Library

By: Claudia Gómez Portugal

Abstract: The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities, the environmental, social and existential crisis, among others, increasingly evident the unsustainable of the development model. Address this systemic crisis involves recognizing the need to create new structures and forms of organization. Its necessary a new education to generate a genuine change, mainly...

By: Gilles Renout

Abstract: The key ideas of "ActivCampus" are the following: a) It picks up two sorts of CRISIS many members of the University are suffering from: First, a leak of "sense" in what, why and how they are doing their work and how the University is organizing the cooperation between individuals and groups. Secondly, corporeal diseases and imbalances due to working structures that are not healthy for...

By: Maurizio Ruzzene

Abstract: The current financial crises involve economic growth and its monetary institutions from many points of view, requiring widespread institutional changes. This paper will mainly focus on the structural problems that arise when financing Public Economies and Care Activities (PE&CA) in the tertiary age, of post growth or Actual de-growth. For many reasons PE&CA cannot systematical...

By: Leslie Safran

Abstract: Many families turn to home education neighbourhood groups for support, resources and guidance. This paper will briefly outline the context of home education in the UK and US, describe three different types of home education neighbourhood group as communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), and examine how the members of these communities learn through participation in such groups. It will...

By: Ricardo Orzi

Abstract: The present work tries to recognize the importance of social-complementary currency systems for the sustainability of a social and ecological economy. The official currency and the current monetary systems promote an approach of perpetual growth, the predominance of the relation of competition in opposition to cooperation, and a mechanistic paradigm of society like a sum of individual...

By: Silke Oetsch

Abstract: In this contribution I try to develop a typology of „progressive“ and „conformist“ systems of finance in projects of transition aiming at providing a set of criteria for civil society projects and preventing the political exploitation of progressive movements by conformist forces. By progressive I mean projects that promote the logic of provisioning, whereas conformist indicate those ...

By: Helena Jeronimo

Abstract: Waste reveals a great deal about values and how we live, the economy that produces it, and our notions of development. An economy driven by the compulsion to make and consume have formed a world in which the lifetime of “durable” products tends to be shortened to that of “consumables,” while nonrenewable natural resource stocks are consumed like renewable production flows. This paper ...

By: Mònica Serlavós

degrowth, education, transition, values

By: Richard Westra

Abstract: The “end of growth” still leaves questions for the design of future sustainable societies. The argument of this paper is that economic choices for the new societies are not unlimited and forms of economy cannot simply be conjured up ex nihilo. Anthropologist David Graeber, economic historian Karl Polanyi and political economist Karl Marx each have produced typologies of possible types...

By: Mark Lindley, Jan Otto Andersson

Abstract: A traditional, persistently mercantilist tendency of nation states has prevented them from cooperating sufficiently on macro-ecological problems of unprecedented urgency in the 21st century. The strength of this tendency is due historically to the fact that nation states, and the kind of patriotism which they engender, emerged together with internationally competitive capitalism. We p...

By: Ernst Hollander

Abstract: 40 years ago it was harder to opt out of 'the growth society', in the US than in Sweden. At home I expected good education disregarding income. Since then Sweden has been 'normalised'. In Polanyian terms – disembedded. The same forces applies mutatis mutandis to nation states. One factor is the arrangements for international flows of finance. An illustration is the rising ratio of glo...

By: Oliver Richters, Ferdin, Wenzlaff, Christian Kimmich

Abstract: If an ongoing growth is considered impossible or undesirable, the growth dependence of man-made structures such as social security systems have to be carefully revised. In the post-growth debate, the monetary system based on credit money combined with positive interest rates is often criticized and accused of causing a growth imperative. The contribution refutes this oversimplified in...

By: Angelika Zahrnt, Jana Gebauer

Abstract: Businesses are not only driving contemporary ideas of progressive economic growth. They are also driven by them as they often perceive an economic and societal pressure to permanently grow in size. At the same time, many companies face stagnant or shrinking markets, resource scarcities, crises or far-reaching demographic trends. Academic and political debates on limits to growth and p...

By: Wolfgang Fellner

Abstract: A time use perspective in economics has to recognise that time is more than an input to commodities, produced by households. Time is not money! If anything, time is life. How we spend our time provides us with skills as well as information. It determines the formation of habits and preferences. The activities we pursue with great motivation and enthusiasm, be it paid work or any other...

By: María Ybarra Enguix

Immaterial Heritage, urban planning, identity, collective memory, know-how

By: Uchita de Zoysa

Abstract: Given the inequities and unsustainability of the present model of development, the world needs profound transformations in the fundamental values and organizing principles of society. The challenge is to recognize the legitimacy of the global polity as an outer layer of the nested system of affiliation that reaches across regions and places, and to build the processes of democratic gl...

By: Rita Calvario

Back-to-the-land, agri-food downscaling, degrowth transition

By: Saamah Abdallah

Abstract: BRAINPOoL was a 2.5 year project funded by the EU FP7 funding stream to understand and explore the barriers to the use of Beyond GDP indicators in policy-making, and to identify opportunities to accelerate that use. The project involved a broad range of activities including a review of Beyond GDP initiatives, interviews with Beyond GDP indicator developers and the policy-makers and po...

By: Erwin Wagenhofer

alphabet-film.com: . . . Denn neuerdings weht an den Schulen ein rauer Wind. „Leistung“ als Fetisch der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft ist weltweit zum unerbittlichen Maß aller Dinge geworden. Doch die einseitige Ausrichtung auf technokratische Lernziele und auf die fehlerfreie Wiedergabe isolierter Wissensinhalte lässt genau jene spielerische Kreativität verkümmern, die uns helfen könnte, ohne Angst ...

By: Katarina Sehm Patomäki

Paper presented at the Conference “New economic concepts in the current European crises“. Abstract: From the paper: The euro, a result of the political project to consolidate peace in Europe, has now created new divisions between the peoples it was meant to unite. Countries with surpluses in their trade balances rule over the economic policies of those with deficits: and the decision-making ...