) and for unsealed, planted areas to in...

Towards a science of liberation

To date, proponents of degrowth have largely abstained from engaging with faith and have yet to discuss degrowth in relation to theological reflections. The present paper puts degrowth in discouse with liberation theology to provide visions that c...

A curriculum for moving undergraduate biology students towards Degrowth principles

Traditional science education in the Global North needs rapid transformation to better prepare students to address the pressing environmental and social challenges of the Anthropocene. In the United States, university-level science education is ty...

Post-growth agrifood systems: now

Contemporary agrifood systems are infected with growth-thinking. Too often, food production is out of balance in all dimensions–relations to soils, animals, landscape ecologies, and relationships between producers and consumers. Bad agricultural p...

Principles and Models of Community-based Organisations in the Anthropocene

The current paper shares the results of qualitative multi-case study research, where 20 community-based organisations (CBOs) were analysed regarding their approach towards meeting basic needs in the diverse fields of everyday reality, such as hous...

Ecological reparations and degrowth: Towards a convergence of alternatives around world-making after growth

Faced with multiple crises, recent years have seen the rise of degrowth as a newly emerging field of research on alternatives to development in the global North, as well as increasing calls for ecological reparations to the global South to address...

The Good Life for All in the Digital Double Classroom

One key challenge in Education for Degrowth (EfD) is the lack of its systematic rooting in formal education systems, causing the politization of future activists to rely on civil society and leaving much idle potential for sustainable transformati...

Rethinking innovation beyond economic growth for sustainability transitions.

Confronted with ecological, social and economic crises, the mainstream response is to advocate technological innovation within a ‘green growth’ paradigm. However, evidence suggests that current conventional models for innovation in sustainability ...

Exploring possibilities of community-led initiatives to engage with local policy makers and citizens for collaborative action towards degrowth-based local provisioning

This paper investigates strategies for collaboration of community-led initiatives (CLIs) which develop and experiment with degrowth- and commons-based forms of local economic provisioning. CLI approaches to provisioning represent counter-hegemonic...

Is there a Place for Artificial Intelligence in a Degrowth Society?

Degrowth perspectives have so far largely left unshaped their visions on the role of technology. In the meantime, governments all over the world are accelerating the development and application of high-end digital technologies such as Artificial I...

“You should research real beekeepers!”

The necessary shift to new food systems and convivial conservation requires also a shift to new beekeeping practices as the currently dominant ones are also tied up in colonial legacies, exploitation and extraction, control and efficiency, private...

The Cooperative Potential of various Alternative Economic Systems: A Systematic Comparison

The need to transform our capitalist economic system has become widely accepted. However, a further understanding of viable alternatives is required to allow such alternatives to be institutionalized on larger scales. This paper considers the impo...

Reclaiming the Circular Economy

Degrowth's call for downscaling of production and consumption in high-income countries aligns with the call of the Circular Economy (CE) for a reduced material footprint and increased circularity. However, the CE often problematically frames 'wast...

Artistic take on material premises of new technologies

A presentation will focus on art practices that address the specific material assumptions of digital technology. The material side of digital technologies appears intangible, since we perceive them most often through the communication sphere of di...

Phasing out fossil fuels, supporting climate justice

This session is based around a new discussion paper on the Cap and Share concept. Cap and Share is a proposal by Feasta’s Climate Group for phasing out fossil fuels globally while supporting climate justice and providing significant climate financ...

Room to grow and the right to say no

This article builds on feminist and decolonial perspectives and engages with political geography literature to rethink the way peace and violence are understood in the Global South. Building peace that is coherent with planetary and ecological ...

Living Well Within Limits: ideas, results and ways forward

In this presentation, we synthesize 6 years of the Living Well Within Limits project. We start by situating our interdisciplinary research domain, which is oriented towards studying (and resolving) the core challenge of our time: how can 8 billion...

Paving own path of recovery - listening to voices from Ukraine

The war is not over yet, but both Ukrainian and international communities have already started to plan recovery and reconstruction of the country. Number of actors has already presented their “Marshal Plans” and visions for Ukraine, while some hav...

Time and Space for Social-Ecological Transformation: Care-Full Commoning in and beyond the Ecofeminist City

Bottom-up insurgent practices and processes of commoning are highly relevant to degrowth scholarship and activism. However, the ability to join initiatives or movements actively fighting for a socially just future within planetary boundaries is no...

‘It was uncomfortable but not unbearable’ - experiences and perspectives of people with disabilities on the 9 euro ticket in Germany

In summer 2022, the government of Germany implemented the 9 euro ticket. Ticket holders were able to use all modes of public transport except for long-distance trains for only 9 euro per month. The aim of this policy was twofold: firstly, to finan...

The Biodiversity Dimension of Degrowth: A Workshop on Strategizing with Convivial Conservation

Convivial Conservation (CC) is a transformative proposal for the systematic redesign of biodiversity conservation. It responds to the failure of mainstream solutions put forward to address the intensifying environmental and biodiversity crises, as...

Discursive Power Struggles over the role of Hydrogen in the European energy transition

Energy transitions are contested arenas. Different actors may hold different views about the pace, the scope and the type of social or technological innovations to be deployed in them. Hydrogen has emerged strongly as the so-called centre piece of...

Energy Peripheries in the Green Transition

The paper builds on a 3-years research project about “Climate Park Steinhöfel” (Brandenburg, east Germany), beginning this spring. Climate Park Steinhöfel is one of Germany‘s biggest agro-solar-parc projects which, within the next few years, will ...

The potential of common based solutions for a just transformation

The era of fossil-fuel based growth is ending. What we perceive as a multiple crisis is developing into a ‘new normal’ which requires learning to live in a new, post-growth reality. This profound structural change is not yet fully understood by th...

Sufficiency is care work – how to combine care theories with circular value creation?

Sufficiency calls for the absolute reduction of production and consumption volumes to create safe operating spaces within planetary boundaries. Sufficiency-oriented production and consumption practices exist to satisfy universal human needs instea...

Household consumption and emissions from corrected microdata

One key question within the existing literature on the interrelation between income, inequality and carbon emissions, is whether the combination of the normative goals of lowering inequality and reducing carbon emissions constitutes a virtuous soc...

Safe and just sharing

There are multiple crises unfolding from multidimensional ecological crises to social crises, which have been heavily influenced or even share a common root in the tendencies of our current economic system. Sharing has been proposed as an effectiv...

Degrowth beyond the metropole

This paper brings the Global South to the center stage of degrowth debates to envision what a truly global and anti-colonial movement towards degrowth could look like. To do so, we first bring the varying definitions of the term 'Global South' to ...

Degrowth as the experience of finitude

Contemporary societies are flooded with scientific information on ecological devastation. Oftentimes, the description of the problem of overshoot is accompanied with technological solutions. If degrowth theorizing does not straightforwardly suffer...

Peak-Oil: definition, key dimensions and relevance for Degrowth horizons

Some of the most prominent Degrowth authors have once been criticized for their apparent lack of understanding of energy and ‘thermodynamic price tags’. Since then, we have seen an intensification of the antagonistic battle between Degrowth and De...

How to understand the hegemony of automobility in times of the socio-ecological crisis?

Since the beginning of the 20th century our transport system is dominated by automobility and exacerbates the global climate crisis. Regardless of whether cars are powered by fossil fuels or electricity, they contribute not only to the ecological ...

Towards post-growth scenarios for climate mitigation

Existing climate mitigation scenarios assume future rates of economic growth that are significantly higher than what has been experienced in the recent past. In this article we explore how assuming lower rates of growth, in line with the hypothesi...

Commoning education

Commons and commoning are often promoted as both an alternative way of organizing key resources to capitalist forms of alienated production and a practice of lived resistance. It is a necessary form of prefigurative radical politics, one that look...

Energy communities as facilitators of energy sufficiency

The world is consuming energy beyond what can be considered sustainable, owing mostly to the persisting mantra of limitless economic growth. The need to downscale matter-energy throughput to sustainable levels is widely agreed. However, what shape...

Unpacking Philippines Zero Waste Community Sites as a pathway for Degrowth

The socio-ecological crisis has brought about various pathways to rethink development and its consequences especially in relation to neoliberalism and its excesses. In the more developed countries, the word “degrowth” has entered the vocabulary of...

Economic redistribution in eco-social narratives

In descriptions of a socio-ecologically sustainable future, ensuring a decent quality of life whilst remaining within planetary boundaries are often dual central aims. However, at present no country is achieving this, given the positive correlatio...

Political Friendship and Ecological Sustainability

The objective of my paper is to show how a contemporary account of political friendship could provide the ethical grounding and contribute to the realization of an economy in the service of human flourishing. I start from the fact of the lack of f...

The role of the circular economy in the 2020s’ critical juncture: Path-fixer, path-opener or path-breaker?

The circular economy is usually portrayed as a pathbreaking concept, representing a paradigm shift that will reconcile the economy with nature. This idea is problematic for different reasons, including present and future concerns. This research ai...

When Degrowth is real

It has now become clear: We are living in a new era. Security cannot be taken for granted, and it does not come for free, but its multi-dimensionality and sheer magnitude is not yet understood. A fundamental industrial change towards a resource-co...

Confronting Growthism: Tales of sufficiency from the Global South

Development discourse can still be seen as being hegemonic, in spite of decades of profound critique. Further, it can be seen as growthism's expression in the Global South. In a country like Colombia, development and modernization can even be said...

Contesting a new wave of green extractivism in Europe: How can the degrowth movement support anti-mining struggles on the ground?

In summer 2021, we conducted ethnographic field research in a rural area in northern Portugal to investigate the anti-mining movement around a proposed mining project. The mine is projected to be essential to Europe's energy transition by becomi...

Prefigurative and Community Action Research in the Context of Agile, Decolonial and Speculative Research

A multitude of formal and informal collective projects are actively working in the Greece against the logic of the World-of-One-World, through the building of alternatives, opposition and (non-reformist) reformism. At the same time research around...

Consumption is a myth: people are investors, not consumers

In Global North economies, 15-25% of GDP is typically invested in the formation of new capital, while the rest, the vast majority of economic output, is considered ‘consumption’. Indeed, the economic orthodoxy believes that our economic system is ...

Degrowth through deliberative democracy – an infrastructure perspective

This paper asks whether there is a deliberative democratic pathway to governing infrastructure systems in such a way as to enable a planned reduction in economic activity. We first consider the forms of democratic governance envisaged by the conve...

Convergence of crises and possible degrowth pathways in Latvia

The ongoing climate and environmental breakdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian war in Ukraine are some of the key events creating a continuous convergence of crises that will likely affect most societal groups and the whole global (dis)or...

Mining soils: political ontological foundations of soil extractivism in Europe

Soils are a foundational part of relational and interdependent planetary existence; almost all local and global multispecies relations are connected to soils. However, regardless of their centrality to all life, soils as complex multispecies entit...

How waste pickers are being sidelined in Global South cities: A network analysis

Waste pickers are essential actors of the waste management of Global South cities: often the only agents separating recyclables materials, they foster urban circularity. However, as extensively documented in the Environmental Justice Atlas (ejatla...

Ethics for degrowth: some insights from N. Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomics

The analysis is mainly based on the contributions of ethics and bioeconomics of N. Georgescu- Roegen, and on the identification of the components of a new ethics that I call bioeconomic ethics. Bioeconomics ethics is an ethics of limits which is b...

Post-earthquake Housing Policies from the Perspective of Degrowth

Turkey was hit by two major earthquakes on 6 February 2023 with 7.7 and 7.6 magnitudes

with epicentre in the Pazacık and Elbistan districts of Kahramanmaraş province in south-
eastern Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, the...

Beyond fossil extractivism?

Climate change and the loss of biodiversity restrict the scarce, sustainably usable biomass resulting in conflicts over the distribution of land and biomass. The high demand for bio-based raw materials will continue to increase in the future. Howe...

Health Commons for Degrowth

Living a healthy life is desired, and it is believed that health must be taken into consideration for degrowth. Pursuing health does not necessarily contribute to degrowth, though. Previous research on degrowth, health, and healthcare have noted t...

Degrowth in an African Periphery: Recentering Decoloniality around Ecocentric and Circular Ontologies

The hegemonic capitalist system likes to argue that endless growth is possible, that if you work hard enough, you too can have your mansion with blue swimming pool and lush green lawns,
gas-guzzlers in the garage and maybe a football team in one ...

The economic growth imperative: A pluralist, comparative review and assessment of key theories

This paper reviews key theories of economic growth imperatives and carves out their disagreements in order to enable a more robust assessment of their respective explanatory power. Currently dominant human-nature relationships in the global North ...

The money supply and degrowth: challenges and possible solutions

It is now widely acknowledged that the vast majority of money that exists in the economy at present has been created by commercial, for-profit banks on the basis of debt.

One might wonder, is this type of money compatible with degrowth?

Wh...

Discovering Diverse Financing

The field of finance is conceived as the epitome of our capitalist economy to the extent that there is limited knowledge about alternative financing outside financial markets. Through the lens of the Diverse Economies, we wish to re-read finance i...

Degrowth journal

Degrowth has become a thriving academic field, with several hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and a growing community of thinkers and doers. After decades of research, the time has come: degrowth now has its own specialised journal. The Degro...

Degrowth in practice VS academia?

Following the dynamics of alter-globalist movements, Degrowth started in France in the beginning of the 2000's when a group of adbuster activists met with Global South and Global North academics and intellectuals radically criticising the imperial...

Playing Simulation Games for Degrowth

This workshop introduces conference participants to three new learning games that serve as a vehicle to politicise youth and young adults for the Degrowth movement. The workshop will consist of a brief overview of the project within which the game...

The role of deliberative democracy in radical food-system transformation

Against the backdrop of the urgent necessity to transform the global food system from one rooted in the capitalist-industrial complex to one of agroecological and commons-based practices, this paper scrutinizes the potential role of deliberative m...

Masculinities and Degrowth: breaking away from the hegemonic model

UPDATE: Tadeas Zdarsky will be running this session
Degrowth advocates for new kinds of societies which celebrate frugal abundance and give centre-stage to the wellbeing of people and planet instead of economic growth. Despite the many synergies ...

Interweaving degrowth, postwork, and postdevelopment: Visions of post-productivist futures

How is challenging the hegemony of growth tied to challenging the hegemony of work and of development? Within capitalism, not only growth but also development and productivism are hegemonic, all-encompassing paradigms. In this session, we explore ...

Climate-Economy Modelling and Degrowth's Counter-Hegemonic Struggle

This paper looks at the politics of climate-economy modelling to understand how degrowth models can gain more traction in science and policy. Neo-classical economics’ hegemonic role in reducing the climate and environmental crises to a problem of ...

The role of common senses for the transition to a degrowth society

My participatory-based research empirically applies degrowth theories to landscape planning at local level. The transition to degrowth depends on the dynamic relations between political and civil societies, and their environments. I focus on how p...

University community engagement from the bottom up

The degrowth transition requires the transgression of the existing hierarchies and hegemonies, and the radical transformation of many (or most) of our existing institutions. Hierarchies and institutions of knowledge production are no exception. Th...

Degrowth as a means to an intergenerationally just future

While degrowth scholars have increasingly examined the relationship between different notions of justice and the degrowth approach, the intergenerational justice (IJ) lens has so far been overlooked in the discourse around degrowth. Similarly, IJ ...

UPDATE: Degrowth and informal waste work: who cleans for a just transition?

This paper will focus upon informally self-employed waste pickers and how they play a vital role in the circulation of waste/used-goods. Following waste industries provides a unique entry point to discuss tensions between capitalist production and...

The ‘CapCollage’

Degrowth is about criticizing a globalizing and growth-oriented socio-economic system – in short, capitalism – for the destructive implications it has on human and non-human beings. Moreover, degrowth is a creative search for just, participatory, ...

Degrowth and agri‑food systems: a research agenda for the critical social sciences

Degrowth has become a recognised paradigm for identifying and critiquing systemic unsustainability rooted in the capitalist,
growth-compelled economy. Increasingly, degrowth is discussed in relation to specific economic sectors such as the
agri-...

Avenues for a safe climate: Remove carbon from the atmosphere or reduce energy use?

Existing climate mitigation scenarios describe a range of potential futures, from a rapidly decreasing dependence on fossil fuels and lower global energy consumption to large-scale negative emissions that allow for the continued growth of global e...

Degrowth and the Aporia of Utopia

Post-capitalist imaginary is caught in a double bind of climate realism and political pragmatism. Climate realism cautions that there is no empirical evidence that the existing growth-oriented technocapitalist processes can be brought within plane...

Slow science and „caring” research

A collaborative research project for social inclusion is in itself a social inclusion micro-process, a dynamic interface between academics and communities. In our paper, we explore the transformative power of citizen social science research on our...

How Should an Economist Act in a Climate and Environmental Emergency?

Given the close connection between the production processes that make up the economy and the deterioration of our climate and ecological systems, it seems extraordinary that this question is not at the heart of the concerns of the economics profes...

How payments for ecosystem services can undermine Indigenous institutions: The case of Peru's Ampiyacu-Apayacu watershed

Payments for ecosystem services have come to dominate international policies for addressing tropical deforestation. Political ecologists, degrowth scholars, and Indigenous activists have critiqued these approaches on the grounds that by centering ...

How can degrowth actors engage in policy dialogue with growth-enhancing policy institutions?

This research investigates how degrowth actors shape advocacy work to drive transformative changes with a case study of ECOLISE, the European Network for Community-Led Initiatives on Climate Change and Sustainability. It explores the concept of st...

The feminist response to Agri-capitalism:

Developing countries continue to face challenges of food insecurity, particularly in rural areas, where farming is the major occupation. The idea of Degrowth is often contested in the context of developing countries because of the fear that Degrow...

Current crisis from the perspective of growth and non-growth economies An Assessment of the Applicability of Sustainability Indicators

The principles of sustainable development are an essential part of the effort to find responses and tools to the social, environmental and economic challenges of the contemporary world, compounded by crises of increasing inequality and poverty, re...

Towards a Degrowth Struggle

Degrowth has been criticized for its eurocentrism, for being elite-driven and for not considering its implications on the poor. Though these critiques are often misinformed, they do raise important questions regarding the somewhat homogenous degro...

On economics as a metabolic process:

The purpose of this essay is to bring together some of the most salient aspects of urban metabolism deduced from the academic literature of several disciplines such as ecology, ecological economics, political ecology and environmental sociology. T...

Agroversitat. Art, agroecology and critical pedagogies in the Valencian horta.

Initiated in 2022 by Viridian art collective, Agroversitat is a project focusing on the creation of intergenerational artistic and pedagogical processes related to themes such as land use, agroecology, environmental awareness and ecosocial transfo...

The sustainability spectacle

Why, even when faced by overwhelming evidence of the already ongoing climate catastrophe, the sustainable business and sustainable business research field is unable to make any meaningful changes to the environmental conditions? Further, why degro...

Value Theory and Practice

Communicating degrowth requires us to articulate abstract theory in a way that makes sense of everyday practices. In this paper I use autoethnography to show how contemporary debates in value theory can guide degrowth activism.

The question of...

Development of a (lifebuoy) blue doughnut economy for the ocean

The ocean is the biggest ecosystem supporting life on Earth. In order to shift from destruction to regeneration of the ocean we need a fundamental system change in the blue economy. Recognizing that the situation is urgent Seas at risk embarked on...

Fairytales of Growth

"Fairytales of Growth is a documentary on climate change, degrowth and system change. The effects and risks of climate change are compelling young people the world round to call upon radical system change as the only solution to avoid a catastroph...

Industry, Labour, Work – Degrowth Perspective on Political Economy for Global Periphery

There are legitimate but also unjustified fears related to the future of industry and the future of work in a post-growth society. In our debate we will focus on the political economy of a degrowth society on the global periphery. Regardless of ge...

Geopolitics of Degrowth

It makes sense for the EU to be a frontrunner in the transition to a degrowth society. This is a matter of ecological justice: EU countries bear the greatest historical responsibility for the crises of climate and biodiversity, and can free up nat...

Who is Degrowth Really For?

It is imperative that any degrowth social movement or research be led by the people who are disproportionately harmed by capitalism, colonialism, violence, and oppression. Otherwise, degrowth social movements will further risk alienating communiti...

Beasts of the Southern Wild (93’)

In a forgotten yet defiant bayou community called the Bathtub, cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee, six-year-old Hushpuppy(Quvenzhané Wallis) exists on the brink of orphan-hood. Her mother is long gone, and her beloved father W...

Gender perspective of climate justice - stories from societies margins

panelists and detailed description coming soon

Decolonial Worldmaking and the Contradictory Ecological Politics of Non-Alignment

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a partnership between decolonial states in the Global South and socialist Yugoslavia, was one of a number of anti-systemic or counter-hegemonic worldmaking projects that emerged after the Second World War. Although ...

Agrarian degrowth and re-ruralization

Fossil fuel enabled industrial capitalism and the resulting processes of urbanization have been coupled with alienation from the land, and the eradication of traditional means of livelihood particularly in the rural. For degrowth to be successful,...

Anthropology and degrowth: deepening the dialogue

So far anthropologists have had very limited direct engagement with degrowth. This is a surprising fact since anthropology had a key role in the very crafting of the concept: the ideas of Serge Latouche were highly influenced by classical economic...

Degrowth: A monetary or ‘real values’ economy?

This workshop sets up a participatory discussion on the need, or not, of a nonmonetary degrowth economy. As such it highlights a significant, yet often marginalised, degrowth topic.
Drawing on grassroots experience and scholarly theory, Anitra an...

Less is enough. Degrowth in (post)artistic practices

The aim of the session is to reflect on artistic strategies of practicing the principles of degrowth. The panel consists of three paper presentations (15 minutes each) followed by a discussion (45 minutes) in which the panelists will further explo...

Presentation of the Re-Geppetto repair caffe in Pula

On behalf of Green Istria, we propose a short, 20-30 minutes presentation (with PPT) of the Re-Geppetto, the first repair café started and managed by a CSO in Croatia.

Repair caffe and workshop Re-Geppetto is a is a well equipped space where ...

Communicating degrowth ideas: beyond the to-do list

The degrowth movement has a strong support in the academic field and it is backed with theoretical knowledge. Researchers have found both ethical and empirical arguments to support degrowth ideas. Nevertheless, these ideas struggle to find their p...

Degrowth inscriptions within queer and decolonial struggles

The subalternisation of beings segmented by the categories of species, sex, gender, class, and race enabled the fossil extractivism and the organisation of the global capitalist economy (Preciado, 2022). While the threat of the Anthropocene procla...

How should degrowth approach power contestations of social change?

Degrowth implicitly questions the power relations behind social and ecological destruction. But how does it approach power explicitly? To date, most degrowth strategies choose to fixate on the comfortable and depoliticised domain of state-based po...

Bringing degrowth into management education?

How is degrowth being brought into management education? This session will build on conversations which have been ongoing since 2021, when a group of early career academics began a dialogue about degrowth in management education. Out of a series o...

Degrowth from the East I

Degrowth is often thought of as one ‘movement’, 'community' or conversation, which emerged in Western Europe in the 1970s and has been spreading both within academia and activist practice over the last decade. However, related ideas and activism t...

Fertile Ground

Degrowth and Food Sovereignty movements have a shared interest in defending and creating systems of production and reproduction based around the flourishing of human beings and nature. Both movements also share commitments to deepening democracy a...

(Re-)Imagining Technology and Innovation for Degrowth

As key drivers of endless economic growth, innovation and technology have often (if not totally) been neglected in their relation to degrowth and wider societal change away from economic growth. However, we argue that in order to achieve alternati...

Colonialism - Digitalisation - Degrowth

In the workshop we explore how the digital economy is based on colonialism and extractivism. We look at the exploitation of the environment and human labor along its entire commodity chain and how both shape our understanding of personal data. We ...

Village Voices

This contribution connects the quest for future-apt rural areas to the transformative degrowth discourse. Rural areas are less often in the focus of social and political debates than growing and densifying metropolitan areas, even in the degrowth ...

Coloniality and Climate Change Mitigation: Social movements at a crossroads of a globally just energy transition

The transition from fossil-based to decarbonized energy systems lies in the core of most of the climate change mitigation strategies and narratives. Recent research on green extractivism, the material requirements of the energy transition and the ...

Learning from the Global South: Degrowth and the Limits of Modernity

Degrowth is a movement developed in the Global North and, naturally, it is influenced by some of the fundamental values of Western Modernity, such as anthropocentrism and positivism. Of course, there are also spiritual, non-anthropocentric views i...

Using quantum physics metaphors to understand the entangled nature of social transformation

Degrowth is primarily about transforming current economic and social practices to stay within planetary boundaries whilst guaranteeing social justice. These transformations involve processes of immense size and changes of radical intensity (almost...

Memories and hunches of life otherwise: re-valuing rurality and subsistence for degrowth futures, learning from the Souths-within-the-North.

In this article I argue for a radical inclusion of rural areas and of subsistence-oriented economies in degrowth scholarship and proposals, exploring the potential of Southern European rural peripheries as starting points for envisioning socio-eco...

Embodying and enacting degrowth

In this work, an experiential methodology is developed to make an inquiry on the effects that a degrowth policy package could potentially produce at the inner plane of individuals and groups and its interaction with wider social change towards deg...

Decolonizing degrowth

As a movement and a research field, degrowth emerged in opposition to a growth-led narrative that dominates not only economics, but also other disciplines. In recent years, we have, as a community, become more aware of the many ways in which we - ...

Presentation of the first Community garden in Pula

On behalf of Green Istria, I propose a short, 20-30 minutes presentation (with PPT) of the first Community garden in Pula, Croatia.

Since May 2021 Green Istria has been managing the Community garden at Gregovica together with Association of Per...

Defuturing Artificial Intelligence

Defuturing is a design philosophy premised on negation. In this paper I offer a defuturing account of artificial intelligence (AI) that illustrates why structural dependencies on mass digital infrastructure may prove, over time, to be incompatible...

Ecovillage scale-up and its wellbeing challenges

Community level initiatives are important in the transition to sustainability. Ecovillages are often presented as examples of such initiatives that aim to combine high quality, communal life with low environmental impact. The Global Ecovillage Net...

Degrowth, Crises and Snails

In my paper I will analyse the theatre play Krize (Crises), (2022, dir. Žiga Divjak), co-produced by Mladinsko Theatre, Maska Ljubljana, Bitef (Belgrade) and Domino Association (Zagreb), which is part of the project ACT - Art, Climate, Transition,...

(Re)allying with the non-human world

Being in close, intimate contact with the living network consisting of people, animals, plants, microbial world, air, soil water… IS what gives us an immediate and direct information about the state and the limits of this network. Only when we ar...

Scale matters for degrowth

No social revolution can succeed without being at the same time a consciously spatial revolution. Responding to the criticisms on the space-blindness and anti-planning sentiment in the degrowth debates, the spatial aspect and planning have drawn i...

Co-capitalism: Degrowth within Capitalism

Co-capitalism is defined as collective, cooperative, and co-owned capitalism. It’s the economic system that uses free markets to give society ownership of the means of production. The tool for achieving this is the simple act of sharing, which is ...

Modelling Degrowth

The challenges related to environmental degradation in general and climate change in particular, as well and increasing inequality impose to the scientific community the burden to produce knowledge capable of stimulating truly transformative actio...

Discussing degrowth climate utopias with diverse stakeholders

Backcasting is an effective, goal-oriented, participatory and problem-solving method for developing solutions to the multiple societal crises. It focuses on a vision for the future and developing steps to reach this vision. It also encourages coll...

Degrowth education- Experiences from the two Degrowth masters in Barcelona

Research and Degrowth is a non-profit association based in Barcelona, dedicated to research, training and outreach on degrowth and environmental justice since 2010. For the last five years, we have been running a masters program in political ecolo...

“Frugal abundance”: A useful concept for degrowth

The concept of “frugal abundance” has recently been mentioned in numerous degrowth publications, such as Schmelzer et al. (2022), Liegey and Nelson (2020) and Latouche (2020). However, degrowth has not yet fully engaged with the notion. In my pres...

Degrowth and basic income

Basic income (BI) is defined as a “periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement” (BIEN, n.d.). Pilot interventions have demonstrated the policy’s value for addressing the soc...

A polycentric approach to the post-growth social order

Many authors, from Serge Latouche (2007) to Elinor Ostrom (2009) and Tim Jackson (2009), have defended a polycentric approach to coping with the environmental crises. In the case of Jackson and Latouche, they defended this polycentric order while ...

Degrowth and the working class

It is now almost unequivocal in the research community from natural science disciplines that the anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity collapse and trangression of various planetary boundaries invoke the necessity of a fundamental socio-metab...

Degrowth as a project of decolonization

In 1972, social philosopher André Gorz coined the word ‘degrowth’, arguing that capitalist productivism, which requires capital accumulation for its own sake, is incompatible with the global environmental balance, in turn sparking a debate in Fran...

Fossil Health: A Conceptual Proposal for Understanding Socio-Ecological Health Dependencies in the Anthropocene

Health imaginaries are an expression of social imaginaries, or of the collective creations of signification that mediate between the social and the material. In a context of socio-ecological destruction and declining energetical availability, conv...

Operationalizing the consumption corridor: how to jointly detect the limits of “enough”?

In the core of sustainability is the question of limits. Degrowth scholarship has made this evident and inspired discussions on what is enough and how to detect sustainable limits and guide our societies towards them in just way. In previous resea...

Deconstructing biodiversity offsets: An exploration of ontological conflicts and alternative approaches to conservation in Finland and Colombia

Together with other market-oriented approaches to conservation, biodiversity offsets (BO) have become popular (e.g., CBD, 2022). Previous research has however documented dispossession of local communities and increased inequalities as possible out...

Re-imagining technology in post-growth 'rurban' futures

Accelerating transitions towards sustainable, post-fossil fuel futures is no longer an option but an imperative. Technological innovation is central in policy debates about how to achieve sustainability transitions and pressing climate targets. Ye...

Degrowth-oriented organisational value creation

The profound socio-economic transformations implied by degrowth concern the way organisations create value. However, there are conceptual gaps regarding the forms and meanings of organisational value creation that are aligned with degrowth. Agains...

Planning Beyond Growth: the case for economic democracy within limits

Degrowth and post-growth economics has emerged as a particularly fruitful approach in the debates about the reorientation of economies in the Global North towards environmental sustainability, equity, need satisfaction and democracy. While degrowt...

Modern Systemic Economics of Human-Technology-Nature Connection

Multiple crises of climate, biodiversity, political, economic and social structures require a new thinking about how humans and their social systems are embedded in nature. This includes a re-definition of how humans relate to nature physically, i...

Crafting alternatives to capitalist labor

Multiple calls exist to profoundly change capitalist provisioning systems and business models to help address unique socio-ecological challenges of the 21 century (e.g. Faning et al, 2020; Nesterova, 2020). Reenvisaging work, the way it is organiz...

Life satisfaction and socio-economic vulnerability: evidence from the Basic Income experiment in Barcelona

This work focuses on the implications of introducing a variation of a Basic Income for individuals in grim socio-economic conditions in Barcelona (Spain). We explore the happiness and socio-psychological imprint of living in material deprivation i...

Less is enough. Eco-art assemblies in Poland as tools for practising the culture of moderation

The paper analyzes the historical and contemporary Polish eco-art assemblies, known in Poland as “plein-airs”, as examples of practicing degrowth principles through creative practice and developing the vision of a sustainable and good life. The au...

From local staple food to superfood

The sudden rise in global demand for so-called ‘superfoods’ has led to a boom in quinoa production, turning the former subsistence crop for local populations into an international commodity. International organisations fuel demand by idealising “n...

Health and Degrowth in times of Pandemic

The emergence of the pandemic is connected to the overexploitation of human and natural systems caused by uncontrolled economic growth. The main negative consequences of the current growth-based system (inequalities and environmental degradation) ...

Realism of Pessimism: The Opium of Overconsumption Under Islamist Authoritarian Regime of Erdoğan

As Turkey’s general election approaches, the authoritarian-cum-conservative regime of Mr. Erdoğan, in reign for more than two decades, has been pursuing a rather unorthodox economic experiment based on cutting interest rates well below the inflati...

Degrowth and the Artisan Class

Five decades after The Limits to Growth was published, it is exceedingly clear that growth must be retired as a fundamental rationale of economic policy, both in the Global North and the Global South. There is also significant consensus that the g...

Capitalism and the meaning of life

Philosophical considerations have always been woven into economic thinking. However, in the 20th century, having developed into a separate discipline, economics largely lost its connection with philosophy (Hédoin, 2018). Despite the recent renewal...

Degrowth, deglobalization, and localization

The growthism intrinsic to capitalism necessarily leads to, depends on, and escalates globalization, exemplified by the outsourcing of production, offshoring of costs, and exploitation of human labor and nature on a vast and globally dispersed sca...

A Forgotten Feminist History of Universal Basic Income and Universal Responsible Production

How would ‘responsible production and consumption’, goal 12 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), relate to goals 1, 5, and 10 of SDGs – ‘no poverty’, ‘gender equality’, and ‘reduced inequality’? In the first half of the paper, drawn upon the a...

Modern economics as male-dominated thought construct to support colonial hegemony – and the implications for degrowth thought and policy advice

This paper establishes that modern economics uses a male-dominated methodology that is intrinsically colonialist. It then proceeds to answer the question “What is degrowth learning from anticolonial struggles on how to change dominant narratives o...

Decolonizing the human domination of the Earth

In the Anthropocene, all earthbound beings habit a human-dominated Earth. While some humans have benefitted greatly from the processes of colonization and domination, others have suffered, or become annihilated, not to speak of most non-human bein...

WHAT DO DATA TELL US ABOUT DEGROWTH VALUES? EVIDENCE FROM WORLD VALUES SURVEY AND EUROPEAN VALUES SURVEY

Degrowth is a multidisciplinary movement that argues that endless growth on a planet with limited resources is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire capitalist system. Abandoning the growth mentality and switching to...

Shifting paradigms of health, illness and death: challenges for degrowth concepts of wellbeing

Degrowth envisions societies overcoming resource depletion, uncontrolled pollution, climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss while promoting planetary regeneration, human well-being and autonomy in a post-capitalist future that entails less mater...

A ‘return forward’?

Within degrowth there is so far a limited and unproductive understanding of Western 'traditional popular culture', previously studied as 'folklore'. It is understood either as a past of hardship overcome by modernity, or as a repository of "sustai...

Solidarity-BASED economy and territory: transformative practices in Friuli Venezia Giulia region

The University of Udine has long been involved in research aimed at studying the solidarity-based economy realities in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. This path begins in the year 2012 with the creation of the Forum of Common Goods network invol...

On International solidarity and economic decolonization

Within the global health field, progress is being made to adopt a justice and sustainability-centred approach to global health issues through the advancement of what has been named a Planetary Health agenda. Meanwhile, an increasing number of glob...

Securing human needs through Universal Basic Services: creating political support for degrowth?

Failure to meet human needs and exceeding the environmental boundaries push to recognise that current welfare states have to rethink how to stay between the social floor and environmental ceiling. Alternative models have been proposed, but ambitio...

Blue Degrowth

The ocean is under increasing pressure from the growth of the global economy, resulting in severe social and environmental impacts, for which high-income nations are disproportionately responsible. In recent years, several international actors inc...

Dividing roles along flows instead of functions

Degrowth has been questioning the level of role division. But we need to question also the way roles are divided. We argue that roles need to be divided along flows instead of functions. Flows include plants, recuperated materials, natural element...

The unexplored field of sufficiency in the research on future mineral demand for clean energy

The undeniable material dimension of the energy transition has generated growing attention over the last few years. The forecast of a strong increase in the demand for some metals is favoring the development of policies that support the mining ind...

Degrowth and the sustainable development agenda

Degrowth and the sustainable development agenda: Should we pursue SDG 7 "energy access for all" in Sub-Saharan Africa?
The evidence is undeniable, the social and environmental harms of the linear and growth-centric systems of extraction and explo...

Social and ecological reasons for a universal basic income

This paper will present the forthcoming book (to be published in Italian in March 2023) titled "Social and ecological reasons for a universal basic income". In it, we develop a degrowth approach to basic income as a political project. We will pres...

Digital degrowth alternatives and AI resistance narratives

Compatibility with degrowth objectives (simply referred to as a radical redistribution of wealth and power) asks for a post-digital framework to address the myth of digital universalism, platform culture, data capitalism, technological nihilism an...

Breathing: A Revolutionary Act

How do we turn the right to breathe into a struggle that is decolonial, feminist, queer, anti-racist, pro-Indigenous, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and internationalist?
The right to breathe is a call for revolutionary action.

Françoise ...

Breaking Free From Mining

Overconsumption and the paradigm of infinite economic growth require vast amounts of metals and minerals, driving one of the world’s most polluting industries and a main contributor to climate change and biodiversity loss: mining. At the same time...

Incubators for a Community Economy

Today’s major societal challenges require require resilient and democratic solutions. The call for a different economy is heard everywhere: what kind of economy do we actually want?

Ecological limits, inequality, extractive business practices a...

Promiscuous Infrastructures

The Promiscuous Care Study Group emerged from the need to build up learning communities where we might recognize the abundance of working together in difference. Comprising students, teachers, and researchers working within an academy of art and d...

Working through Degrowth –  elements of Ecological Syndicalism

SCHEDULING TO BE UPDATED (move it to the 4:30 slot on the same day)

What does it mean to struggle for degrowth in and through the workplace? There are a wealth of policy proposals and connections to social movements. Yet while it’s clear any de...

Mother Nature the Goddess

In this session we’ll present excerpts from our film “Kunna”. The purpose is to host a creative discussion and explore the links between degrowth and feminism. Why are matriarchal cultures more connected to the reproductive capacities of nature?
...

Decolonisation and Degrowth: Degrowth Narratives from the Global South and European Perspective(s)

In this debate we want to tackle controversies and contradictions related to the reception and perception of the degrowth in the Global South. While the main principles of degrowth highly resonate and share some direction with various principles a...

Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses, Tools and Alliances

How can artistic and cultural practices put forward new eco-social practices committed to sharing resources and creating open infrastructure? How can artistic ecologies renew alliances between communities, institutions and new forms of activism fo...

Low -Level Renovation

Low-level renovation refers to making small-scale changes to existing buildings, such as insulation, energy-efficient windows, and solar panels, rather than tearing down and rebuilding. This approach is more environmentally friendly than new const...

Conversion towards a Just Transition?

The German car industry is transitioning away from internal combustion engines in response to new regulations and market developments. This process engenders economic pressure on suppliers, which are often dependent on the combustion engine. The m...

Redefining success in organizing towards degrowth-inspired futures

This paper brings degrowth scholarship in conversation with living systems theory in efforts to propose a novel conceptualization of success in organizing towards degrowth-inspired futures. The initiatives that embody the paths and pursuits of deg...

The Spatiality of Degrowth

Full co-author list: Silvio Cristiano, Anton Brokow-Loga, Karl, Jana Gebauer, Luciana Maia, Sarah Ware
Degrowth is a crucial vision and project in a century rapidly evolving towards the self-destruction of human livelihoods. Imagining how degrowt...

Patterns for digital degrowth

In the face of multiple crises, digital technology is widely considered central to the development of a green capitalism in which efficiency gains and „dematerialisation“ would allow industrial societies to decouple their resources use from their ...

Sensing urban manufacturing: sensible production in a small Swiss town

Environmental destruction, social inequalities, geopolitical vulnerability–the limits of the long-time praised paradigm of post-industrial cities and globalised value chains are becoming evident, while calls for (re)localising production in cities...

Decoupling or cost-shifting? Air pollution in a sprawling city (Warsaw, Poland).

Both the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and Environmental Justice (EJ) address the environmental externalities of development. The first category, well-established within the hegemonic economic discourse, assumes than once a certain level of we...

Low-tech’s bit to the post-carbon transformation

Disruptions of global supply chains, climate change, or depletion of non-renewable resources all call for resilient technologies that reduce energy throughput. Convivial, low-tech, degrowth-aligned (Kerschner et al., 2018; Vetter, 2018), “pluriver...

Future of wellbeing: Finnish MPs perceptions on health and wellbeing against the eco-social-growth trilemma

Climate change and other socioecological disasters threaten the wellbeing of humans and the planet. Root cause for this is economic growth, which has been the hegemonic policy paradigm for decades. Recently there have been proposals for alternativ...

Transformational work-policies as pathways to a Degrowth future in tourism? Explorative analysis of the worker’s perspective

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic a lot of emphasis has been put to “build back better” the tourism industry, a former largely unsustainable and polluting sector. A key factor in this endeavour would be to break up the dependency upon t...

E-waste - the forgotten material dimension of digitalisation

When talking about a digital transformation of society, we are often discussing possibilities and benefits while overlooking the significant material dimension of these processes. However, the amount of resources and energy necessary for the produ...

Alternative organising against the plastic crisis

Plastics, which are made of fossil fuels, constitute 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions – a share which is expected to increase to 20% by 2050. Their biggest application is packaging, making up about 40% of plastic production. Made to be wasted...

(Re)constructing agents of power in the care economy sector

There would not be any economic action if it were not for care work to enable it. This leads to the assumption that care agents indeed have a lot of power. This changes various perspectives, firstly, the perspective on power, secondly, on where th...

Posthumanism and Degrowth

Dominant neoliberal economic paradigm is clearly exploitative towards all kinds of resources. Alternative paradigms mainly aim to stop being exploitative towards (some) humans. Dominant paradigm is dehumanizing, alternative paradigms are anthropoc...

Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide

In August 2020, we launched our jointly authored book Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (Pluto Press). ‘The book you hold in your hands’ states Jason Hickel of the University of London and author of Less is More 2020, ‘paints a picture of the n...

Care and Degrowth: Old Acquiantance, New friendship?

Degrowth is premised on reducing material extraction while increasing societal well-being. This inversion implies a shift away from the production of material goods toward the provision of care to enable individual, collective and environmental fl...

Cities in the post-growth era: Theory and Practice, pt. I

In the post-growth debates, there is a growing number of arguments around what degrowth a state can provide. While the issue of scale sometimes is discouraging for larger states to consider post-growth as an alternative, the same cannot be applied...

The Birth of the International Degrowth Network: Outcome of the Degrowth Movement Assembly and Workshops with International Working Groups

Throughout 2023, the open collective Organising the Degrowth Network (ODN) worked to formulate a proposal to improve the structure and functioning of the International Degrowth Network. This proposal will be discussed, amended, adopted, or rejecte...

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (82’)

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva tells the remarkable life story of Gandhian eco-activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, how she stood up to the corporate Goliaths of industrial agriculture, rose to prominence in the ecological food movement, and is inspiring an in...

The state, class inequalities, and their affective reverberations: considerations for a degrowth transition

This talk is inspired by stories collected over the last decade as part of several research projects based in Croatia. These are stories of everyday hardship told by people who eat in soup-kitchens, stories about persisting to work in civil societ...

Transport poverty in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

Transport poverty is a phenomenon, which is on the rise in CEE. Upcoming EU expansion of emissions trading scheme into the transport sector is likely to add more pressure on the people who already now have difficulties in accessing transport for t...

The degrowth opportunities in ongoing EU policy files

While the discourse on the need for systemic change of our economic system is slowly shifting in academia and civil society, we have yet to see this recognition consolidated in actual policy change in Europe. Meaningful action to tackle our system...

Degrowth & Strategy

As the cost of living crisis deepens, Lützerath hamlet in western Germany is being evicted with an extreme show of force, and COP28 will be chaired by an oil executive – what is to be done to ensure a social-ecological transformation? This questio...

Why sufficiency? Necessity, potentials and legitimacy

The evidence supporting the notion that sustainability goals cannot be achieved solely through technological innovations, but rather by incorporating sufficiency strategies, continues to grow each year (Haberl et al., 2020). The Intergovernmental ...

Degrowth, Re-localization and Multi-level governance in European Solidarity Economy networks

The social, economic, and environmental externalities of industrial mass production and neoliberal approaches to globalization led to the multiplication of degrowth-oriented community-led initiatives (CLIs). Many of these initiatives were develope...

Linking the levels: Actors, strategies and alliances for postgrowth transitions

While postgrowth approaches are gaining discursive momentum, the development of encompassing strategies for a degrowth transformation has only started. Particularly, there appears to be a strong divide between bottom-up and top-down approaches (D’...

Towards a Post-Growth Deal: Introducing the REAL EU-ERC Synergy project

In this presentation, we will introduce the recently awarded project “REAL: A Post-Growth Deal”, an EU ERC Synergy project, and the largest project awarded by the EU to degrowth/postgrowth topics to date. The project starts in May 2023, with a dur...

Proximity and care: towards alternative ethics of future tourism practices

The paper aims to grasp and rethink proximity tourism in the context of recent degrowth debates, mapping out how might travel practices that take place near home and encourage slow travel on the ground cultivate much-needed perceptive attentivenes...

Living in the ‘doughnut’: reconsidering the boundaries via composite indicators

The concept of ‘planetary boundaries’, worked out by Rockström et al. (2009), and the need to guarantee some social minima were integrated into a unified picture by Raworth (2012, 2017) who proposed a doughnut-shaped ‘safe and just space’ for huma...

Redistribution, Good Work, Public Services – How the social crises open the door for new degrowth support

Inflation-driven poverty, collapsing health systems, demographic pressure, fiscal burden –Western welfare systems are facing a severe crisis. And : the worst is yet to come when planetary boundaries limit the overall wealth to be redistributed.
...

(Em)powering communities on the journey to energy resilience

The impacts of climate change are affecting regional and rural communities in Australia at an immense scale, climate disasters show intensities and frequencies that exceed past events by large. Floods, bushfires and cyclones cause loss of homes, i...

Decarbonisation of the Steel Industry and Changing Places of Work

The transition to a low-carbon society will require extensive industrial change. These changes will have wide-ranging socio-economic implications in the locations where these industries are based. As well as economic dependencies, geographic conce...

Spatializing degrowth: Five steps towards a radical urban degrowth agenda in the face of climate emergency.

This paper calls for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas. This, we argue is an academically and politically urgent endeavour that will benefit both fields. Our aim is threefold: 1) to explore practices for ‘operationalizing’ ...

How a care centric degrowth is necessary to promote a sustainable eco-social future that values everyone

Capitalism reproduces injustices and inequalities across social and ecological life. System change is required, and systematic change is only transformative if addresses the conjunction of growth surplus and care deficits which are core causes o...

Degrowth Enthusiasm and the Eastern Blues IV

Our paper traces the links between post-socialist transformations and the degrowth movement. We note that the degrowth debate in general and Western degrowth research and activism in particular rarely refer to experiences from socialist societies ...

Urban food policies without local food producers

Recently, urban food movements have been proliferating in Europe. They highlight the corporate food regime’s failure to tackle nutritional poverty and promote local food initiatives. Also, urban food policy is a new phenomenon in Prague and Brno, ...

Degrowing concrete

Concrete is the most widely used man-made material in the world, and after water, the most widely used resource. From urbanization to mobility to CO-2 emissions - concrete buildings and infrastructures form the often invisible but essential basis ...

A case study of the Hungarian Degrowth Donut

The Degrowth Donut (a modification of the original Donut visualisation of boundaries and foundations created by economist Kate Raworth) can be considered a visualisation tool for assessing the current environmental and social capacity of a country...

The unwritten Yugoslavian history of degorwth

Self-management in Yugoslavia was an authentic form of joint labour. It lasted four decades and was constantly built, re-shaped, and re-defined through institutional changes. Compared with the economic systems of a given time, it is possible to di...

Degrowth meets Feminist Political Ecology: Towards a care-full and pluridiverse intersectional degrowth transformation

In this two-parted session, affiliates of the Feminism and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) put Degrowth and Feminst Political Ecology (FPE) into dialogue. We aim to explore what a degrowth transformation might entail from intersectional, pluridiverse and...

Electrochemistry, decarbonisation technologies and degrowth

Electrochemistry is positioned to play a crucial role in the transition towards a sustainable energy system and new multi-million funding programmes are established across Europe to support public and private research and innovation initiatives. T...

Gajna commons, fight for nature, people and climate

Gajna is a naturally flooded grassland located in the eastern continental part of Croatia, on the
Sava River, which forms the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is pre-WW2 common
land which, although having State owned land status, managed t...

Visualising the social impact of climate adaptation

Transition of contemporary societies to different energy flows and different distribution of social product – from linear consumption of energy stocks to utilisation of flows and abandonment of the growth hegemony – is necessitated by the biophysi...

Exploring degrowth proposals

Degrowth – the planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption as a solution to the social- ecological crises – is slowly making its way to the sphere of policy-making. But there is a problem: proposals are scattered through a volum...

Degrowth meets Feminist Political Ecology: Towards a care-full and pluridiverse intersectional degrowth transformation

In this two-parted session, affiliates of the Feminism and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) put Degrowth and Feminst Political Ecology (FPE) into dialogue. We aim to explore what a degrowth transformation might entail from intersectional, pluridiverse and...

"Exploring Minimalist Emotions: A Cross-Cultural Study in the United Kingdom and Thailand”

Minimalists, i.e., individuals who live with fewer material items than other people and, are emerging as an essential area of both academic and non-academic study (Rebouças and Soares, 2021; Hook et al., 2021). It is interesting to note that links...

A Degrowth Project: Degrowth policy proposals and political agenda

In 2013, in France was published a successful book translated into several languages: A Degrowth Project, Manifesto for an Unconditonnal Autonomy Allowance (Liegey et al, Editions Utopia, 2013). This book is the result of the political dynamics ar...

Geopolitics and Degrowth

Degrowth policies aim to respect planetary boundaries, while allowing the Global South to develop. This calls for a compelling narrative about a future in which we consume more frugally but live better together, as is being developed by the degrow...

Political strategies for a socio-ecological reduction

Growth-based eco-technological modernisation will not succeed in curbing global warming and other eco-social crises. Degrowth, the climate movement and other actors of a socio-ecological transformation should already discursively and politically a...

The De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth: Propositions and Prospects

Special Session Proposal
Format: Book Discussion of De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth: Propositions and Prospects

Participants in the special session will include both Co-Editors of the De Gruyter Handbook of Degrowth along with several of th...

“The Long Way Home”: The Politics of Selfcare and Yoga in Global Capitalism

The caption read, “Took the long way home, away from the hustle and bustle where the air is fresh and life moves more simply…In my next life I’m moving [here] to Bali and becoming a rice farmer…” The author is an upbeat, ex-model, Californian yoga...

Turning away from Growth with state-less Democracy

Degrowth, as a broad spectrum of proposals and advocacies, is united in the demand that economic activity must undergo a ‘right-sizing’ to a level that respects socio-ecological boundaries and the minimum social foundations that ensure a dignified...

Integrating IAMs to Mainstream Degrowth Ideals

In this 90-minute session, participants will explore the potential of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) in promoting the idea of degrowth and its mainstream adoption. The focus will be on a new IAM called WILIAM (‘Within Limits’ IAM), which aims...

Weaving Alternatives to Polycrises:

The Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) is an initiative seeking to create solidarity networks and strategic alliances amongst all radical alternatives on local, regional and global levels. It locates itself in or helps initiate interactions amo...

Science and Activism: Together through the Climate Crisis?

In the past few years, we have witnessed a stark increase in civil society activism regarding the climate crisis, climate justice, degrowth and a social-ecological transformation. Especially forms of direct action have become more frequent and mor...

Snails over Teslas: how energy citizenship and energy communities can push for a degrowth energy transition

Community energy, a specific form of energy citizenship (ENCI), represents one of the ways for a just and inclusive energy transition towards degrowth. At a time when the moral bankruptcy of energy companies has been laid bare by their profit-maki...

The importance of Optimal Design of a PV System in the Net-Metering Model: A Case Study for Croatia

The world’s demand for electrical energy is increasing rapidly while the use of fossil fuels is getting limited more and more by energy policies and the need for reducing the impact of climate change. New sources of energy are required to fulfill ...

Ecofeminism or death. Ecofeminist art as a tool of practicing degrowth principles

The aim of the proposed paper is to analyze how the principles of degrowth are applied, practiced and experimented with in ecofeminist artistic practices. Taking as an example the activities of historical and contemporary ecofeminist artists, I ar...

Can politics cope with hard limits on societal metabolism?

In July 2021, following long-running campaigning by Irish civil society groups, Ireland enacted a new domestic climate law. This created a statutory framework for the adoption of rolling "carbon budgets": voluntary limits on total domestic GHG em...

The degrowth movement needs a critique of state sovereignty

Max Koch (2022) argues that the degrowth movement needs to adopt a multi-frontal approach, working both within and outside of the state. I argue that this strategic proposal further needs a critique of state sovereignty, as well as a vision for wh...

Concepts of health and illness within the Portuguese degrowth movement

In 2022, the Portuguese Degrowth Network organized a series of events on the 50th anniversary of the report ‘The Limits to Growth’ under the motto ‘Crescer até rebentar?’ (Growing till bursting?). One of the events consisted of an interactive work...

Emergent more-than-human anarchisms in a Pyrenean agro-ecosystem

This paper explores the concept of more-than-human anarchisms by connecting eco-anarchist ideas and practices with recent literature on cosmopolitics and more-than-human political work. We try to understand the practical emergence of autonomous hu...

Adaptation of the electric power sector to climate change

The electric power sector has a significant role in the climate change mitigation. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources significantly reduces greenhouse gases in electricity production. Nevertheless, the electric power sect...

The revolutionary politics of a degrowth transition

Research in degrowth has provided a detailed analysis of the social injustices and ecological unsustainability of a capitalist mode of production predicated on everlasting economic growth. It has also put forward a robust set of policy proposals t...

Lessons from death

Following the diagnosis of a stage four glioblastoma, a family member with pre-existing chronic illness was given three to six months to live. Over their final months they experienced a continual decrease in motor function, requiring increasing am...

Systemic vulnerability to fossil fuels – Too central to fail?

Phasing-out fossil fuels is an urgent, mandatory imperative to increase the chances of human survival on Earth. The global economy can be conceptualized as a highly complex network of interacting and interdependent economic sectors whose functioni...

From Marxist development theories to their translation in the degrowth discourse: Transforming unequal international structures for environmental sustainability

This chapter aims to connect two important movements that have dealt with the issues of international structures and injustices but tend to stay disconnected in the literature: dependency theory and degrowth. We argue that degrowth, as an academic...

Notes Towards Inquiring the Politics of Degrowth

While recent publications have put in the centre of degrowth discussions the issue of strategy, the formation of collective actors/agents of transformation that will implement such a strategy has not been elaborated in detail. This presentation ai...

Identifying different narratives of Agroecology in Turkey: The cases of Nilüfer and Seferihisar Municipalities

Agroecology, as a 'science, practice and movement', and especially as a pillar of the food sovereignty movement, has been gaining attention globally as well as in Turkey. However, despite several local initiatives focusing on supporting agroecolog...

Degrowth for Peace? Proudhon's international theory and its relevance for the geopolitical implications of degrowth

Degrowth has failed to adequately address the geopolitical implications of the transformation it envisages. Degrowth has equally failed to build a convincing theoretical basis for how the political project it puts forward might manage violence and...

Contestation, Expertise, and Time: An Ethnographic Case Study of the Swiss Citizens’ Assembly on Food Policy

For food system transformation, there is growing interest in deliberative participatory processes at the governance level, following good examples for other controversial issues such as climate policy. However, it is contested whether such citizen...

Imaginaries of public and contentions over renewable energy ownership models

Contentions associated with the transition of the energy sector towards renewable energy (RE) sources stem from different sociotechnical imaginaries of future energy systems. This presentation focuses on contentions over RE ownership models among ...

Towards modelling degrowth scenarios

The scenario database used in the most recent IPCC Assessment Report on climate mitigation does not feature any modelled degrowth scenarios. This means that in assessing the available literature, the IPCC was unable to include degrowth as a strate...

Urban Commoning Politics and Policies

This paper will present an interpretation of Belgian Philosopher Isabelle Stengers concept of ‘ecology of practices’ applied to the urban commons provesses developed in Barcelona during Barcelona in Comú mandate. It will reflect on how the develop...

Coercive Power and the Shaping of Civil Society Activism: A Study of Bologna's Social-Ecological Transformation

In Miraftab (2017), the relationship between civil society activism and the authorities is described as shaped by the coercive use of power, in which the authorities manipulate activism by suppressing some forms and promoting others for the purpos...

The role of utopia in a Degrowth transition

Degrowth activists and researchers are often dismissed on account of pursuing a utopia. But why should that be a problem in a world where it seems easier for people to imagine a planet on fire where we kill each other for fresh water and the remai...

A Free Store Grows in Manhattan

In this session, I will bring participants on a journey and discussion exploring the transformation of a vacant storefront in the heart of bustling NYC into a community asset and living museum. Leave what you can and take what you need at the Hell...

Meet and join the Degrowth Movement

The open collective ODN (Organising the Degrowth Network) is inviting to this session all degrowthers and new-comers curious to know more about the Degrowth Assemblies, the functioning of the Degrowth network and its international working groups, ...

Practices of Conviviality

This panel will bring together contributions from Ecofeminism, Feminist mutual support groups and Community Accountability experiences to illustrate some of the challenges and opportunities for practising convivial ways of living and relating in t...

Inclusiveness in practice

How to become a movement which is truly inclusive of non-white, non-cis-male people?
As activists from the Decolonial Feminism Working Group of the Association Degrowth Switzerland, we would like to address this question by sharing our thoughts,...

Degrowth and the Political Left

The degrowth movement shares many values with other left-oriented political movements and parties. Yet, until recently, the degrowth movement has been very distant from the political, or even policy arena, mainly operating within the academic comm...

Supporting schools to (de)grow from natural hazards

School resilience as the ability of organizations to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to sudden disruptions caused by natural hazards, is becoming increasingly recognized. The more frequent natural hazards as a result of climate change a...

Regenerative communities: resistance, existence, and re-existence

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the deep fractures and the baseless promises of well-being that the capitalist model made to the whole world. Neither the market nor the State will be able to take care of a vast number of peoples, except in a trans...

Degrowth from the East II

Degrowth is often thought of as one ‘movement’, 'community' or conversation, which emerged in Western Europe in the 1970s and has been spreading both within academia and activist practice over the last decade. However, related ideas and activism t...

Towards a Forum for Caring Societies

The world is currently facing multiple, interconnected crises including poverty, global and gender inequality, climate change, and biodiversity loss. These problems are all symptoms of the same systemic crisis and need holistic interventions to so...

2050 Emission Pathways Explorer Croatia

Achieving climate neutrality in Croatia by 2050 is technically feasible, although challenging and requires systemic changes. The 2050 Pathways Explorer is a model that transparently presents the big picture and allows cross-sectoral assessments of...

Translating degrowth ideas and permaculture principles to housing practices

Large part of everyday consumption is related to housing. Conventional housing is extremely resource intensive, regarding both a) construction and b) dwelling. How to organise degrowth-friendly small-scale housing?
Although sustainable housing is...

Degrowth practices at local level: participative community management of local resources in Slovenia

The key elements of community based sustainable management of local resources concept are community – defined by a common location or common interest – and its resources: natural and those that have emerged as fruits of its culture (e.g. tradition...

Post-growth Pluriverse(s) in Policy Spehere(s): European Green Deal and Beyond

During this high-level panel the intention is to provide a critical and post-growth friendly 'reading' of the European Green Deal. European Green Deal is a complex and multi-layered program of the European Commission to implement a green transitio...

Françoise Vergès & Maja Solar: Launch of the Croatian translation of "Un féminisme décolonial"

A book launch of the Croatian edition of F. Verges' book

Panel Discussion on sustainable and just transformations of city-region food systems

How would a degrowth agri-food system envision the connection of rural-urban spheres under the urgent calls for sustainable and just urban transformations? Short food supply chains and the city-region food system approach can be a way forward. The...

Exhibition opening

Marwa Arsanios, Željko Beljan, Marina Naprushkina, Rupali Patil, Dan Perjovschi, Selma Selman, Marko Tadić…

Under the same title as the conference 9th International Conference on Degrowth Planet, People, Care-It Spells Degrowth!, the exhibitio...

Nithi Nesadurai: "Equity-based De-Growth: Pathways for Living Well Within the Ecological Limits of One Planet“ (Workshop)

The intersection between Degrowth, and Equity and Ecological Limits will be the focus of this interactive workshop. After on-the-spot assessments of participants’ views on Degrowth, the workshop will address the questions of: Who should be the fir...

Unleashing Fantasy for Transformation

Building on the work of novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) we explore the possibilities of Science Fiction and Fantasy for an “education of imagination” that is essential for a degrowth transition.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems ines...

(un)maker Faire

Within contemporary economic rational thinking, the act of “making (producing)” has been central, whether or not one complies with environmental standards. So called ecolabels, of which there are more than 450 kinds operating in 199 countries and ...

Green European Journal: Can degrowth rescue climate politics?

Climate politics is facing a backlash. From mining to migration, everywhere we look new conflicts and dilemmas are emerging around the climate crisis and the green transition. Media partner of the International Degrowth Conference, the Green Europ...

Eunice Asiedu: "Bridging the Divide - The European, African And Asian Labour Market and The Degrowth Nexus"

By 2050, Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.2 billion. A key question is how to great create enough, and at the same time, decent jobs. COVID-19, Russia-Ukraine War and Climate Change have exacerbated the unemployment situation in Africa....

Advertising degrowth

One of capitalism’s greatest tricks is to make so many believe that they can buy their way to utopia. Although reality may differ greatly from the adverts, that concept has seeped through screens and into the minds of billions. For any alternative...

Strategies for Basic Provisioning

In the context of environmental, inequality, housing and energy crises, Degrowth Vienna has chosen to focus its 2023 activities on basic provisioning. Through interactions with various boroughs, associations and networks, Degrowth Vienna is develo...

GEF knowledge communities: Philippe Pochet: "Welfare states and climates change"

only per invitation

the evolution of our consciousness drives the evolution of our economy

in this session we play a simple yet powerful simulation of our new economy. thus it is an explanation of my manifesto: http://free-to-serve.org
the simulation and manifesto investigate the relationship between consciousness and economy. they ope...

Mirela Holy: " Degrowth and Circular Economy: Synergy Approach for Sustainable Croatia"

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung sessions

Germinar-t: a community based degrowth art residency

To create a space at the intersection of degrowth and art is necessary, because the arts are powerful in kicking us out of our mental and practical routines. They tickle our imagination and help us co-create alternative, desirable futures. They ca...

Olha Boiko: "Walking a mile in EECCA activists’ shoes towards climate justice"

What do we know about being a civil society activist in Eastern Europe, Caucasus or Central Asia? Be it Ukraine, Georgia or Kyrgyzstan – all countries need to move towards climate justice and implement better climate policies. At the same time, be...

GEF knowledge communities: Mike Duff: "Cities and degrowth"

only per invitation

Democratic Confederalism in Theory and Practice

Democratic Confederalism is a social concept that takes the basic principles of the degrowth idea and translates them into a system of self-government for the people of the Middle East. The concept's mastermind, Abdullah Öcalan, sees Democratic Co...

Revolutionary love and relation

In light of the multiple crises advanced by late-stage capitalism, movements for socio-ecological transformation embrace a new kind of political belonging and relation, as they articulate alternative positions to the status quo and theorise and pr...

Capturing the European Other

My name is Mina Archontaki (b. 1997, Rethymno, Greece) and I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam working with biomaterials and natural resources. I am interested in commonism -with an O in the middle - and the urban and environmenta...

Feminist Alternative Economies: Towards Radical Emancipatory Horizons

This activity has two objectives. The first is to make visible various economic alternatives built by feminists, women and LGBTQIA+ people in different parts of the world and in different sectors of our economies and spheres of our lives. These al...

Municipalist Politics for the Change We Need - Experiences from Zagreb

Zagreb je NAŠ!/Možemo! neighbourhood, district and city councilors will discuss the efforts of the current green-left municipal government in Zagreb to institute a more democratic, more just and more sustainable city to live in.

Maritza Islas: "Living in the Capitalocene: Bodies, Territories, and the Web of Life" (Workshop)

At the beginning of the 21st century, the concept of the Anthropocene entered the political and scientific arena announcing the beginning of a new epoch characterized by human influence on Earth's systems.

However, from the perspective of vari...

Closing plenary

The LOC present concluding remarks, reflections on the conference preparation and degrowth movements' first post-pandemic physical assembly, and the diverse team putting the conference together over 2 years and 5 intense days. The SG charts the ev...

Final party and open air concert

Rundek Degrowth Trio Concerts followed by a convivial party with citizens and conference participants. A farewell to degrowth conference in Zagreb