Overcoming the Inequalities of Green Transition
The International Summer School of Political Ecology 2023 will explore growing inequalities and address the question why concepts such as environmental justice or just transition are increasingly important in discussions on how to tackle the environmental crisis without deepening inequalities.
The consequences of climate change, mass extinction of species, loss of habitats and pollution lead to general environmental and ecological issues that are appearing more than ever on the political agenda, as they affect and influence us all, albeit in a very unequal way. They have distinctly negative impacts on different regions in the world, societies, classes, groups of people and other living beings. The most vulnerable are the least responsible for the environmental crisis, but are usually the most affected.
Policy measures for protecting environment and climate that have been or are yet to be adopted are likely to lead to more inequalities and other undesirable social consequences: undermining social cohesion and reducing social welfare, as well as preventing just solutions to environmental issues.
The focus of the Summer School will be on the growing inequalities within and between countries, and how our societies and economy can be organised in ways that do not exacerbate these inequalities, but also do not further harm our planet.
For more information, see here.
In 2008, a few years after the birth of "décroissance" in France, we organized the first International Degrowth Conference for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in Paris. Only ten years later, in 2018, we promoted three large international events in the same year: the 6th International Degrowth Conference in Malmö - following Barcelona, Venice, Leipzig and Budapest – as well as a macr...
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...
How to sell degrowth is one of the questions of our research and communication project Postwachstumspioniere at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research. In the paper “Successful non-growing companies“, Andrea Liesen, Christian Dietsche and myself are discussing motives and strategies that seem to apply to a variety of non-growing companies. We found that small and medium-sized [...]
