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Re-taking Sustainable Development for Degrowth

By: André Reichel

22.03.2016

From the text: In the discourse on degrowth – the deliberate and planned downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet – the notion of »sustainable development« has sort of a bad rap. In fact, sustainable degrowth is intended to replace sustainable development as the central concept under which ecological and social minded activists and researchers might rally. Serge Latouche, the one who first fired the »missile word« of décroissance into the pubic realm, once held a talk titled »Down with sustainable development! Long live convivial degrowth!« at a conference in Paris in 2002. What are the reasons for such disregard of sustainable development? And could this be a somewhat foolish mistake?

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André Reichel

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Undoing the Ideology of Growth: Hegemony, Path Dependencies and Power in the History of the Growth Paradigm

Hegemony of growth

By: Matthias Schmelzer

Degrowth aims at undoing growth. Undoing growth both at the level of social structures and social imaginaries. Although the focus is very often on the latter, i.e. the “decolonization of imaginaries” as put by Serge Latouche, the degrowth perspective still seems to lack a comprehensive understanding of the role of ideology, the path dependencies and the power that shape these imaginations. Degr...

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"No action, just promises" – Critical reactions to the Paris climate agreement

Climate change

By: Christiane Kliemann

While world leaders were still celebrating the Paris climate agreement adopted at the UN climate change conference in Paris as a "major leap for mankind", critical voices had already denounced the paper as "fraud", "epic fail" and "trade agreement". With this, they point to the discrepancy between the agreed commitment to hold the "increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C abo...

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More than 600 contributions from all over the world!

On 14 March the last submission period closed for contributions to the conference. After a first quick review it was already clear that all expectations were far exceeded: more than 350 scientific papers were received from a broad range of disciplines such as economics, psychology, geography and urban planning. Further 260 proposals for practice-based activities were submitted by various civil-...