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...
Housing • 22.10.2020
October 1st marked the 10th anniversary since squatting was criminalized in the Netherlands. This infamous decision by the Dutch state led to an immense increase of speculation in the housing market, doubling the average cost of housing in just 10 years. ‘Coincidentally’, over the same period homelessness has also doubled, and social inequalities have skyrocketed. All of this before the effects...
Strategy • 12.10.2020
This piece will close the ten-part degrowth.info series on strategy, highlighting some of the key insights and charting the development of the strategy debate within degrowth. We will then offer some insights on how our own understanding of strategy and degrowth has changed over the last two years since we first urged the community to engage with this topic more. Finally, we will consider the p...
Justice • 09.10.2020
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, violence against women is increasing. More women are isolated at home with abusive partners and without resources and opportunities to leave. In Canada, where only a few months ago funding for Ontario rape crisis centres was slashed by $1 million, the political pressure to intervene in gendered violence has increased. Many women’s organizations, such as the ...
Events • 06.10.2020
On August 14th, an uprising of art installations and happenings emerged in the Old North End neighborhood of Burlington, Vermont. Two days later, they all disappeared. Through these art pieces, community members and local organizations explored today’s tensions and possible paths toward desirable futures. Burlington residents navigated the neighborhood on self-guided tours, following a m...
Justice • 28.09.2020
In the United States, the police-, prison-, and military-industrial complexes serve as the engine that fuels racial capitalism. The expansion of these various but interconnected forms of oppression rests on the subjugation of incarcerated and colonized peoples and on the exploitation of land stolen from Indigenous nations. The abolition of such is necessary in achieving an equitable and sustain...
Strategy • 21.09.2020
A degrowth strategy for societal transformation needs to combine several approaches, reflecting the plurality of degrowth as a movement. To support the myriad of bottom-up alternatives that are already out there, degrowth should put a special emphasis on strategies which build power outside of the capitalist system, be very cautious of those which merely seek to tame capitalism, but also integr...
Money • 16.09.2020
I feel personally guilty for the pandemic. At the beginning of March, I published my PhD dissertation “The Political Economy of Degrowth”, whose introduction ended with the following words: “Let me invite you into a wild thought experiment. Imagine that in one year, it will all stop. In precisely 365 days, the economy will come to a halt. Imagine the economy gone and all of us frozen in social ...
