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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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Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) Newly Launched

Feminism rocks

  We are happy to announce a follow up to our roundtable about feminism(s) and degrowth at the Degrowth Conference in Budapest 2016. Sharing many common points, feminisms and degrowth have the potential to build an alliance which promotes mutual enrichment. One intersection is the criticism of the dominant socio-economic mode. By criticising the centrality of productive performance and by furt...

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From Post-Growth Society to Sufficiency Politics

Sufficiency politics map

By: Angelika Zahrnt

When our book Post-Growth Society was published in 2010 in German, the term was entirely unheard of. Today, Post-Growth is the harsh reality in many countries, but this phenomenon is considered to be transitory. Governmental investment subsidies and infrastructure spending, consumer incentive programs and a generous monetary policy are supposed to re-stimulate growth. Additional governmental e...

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Everyone talks about Volkswagen, but the real question is hardly ever touched

Cars

By: Christiane Kliemann

Day after day the media, at least the German ones, reveal new allegations against Volkswagen. Now that the scandal around the manipulated testing software for diesel emissions is widening, many fear that the current crisis will hit the company and the German automotive industry so badly that it will affect the whole German economy. This is no wonder, considering the widespread belief - also rei...