Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

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 developed as part of grassroots, citizen-led strategies of promotion of resilience from the ground up.

Although often small in scale, low in resources and sparsely networked, these CLIs promote multidimensional approaches to protecting or rebuilding the fabric of life from the impact of market pressures, as they tend to treat environmental sustainability and the promotion of economic democracy as inherently linked. They foster degrowth by supporting the re-localization of supply chains and policy processes. The goal is to capitalize upon local resources to arrest and reverse the loss of the capabilities necessary to form synergistic interrelationships among people and with nature. Still, multi-level governance, in the form of a strong connection with regional, national, and supranational levels of peer-to-peer collaboration, as well as policymaking, is recognised as needed to properly tackle the economic, political and institutional challenges faced by CLIs. Solidarity Economy is a term used by scholars and practitioners to refer to emerging social movements that are organizing CLIs in webs of mutual recognition and support.

Based on fieldwork, this paper compares how the strategies of degrowth and re-localization, adopted by three social movement networks aligned with Solidarity Economy principles, affect their approaches to multi-level governance, from the local to the European Union levels. The European hub of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN-Europe) and its urban and peri-urban “brainchild”, the Transition Network (TN), share a bioregional approach to “solidarity economy” that focuses on de-linking productive activities from the carbon-based economy by making them sensitive to resource limits and ecologically enriching. The European hub of the Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy (RIPESS), promotes an intersectional approach that focuses on furthering the practice and institutional recognition of economic self-organisation by marginalized groups and territories.

Info

Day: 2023-09-01
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-1
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Degrowth as a political project?

Links:

• iCalendar