By Chris Ward
Despite attending the conference, not everyone will fully understand what ‘Degrowth’ is, or the multitude of related terms that will be mentioned during the conference. Thankfully the first session on the schedule, offered by Federico Demaria and Giacomo D´Alisa was ideally suited for getting your knowledge up to scratch.
Judging by audience responses to the question “What is Degrowth?” there isn’t a concrete definition yet, but one is needed to make the term more understandable to the wider world. Currently ‘Degrowth’ is more of an intersection of several concepts, we need to be clearer with our vocabulary to emphasise ‘different’, not ‘less’.
‘Degrowth’ was first mentioned as a term by Gorz and later by Roegen and Grinevald in the 1970s
Degrowth lost some interest in 80s and 90s due to the prevailing neo-liberal thoughts of the era. It re-entered the public’s interest in the 00s especially around Europe and Latin America in some of the more traditionally activist countries and those worst hit by the Global Financial crisis.
Leipzig is 4th international conference on Degrowth, and now the term is being mentioned in mainstream media, academic courses and articles.
Let’s break apart the vocabulary apart a little…
The Limits of Growth
We, organizers and participants at the Degrowth Vienna 2020 conference demand equity and justice. We stand in solidarity with the people in the United States challenging white supremacist culture and with related global struggles. As activists, academics, artists, and practitioners we aim together to put an end to systemic oppression and structural racism; as again has been recently revealed by...
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...
By Frigga Haug At the closing event of the attac-congress on capitalism in 2009, the German politician Heiner Geissler pleaded for an eco-dictatorship. After all, even as a prominent member of the Christian Democratic Party he had joined attac out of concern over problems of capitalist society, among them the ecological one - and was now calling on the 2000 or so participants to take action to...