Food • 05.04.2021
On October 1, 1960, as Nigeria gained independence, the population of the entire country was around 45.1 million. Fast forward to the year 2020, according to U.N, the estimated population of Nigeria is above 206 million. This can be seen as a rapidly exploding population when compared to other nations in Europe like UK (52.2 million in 1960 to 67.9million in year 2020) over the same period of t...
Money • 26.03.2021
GDP is a flawed guide to prosperity. What else should we measure if we want to do better? “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”. Those were the words of Simon Kuznets, who developed the first national income accounts in the United States. And yet, we look back on decades of appropriating GDP as a measure of social welfare and progress. With t...
Strategy • 05.03.2021
What does degrowth mean in the Latin American context? In 2020, a series of six self-organized encounters attempted to dive into this question. Each meeting reflected the metaphor of the agricultural process: from sowing to harvesting. Among the conclusions was a unanimous desire to put into practice ‘other ways of inhabiting the world’, valuing the knowledge of the original peoples and inhabit...
Care • 12.02.2021
The third annual Global Degrowth Day on the theme of care will take place on 5th June 2021. Here, Corinna Dengler and Giacomo D'Alisa expand on the centrality of care to degrowth. Degrowth is an activist and political claim supported by academic research that aims at creating global human well-being within planetary boundaries. Degrowth problematizes interlinking systems of domination ...
Work • 03.02.2021
As the current default indicator for economic and social ‘progress’, GDP is the most broadly established measure of a country’s economic performance relative to that of other countries. Conceived as a tool to measure economic quantity, GDP is widely used to assess economic quality, although it ignores a range of vital economic activities, most notably care work. On top of that, the race for GD...
Strategy • 12.01.2021
As we look back on 2020 we see how Covid-19 has made it starkly clear to all of us that globally something is deeply, systemically wrong. As Arundhati Roy stated a portal has opened that demands we change our lives. Those of us cocooned at home working on zoomland, or those of us struggling with economic uncertainty and compromised health, have become even more aware of how important relations ...
Events • 14.12.2020
In this announcement, the Global Degrowth Day organising team talk through the selection of care as the theme for the 2021 edition of the event. In our search for a theme for next year’s Global Degrowth Day, taking place on June 5th 2021, we launched a call for ideas back in October, and a poll in November. These were the results: The results reflect the multiple angles and aspira...
Strategy • 02.12.2020
Our societies are facing multiple interconnected challenges, which include climate emergency, an unprecedented loss of biodiversity, growing inequality and plastic pollution. What connects these challenges is the underlying capitalist economic model, which prioritizes profit-making over wellbeing and requires endless economic growth simply to stay afloat. Degrowth offers an alternative v...
Blog • 23.11.2020
Degrowth is a movement that explores another direction for society, one where ecological and social justice become possible, along with more meaningful lives. While there is no single definition for degrowth, this entry attempts to offer some guidance for understanding degrowth in all its diversity. First, degrowth is a variety of challenges to the current status quo. Secondly, degrowth ...
Food • 09.11.2020
Perspectives from Eastern Europe and particularly Russia are so far underrepresented in degrowth debates. Translated from its original Russian, the piece below showcases an interview with a prominent British-Russian academic, Teodor Shanin, discussing degrowth in the Russian context through the lens of agriculture. Accordingly, it enables new audiences to gain an insight into this underrepresen...
Blog • 03.11.2020
In a recent op-ed published in Le Monde, French economist – and Emmanuel Macron’s economic program inspirer – Jean Pisani-Ferry argued that economic growth was necessary to fight against climate change and called for eco-productivism. The following op-ed is a reply to Pr. Pisani-Ferry that was originally published in Le Monde (in French). Recently, there have been calls for eco-productivis...
Blog • 26.10.2020
The prospects for Earth’s biological diversity look increasingly bleak. The urgency of global efforts to preserve biodiversity long predates the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic has added new dimensions to the problem. Conservation funding from nature tourism has all but disappeared with international travel restrictions, wildlife poaching is on the rise, and various political regimes have use...
