Across Europe, politicians, academics and civil society will explore the need for economic system transformation beyond growth at several national-level events. At least five Beyond Growth conferences have so far been confirmed, in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Italy – most of them taking place within national Parliaments.
These events are a direct consequence of a large three-day-long conference held at the EU Parliament in Brussels in May 2023. 20 MEPs from different political families co-hosted the ground-breaking Beyond Growth conference, where over 7000 enthusiastic people gathered to debate on policies toward a beyond-growth Europe. The 2023 event was highly successful and confirmed the importance of rethinking our economic models beyond growth dependency in the face of growing unrest from inequality, health problems and ecological breakdown. It was hailed as “marking a turning point in the battle of ideas around post-growth”. A clear shared vision emerged of moving beyond growth-oriented policies and practices, instead centring the socio-economic model on people’s wellbeing.
Precisely this vision will take centre stage at the national conferences throughout 2024. Citizens, activists, politicians and NGOs are organising themselves on national levels to bring forth conferences to explore what moving beyond growth means in their contexts and to make many politicians and lawmakers more familiar with concepts such as post-growth and degrowth. In a time of increasing political polarisation and multiple crises, the Beyond Growth movement seeks to emphasise our shared needs to live well on a healthy planet, and how we can democratically reorient our economic systems to deliver sustainable futures for all.
The event organising teams are collaborating to ensure that the conferences have impact in each of their countries, and also at European level and beyond. The confirmed conferences, so far, are:
More information will be published soon about these conferences.
As degrowth becomes a more familiar term worldwide, a loose informal network of Australian degrowth activists, scholars and advocates has emerged into the formal Degrowth Network Australia (DNA). The network has a public launch in a participatory degrowth workshop at 2pm–4pm on 26 February 2023 — a National Sustainable Living Festival event at the Black Spark Cultural Centre in Northcote, an inner suburb of Melbourne (Victoria, Australia).
The first International Degrowth Conference held in Paris in 2008 was followed by another ten other conferences, most of which took place in Europe. These conferences provided room for the Degrowth community to meet and exchange on latest research. In Christiania Town (Copenhagen) in 2018, just before the 6th International Degrowth Conference in Malmö, degrowthers met in a new format. Going beyond research-related conversations, they instead discussed the “how” of Degrowth and started to organise the movement.
In October of this year Giorgos Kallis, Julia Steinberger and Jason Hickel were awarded 9.9 million euros by the European Research Council (ERC) for a project titled Pathways towards post growth deals. This constitutes the largest ever sum of funding for a degrowth research project! We interviewed Giorgos Kallis to find out more about this important milestone!
