Library

By: Lucy Ford, Gabriela Kuetting

The Global Environmental Politics literature tends to focus on institutional and governance frameworks as the solution to global environmental problems rather than on the systemic constraints that limit the potential effectiveness of governance efforts. Part of the problem with institutional frameworks to reform global environmental governance is insufficient attention paid to deeper structural...

By: Luigi Pellizzoni

Prefigurative mobilizations replace protest with direct action, means and ends becoming ideally one and the same. Analytically this entails a two-step movement: first, subtraction (withdrawal) from some arrangement; second, affirmation of an alternative. Both positive and critical assessments focus on the strength or lack of affirmativeness. However, as Foucault and governmentality studies have...

By: Dorothea Elena Schoppek

Capitalism is often modernised and stabilised by its very critics. Gramsci called this paradox a ‘passive revolution’. What are the pitfalls through which critique becomes absorbed? This question is taken up using a Cultural Political Economy approach for analysing the resistant potential of ‘degrowth discourses’ against the neoliberal hegemony. Degrowth advocates an economy without growth in o...

By: Silvia Federici

By: Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson

A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement. As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement dema...

By: Joëlle Saey-Volckrick

The phenomenon of the rebound effect has been known for decades now, yet it is very much absent from resource efficiency policies. One of the reasons is that there is a plethora of different estimates for the rebound effect, depending not only on the country and the sector studied but also on the level and type of rebound effect addressed. This chapter aims, in a first step, at enhancing the th...

By: Philipp K. Wegerer, Monica Nadegger

Resistance against tourism development has become a key analytical domain among tourism researchers. Yet, little attention has been paid to understanding online resistance against tourism development as a discursive phenomenon. This inquiry provides a discourse analytical study regarding an online petition against a large-scale infrastructure project in the Austrian Alps. Employing an analytica...

By: Rolf F.H. Schroeder

This article sheds new light on the development of complementary currencies. Based on a comprehensive survey of the literature, the study questions conventional interpretations of these social innovations. The article challenges the view that money is the only feature that complementary currencies have in common. The author argues that in addition to the ways in which connectivity takes place, ...

By: Konstantin Stadler, Daniel Horen Greenford, Timothy Crownshaw, Corey Lesk, Damon Matthews

The tertiary (or 'service') sector is commonly identified as a relatively clean part of the economy. Accordingly, sustainable development policy routinely invokes 'tertiarization'—a shift from primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary sector—as a means of decoupling economic growth from environmental damages. However, this argument does not account for environmental impacts related to t...

By: Katharina Zimmermann, Paolo Graziano

Attention towards topics such as environmental pollution, climate change, or biodiversity has strongly increased in the last years. The struggles to balance market powers and ecological sustainability somehow evoke memories of the early days of European welfare states, when social protection emerged as a means to prevent industrial capitalism from disruptive social tensions due to excessive soc...

By: Pinar Ertör-Akyazi

The expansion of industrial fishing via technological advancements and heavy subsidies in the Global North has been a significant factor leading to the current global fishery crisis. The growth of the industrial fleet led to an initial increase in global catches from the 1950s to the 1990s; yet, today, several marine fish stocks are harvested at unsustainable rates, and catches are stagnati...

By: Tuuli Hirvilammi

Welfare states are highly dependent on the economic growth paradigm. Especially in social democratic welfare states, growth dependence has historically been accompanied by the notion of a virtuous circle, which ensures that social policy measures do not conflict with economic growth. However, this policy idea ignores the environmental impacts that are now challenging human wellbeing and welfare...

By: Adeline Otto, Dimitri Gugushvili

In the face of accelerating global warming and attendant natural disasters, it is clear that governments all over the world eventually have to take measures to mitigate the most adverse consequences of climate change. However, the costs of these measures are likely to force governments to reconsider some of their tax and spending priorities, of which social spending is the largest expenditure i...

By: Riccardo Mastini

Presentation [part of the standard session "Institutional Change 2"] The Green New Deal offers a powerful vision for how to deploy industrial policies to coordinate the overhaul of a country’s energy system and decarbonize its manufacturing and agricultural sectors. However given the elusiveness of absolute decoupling degrowth policies must accompany this transition. Presenters: Riccardo ...

By: Steffen Lange, Tilman Santarius, Johanna Pohl

This article investigates the effect of digitalization on energy consumption. Using an analytical model, we investigate four effects: (1) direct effects from the production, usage and disposal of information and communication technologies (ICT), (2) energy efficiency increases from digitalization, (3) economic growth from increases in labor and energy productivities and (4) sectoral change/te...

By: Louison Cahen-Fourot, Nelo Magalhães

This paper aims at integrating macroeconomic and institutional analyses of long run dynamics of capitalism with material flow analysis. We investigate the links between accumulation and socio-metabolic regimes by studying French capitalism from a material perspective since 1948. We characterize its social metabolism both in production- and consumption-based approaches. We show that the periodiz...

By: Milena Arias Schreiber, Ida Wingren, Sebastian LInke

The EU Blue Growth agenda is being implemented at a time when European coastal fisheries and traditional fishing communities are struggling to survive or have already vanished from areas where they used to flourish. Driven by the strong conviction that current disadvantaged and vulnerable coastal fishers still have a central role to play in rural development, local level initiatives are cal...

By: Timmo Krüger

Presentation [part of the standard session "Regional Transformations"] Buen Vivir goes beyond criticism and rejection. It has an utopian surplus. European activists adopted it to make positive visions thinkable and expressible. The fluctuating relevance of Buen Vivir can be traced back to the course of political struggles both in the Andean countries and in Europe. Presenters: Timmo Krüge...

By: Andy Stirling, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Patrick Schmid, Goetz Walter, Gordon MacKerron

Two of the most widely emphasized contenders for carbon emissions reduction in the electricity sector are nuclear power and renewable energy. While scenarios regularly question the potential impacts of adoption of various technology mixes in the future, it is less clear which technology has been associated with greater historical emission reductions. Here, we use multiple regression analyse...

By: Norie Tamura, Hein Mallee

Presentation [part of the standard session "Regional Transformations"] Embedding human lives again into the local ecosystem may help to reverse overexploitation and to foster degrowth lifestyles. To discuss transition strategies for alternative lifestyles, we analyze two niche developments in Japan: the fishery-forest movement and the self-employed forestry movement. Presenters: Norie Tam...