Library

By: Mohsen Abdelmoumen

An interview with Dr. Stuart Newman on the excesses of biotechnology and its ramifications with the world of money. Newman is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY, United States.

By: Paul Robbins

Imagining progressive environmental futures, especially among critical scholars, can be a fraught enterprise. While some theorists and activists turn towards the social emancipatory power of modern technological interventions at scale, others point to the revolutionary power of degrowth, simplicity, and conviviality. These competing political geographical imaginaries are often strident in their...

By: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Alexander Paulsson, Stefania Barca

Since the 1970s, the degrowth idea has been proposed by scholars, public intellectuals and activists as a powerful call to reject the obsession of neoliberal capitalism with economic growth, an obsession which continues apace despite the global ecological crisis and rising inequalities. In the past decade, degrowth has gained momentum and become an umbrella term for various social movements...

By: the Support Group

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

By: David Graeber

A book review by David Graeber of Robert Skidelsky's new book Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

By: Lukas Hardt, Karen Turner, Paul Brockway, Grant Allan, John Barrett, Peter McGregor, Andrew Ross, Kim Swales, Marco Sakai

This study investigates how an increase in exports (a key pillar in the UK Industrial Strategy) could impact energy and industrial policy by comparing two types of energy-economy models. Achieving the targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions set out in the UK Climate Change Act will require a significant transformation in the UK's energy system. At the same time, the government is pursuing...

By: Stefanie Sievers-Glotzbach, Julia Tschersich

A fundamental transformation towards sustainability in face of complex social-ecological challenges needs to initiate deep changes of those incumbent system structures that support unsustainable trajectories, while at the same time encouraging a diversity of alternative practices. A review of transformation approaches towards sustainability shows that these do not (sufficiently) link processe...

By: Romain Svartzman, Dominique Dron, Etienne Espagne

This paper takes stock of the achievements and gaps of the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics, which has brought insights from specific schools of macroeconomics—most notably post-Keynesian—to ecological economics, with a strong emphasis on the endogeneity of money. Ecological macroeconomics has proposed fiscal, monetary and prudential reforms to boost ‘green’ investments, and develope...

By: Nathan Barlow

Two movements have emerged on either side of the Atlantic with the aim of transforming the economy in the U.S. and Europe –the new economy movement and the degrowth movement respectively. Both movements gained momentum after the financial crisis, and have since flourished nascent social movements composed of practitioners, academics, and activists loosely organized through

By: Alberto Huerta

A material efficiency strategy, achieved through investment in labour, can potentially generate the ecological benefits and avoid its rebound effects. This “type” of efficiency constitutes a fundamentally anti-capitalistic behaviour, while at the same time allowing the survival of an enterprise in a capitalistic system. Petridis argued, that practices and institutions grounded in the current sy...

By: Neera M. Singh

Struggles for Environmental Justice, more widespread in the global South, are often framed as traditional societies defending “old ways of life”; while degrowth, a relatively new movement in the global North is seen as striving for a “new ways of life.” I argue that both assert or aspire for other ways of being and belonging to the world and open possibilities for post-capitalist futures. In th...

By: Andrew Fanning

Ten years ago G20 leaders committed a staggering $5 trillion of public funds to rescue the banks and restore growth during the largest economic contraction in modern times. The economies of an unprecedented number of countries — and their associated environmental footprints — experienced very low growth over the decade that followed.

By: Jonathan Barth, Timothée Parrique, François Briens, Christian Kerschner, Joachim H. Spangenberg, Alejo Kraus-Polk, Anna Kuokkanen

Is it possible to enjoy both economic growth and environmental sustainability? This question is a matter of fierce political debate between green growth and post-growth advocates. Considering what is at stake, a careful assessment to determine whether the scientific foundations behind this decoupling hypothesis are robust or not is needed. This report reviews the empirical and theoretical...

By: Diana Vela Almeida

On October 1st, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno announced a series of economic measures for the country, including the elimination of gasoline and diesel subsidies and the liberalization of their prices, as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These measures led to the eruption of massive nationwide protests for eleven consecutive days,

By: Timothée Parrique

If making the degrowth case was like baking a cake, disproving the plausibility of green growth would be the equivalent of turning the oven on. Decoupling is only “a myth” or “a fantasy,” some would say, a notorious fallacy that requires as much attention as the confabulations of Flat Earthers. And yet, faith in decoupling

By: George Martine, Jose Eustaquio Alves

Scientists warn that human activity in the Anthropocene is causing the transgression of several planetary boundaries. The population/environment/development equation has become insoluble. This paper reviews the trajectory of climate change and discusses the shortcomings of ongoing efforts to address it. It analyzes the current crisis in global governance, fostered by widespread disenchantment w...

By: Colleen Schneider, Elena Hofferberth, Jonathan Barth, Lukas Hardt

Given the strategic indeterminacy of the degrowth movement that has been discussed in earlier articles within this series, we will consider the role that policy may play within the broader scope of a degrowth transformation and as one important focus within a plurality of movements. Specifically, working to move the focus of policy towards instruments

By: Nathan Barlow

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,

By: Rowan Alcock

This paper investigates a grassroots Chinese movement called the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM). Drawing on field visits, surveys, interviews and social media posts regarding a NRRM project and relevant literature I link the NRRM to the degrowth movement. This is likely the first research analysing a Chinese grass-roots movement from a degrowth theoretical perspective. This link is de...

By: Joëlle Saey-Volckrick, Andro Rilović

The time has come for ESEE to take a firmer stand and address the impossibility of tackling the monumental ecological crisis we are facing with partial “solutions”. In order to remain relevant ESEE needs to empower its members to speak the truth, confront power and focus their energies on finding meaningful, holistic and truly transformative