Library

By: Robert Fletcher, Bram Büscher

A post-capitalist manifesto for conservation Conservation needs a revolution. This is the only way it can contribute to the drastic transformations needed to come to a truly sustainable model of development. The good news is that conservation is ready for revolution. Heated debates about the rise of the Anthropocene and the current ‘sixth extinction’ crisis demonstrate an urgent need and desir...

By: Viviana Asara

Abstract: Under regimes of austerity, social movements´ transformative eco-politics may appear endangered. What kinds of environmentalism and radical imaginaries can unfold in social movements in crisis-ridden societies? I focus on the ‘movement of the squares’ during its post-encampment phase, with a case study of three urban projects of the Indignados movement in Barcelona. Observation of the...

By: Ruth Falkenberg, David Fox

Standard session (discussion following 2 presentations) Social Work, Ecoanxiety, and Peer Pressure Ecoanxiety is a significant component of the global climate crisis; yet it is mostly absent from collective understanding regarding the Grand Challenge to create social responses to the changing environment. Social work has an opportunity to employ positive peer pressure throughout the disci...

By: Maria Paulitsch, Sven-David Pfau

Workshop In diesem Einführungsworkshop machen wir uns mit den Steigerungszwängen der kapitalistischen Gesellschaftsordnung und dem Denken von wachstumskritischen Ansätzen vertraut. Was sind die Ursprünge, Eigenheiten und Ziele der verschiedenen Strömungen? Dabei schauen wir auf Gefahren und Potentiale der verschiedenen Perspektiven für einen emanzipatorischen Wandel zum Guten Leben für Alle!...

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: 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: Aaron Timms

Aaron Timms shares his impressions of the Degrowth Summer school, and life at Can Decreix in Cerbère. This article appeared in The New Republic, on January 27th 2020

By: Nina Treu, Matthias Schmelzer, Corinna Burkhart

After decades on the defensive, the left has once again started to embrace positive visions of the future.

By: Dario Krpan, Frédéric Basso, Tom Smith , Lucía Muñoz Sueiro, Justus Baumann, Vegard Beyer

Standard session (discussion following 4 presentations) The Psychology of Degrowth Adoption: Insights from the Perspectives of the Utopian Impulse and the Regulatory Focus Theory - video We investigated how to influence people’s support for degrowth, and whether such influence may be subject to individual differences regarding transformative social change. To do so, we adopted the regulat...

By: Laura Lanzoni

"A societal change towards sustainability, can not succeed without a transformation of work and society based around work, so becomes extremely important and fundamental reconsider the current social – economic system, in order to create a path that can lead to a sustainable society, where people and nature can collaborate to find their own spaces, their own times and to listen to their needs, ...

By: Markus Wissen, Melanie Pichler, Nora Krenmayr

Workshop In this Special Session, results of the CON-LABOUR research project will be presented, which during more than two years explored the opportunities and challenges of a social-ecological transformation in the Austrian automotive industry from the perspective of employees and their representations. We provide insight into the political economy of Austrian supplier industry and reflect ...

By: Oliver Parodi, Andreas Seebacher, Helena Trenks, Sarah Meyer-Soylu, Richard Beecroft, Annika Fricke

Presentation [part of the standard session "Mobilität, Transformationsdesign und imperiale Lebensweise"] Self-experiments offer an opportunity for testing sustainable practices in a limited period of time concerning their effects and their fit with the rest of life. So they are an easy entry into the urgently needed social transformation towards sustainability. Based on our experience in the...

By: Timmo Krüger, Anton Brokow-Loga, Frank Eckhardt, Evelyn Markoni, Kris Krois, Viola Schulze Dieckhoff, Christian Lamker

Special session Book presentation: How do we want to live, work, relax today and tomorrow? How do we create a good life for everyone in the city? While niche initiatives are already beginning to answer these questions, there is still a lack of comprehensive concepts and approaches to transformation that would outline a fundamentally different, solidarity-based city. The Degrowth City (Postwa...

By: Jonathan Barth

Presentation [part of the standard session "Institutional Change 2"] The session introduces an online toolbox to guide policy-making beyond growth. Based on a literature review, we structure post-growth policies along 17 objectives, 101 transformative changes and 260 instruments. The framework shows what means other than economic growth can achieve political ends. Presenters: Jonathan Bar...

By: Michael Deflorian, Karoline Kalke, Roberto Sciarelli, An, Pandian, Oxana Lopatina

Standard session (discussion following 4 presentations) The Awesome Life: Why Degrowthers Need to Talk about the Feeling of Entropy - video Critical views of consumerism are widely shared among degrowthers. However, there is a risk of overlooking a particular affective dimension of consumption: the ‘entropic feeling’. The latter is triggered when we surpass the biophysical limits of our h...

By: Tim Crownshaw

"In place of the GND, we might be better served by scaling back our ambition and embracing a Green New Direction. This alternative could preserve many of the same essential goals, but would need to forgo the use of enticing promises to motivate action and instead do the hard work of building solidarity and commitment to collectively face an energy future which will be more complex, more unpredi...

By: Jana Brandl, Irina Zielinska

In the face of an increasing awareness of environmental issues and the urgent need to tackle them without shifting the burden onto the most vulnerable social groups, calls for a socio-economic transformation are growing louder. However, there is no consensus on what transformative strategies should look like. Within the German-language literature one can broadly distinguish two transformative p...

By: Dirk Raith

Presentation [part of the standard session "Co-operatives, work and degrowth"] “Post-growth organizations” do face a dilemma: Growth allows them to increase their good impact. At the same time, it may have bad effects on themselves, as organizations. Against that background, we discuss various “cooperative growth strategies beyond growth” that promise to resolve that dilemma. Presenters: ...

By: Michael Löwy

Should the ecological left aim to reduce all consumption, or to radically transform the prevalent type of consumption?  

By: Antonia Ney, Joy-Fabienne Lösel

Presentation [part of the standard session "Transformation, Design and Utopias"] The central question of socio-ecological transformation is whether it will take place “by design” or “by disaster” (Sommer/Welzer 2014:27). In the discourse this question is rhetorically answered with “by design”. But what role does design play in social-ecological transformation? The lecture will present growth...