Library

By: Miklós Antal, Bence Lukács

Working time reduction may be one of the great achievements of the 21st century, potentially delivering environmental, social, and economic benefits. However, implementation at the level of organizations is not straightforward. Reliable data on working hours are needed to track changes, so the limited availability or poor quality of data may prevent certain types of reductions. Here we explore ...

By: Anitra Nelson, Joshua Lockyer, Jenny Pickerill, Tendai Chitewere, Natasha Cornea, Rachel Macrorie, Jan Malý Blažek

Cities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are sociomaterially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever-increasing demands on the natural environment and generating dangerous pollutants and emissions. Current approache...

By: Joëlle Saey-Volckrick, Simon Tremblay-Pepin, Krystof Beaucaire

The integration of environmental issues into democratic economic planning models is the object of ongoing debates. Environmental factors cannot be reduced only to economic indicators, rendering economic models unable to properly account for ecological limits. By focusing on our societies’ biophysical needs, the concept of social metabolism opens new avenues to answer such problems. This paper p...

By: Tahir Karakaş

Since the 2000s, French politics has been reshaped by emergencies imposed by the ecological crisis, spurred on by a consumer society, problems of developmentalism as ideology and a belief in endless exponential economic growth. Today, the ecological question has become commonplace for both the left and the right (and even for far-right movements). This process of restructuring political life re...

By: Milica Kočović De Santo, Stéphanie Eileen Domptail

The chapter opens up key dichotomies characterizing the Western cartesian worldview and modernity to shed light on the consequences of an understanding of the world characterized by binaries and to open up the doors towards a new space of flourishing. We understand decolonization efforts in economic thinking and science as attempts to destabilize this binary world organization and to create a n...

By: Ting Wang

As the world’s second-largest economy and the biggest greenhouse gas emitter in total terms, China plays a significant role in addressing climate change and promoting effective action. While gender mainstreaming has been adoptedin the UN system since 1995 and has subsequently been incorporated intodifferent national policies, itis rarely recognizedin China’s climate policies. However, enhancing...

By: Tamara Schneider

Without doubt, anthropogenic climate change has increased the risk of ‘natural’ disasters—and the impact on society will only become more severe. Art history studies societal phenomena such as culture, politics and economics through the lens of artworks, and can thus also be applied to climate-related disasters. But is there a universal response in art creation to catastrophes—particularly in i...

By: Stéphanie Eileen Domptail, Jennifer Hirsch, Ernst-August Nuppenau

In Western Europe, farmers are embedded in a secular culture, characterized by a worldview where (hu)mans and nature are separated and opposed, capitalism rules exchanges, nature is rationally exploited, and the process of food production was long ignored. This worldview is hegemon and questioned as colonizing. Agroecological approaches and practices are said to enable farmers to entertain fund...

By: Katharina Richter

This chapter brings degrowth into conversation with Buen Vivir/sumak kawsay, an alternative to development from Ecuador. The Anthropocene is a crisis marked by multiple ecological crises, but also by dualistic and hierarchical structures of oppression. It’s a civilisationary crisis that needs to be confronted in all its intersecting dimensions. Anthropocentrism is one of the defining features o...

By: Inga Barbara Kuźma

The paper discusses the concepts of degrowth and decolonisation in the context of the tensions of the Cold War in socialist Poland of the 70-ies. At that time, the Berlin Wall symbolised the divisions between two geopolitical structures, namely the West, perceived as a guarantor of democracy, and the East, dominated by the Soviet sphere of influence. However, both sides were full of anticipatio...

By: Milica Kočović De Santo

Until the 60s, in Yugoslavia, the emphasis was mainly on the economic policy and instruments—in a narrower sense. Traditionally unprofitable activities started to appear to capture in a more excellent picture of development. The culture slowly became an integral part of social being by allowing the politics and policy to become social constructs (through self-governance socialism) and not the e...

By: Milica Kočović De Santo, Stéphanie Eileen Domptail, Jennifer Hirsch

Degrowth Decolonization and Development offers a collection of seven original case study analyses, followed by a synopsis of concepts contributing to decolonize development by shaking the hegemony of the Western paradigm. The participating researchers met when presenting their work in Decolonization and Degrowth panels within two International Degrowth Conferences held in July (organized by Man...

By: Charles Stevenson

A review of Degrowth & Strategy: How to Bring about Social-Ecological Transformation

By: Hubert Buch-Hansen, Iana Nesterova

While the notion of degrowth has gained traction in recent times, scholarship on degrowth transformations has yet to provide a conceptualisation that captures key attributes of what such transformations entail: (1) the reduction of some items and the expansion of others and (2) profound changes in various dimensions of social being, including in how humans interact with nature, non-humans, and ...

By: Koenraad Priels

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive and workable answer for addressing the socio-ecological crises that result from the severely flawed socio-economic system that is the capitalist world system to date. It presents a fundamental first step towards correcting this system, by addressing and correcting the monetary system whereupon a global kleptocracy has been constructed. At ...

By: Adam Pomieciński

This chapter focuses on the radical activities and actions of the environmental movement related to the exploitation of gold in Amulsar, as well as global growth issues in the context of anti-capitalist logic and degrowth revision. The Amulsar gold mine is located 170 kilometers south of the capital of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan. It was created by the international concern Lydian Internat...

By: Milica Kočović De Santo, Stéphanie Eileen Domptail

Degrowth Decolonization and Development reveals common underlying cultural roots to the multiple current crises. It shows that culture is an essential sphere to initiate fundamental changes and solutions as it brings about transformative imaginaries on a theoretical, political and practical level. The book focusses on the interplay between culture and the environment, society and the economy. I...

By: Azize Aslan

This book looks at the anti-capitalist economy and the organization of social relations in the context of the revolution and autonomy of Rojava (Kurdistan-Syria). It questions both the limitations and the historical problems of the phenomenon of revolution, and the conflicts and contradictions that emerge in this process. It also draws from the conflicts and contradictions the author has cons...

By: Cecilia Paulsson, Anders Nilsson

Film

By: Federico Demaria

Introduces the burgeoning fields of ecological economics and political ecology Presents an in-depth overview on the informal recycling sector in the Global South that, according to the World Bank, employs 1% of the urban population in developing countries The struggles by informal recyclers are discussed as a case of urban 'environmentalism of the poor', because by defending their livelihoo...