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-society organizations and initiatives. The majority of the contributions came from European countries, although there were also submissions from Japan, India,Mexico, Brazil and the United States.
Professor Tim Jackson, author of „Prosperity without Growth“, and member of the conference’s advisory board, sees the conference as an important step towards overcoming the growth paradigm: „I hope that this conference will help shape a positive vision of an equitable and sustainable post-growth society“. Nina Treu, programme coordinator of the conference, is pleased: “The high number of contributions shows the great interest in the topic. I am sure that now we can put together a conference programme with many superb presentations and activities.”
At the conference there will be seven keynote-speeches and more than 20 panel discussions. Around 250 activities will take place on the basis of the received submissions, in addition to an inspiring artistic programme. Confirmed speakers are among others Naomi Klein, Sunita Narain, Alberto Acosta, Esperanza Martinez, Harald Welzer, Joan Martinez-Alier and Angelika Zahrnt.
My colleagues and I wrote an initial blog post arguing that the question of strategy has received too little attention in the degrowth movement, and by degrowth scholars. Further, we observed that the discourse on strategy in degrowth was excessively plural, being open to all strategies in all contexts, rather than considering case-appropriateness (spatially, temporally, sectorally etc.). Th...
In a recent article with Stefan Drews, we discussed why degrowth might be an unfortunate name and slogan for the alternative economics movement. We listed several expressions that could possibly be better, but we were also upfront about their disadvantages. Here I propose a new term that might combine the advantages of the word degrowth with those of its more positive alternatives. For an asse...
The debate on flying in contributors to the Degrowth-Summer School By Janna Aljets At the second planning meeting for the Summer School in February, the organizing team spent some time on discussing the participation of contributors from the Global South – which could involve long-distance flights: How can we ever „authentically“ talk about climate justice without people from the Global South...
