Workshop

The idea of the workshop Let’s Talk: Debt Meets Degrowth is to bring closer together two interlinked (international) communities, one working on debt and the other on degrowth, that share the same policy agenda, but had not had many opportunities to advance their common strategic debates. Many conferences and debates on debt or degrowth have taken place, but without sufficient communication and collaboration between the two communities. To build on this momentum and bring cooperation to a new, stronger and more creative level, therefore invited actors from the debt and degrowth movements come together and talk, share their understanding of ongoing work, exchange their experience in political and social organizing and, most importantly, discuss possibilities for collaboration. The Covid-19 crisis is already unleashing a debt crisis in the global South. How can calls for a debt jubilee be amplified by the degrowth movement, and how will policies employed in the global North in the wake of Covid-19 support, rather than further derail a just transition in the South? We are currently in the midst of a climate emergency. Economic growth is a fundamental driver of climate and ecological breakdown. Now more than ever, we must move beyond GDP growth as a measure of societal well-being in order to reduce the material and energy throughput of our economy and move towards greater social justice. Our current debt-fuelled monetary and financial system, however, presents a pro-growth bias while fostering inequality and instability. Therefore, the status quo of money and finance is one of the impasses to achieving an environmentally sustainable and socially just economy. It is essential that we develop a deep understanding of the links between money, growth, environment and inequality, and collaborate in our efforts to identify avenues for further research and action on money and finance. Such avenues may include, for example, green investment programmes, public banking, overt monetary financing, complementary currencies, modern debt jubilees, and international monetary reform. In bringing together thought-leaders in this field, we hope to have a productive conversation about where we ought to focus our efforts in escaping growth dependency.

Presenters: Tilman Hartley (ICTA, AUB), Mark Perera (EURODAD), Ajda Pistotnik (EnaBanda Association)

Language: English with German translation

Technical details: WS J3_Let's talk.mp4, MPEG-4 video, 186MB

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