Library

By: Madalina Balau

In Romania all parents want to offer their children a better life and a better future, sometimes with their own sacrifice, yet the years following communist regime have brought unsustainable development, present in environmental degradation and social insecurity. After living in communism and knowing how bad it was, people have been accustoming for the last 26 years, to accept the lesser evil, ...

By: Helen Zaiser

Overcoming consumerism is one objective of the degrowth movement, to be achieved through a great social transformation by building alternatives. It inherently embraces material needs downscaling, self-sufficiency, voluntary simplicity and getting clear of neoliberal capitalist logics. Food cooperatives have the potential to embody such features, constituting a strategy for new social movements....

By: Julia Désirée Huber

The Greek island of Samothraki was food self-sufficient up until the mid 1960s. This paper analyses, from a socio-metabolic perspective, how the changes in Mediterranean food production and consumption have influenced the island’s food consumption patterns over the past 50 years. A food consumption survey was conducted to assess the current food consumption patterns of the local population of S...

By: Barbara Muraca

In her keynote speech, Barbara Muraca will outline the key strategies for degrowth, specifically reflecting on the following topics, which are also the guiding topics of the third day of the conference: -Changing networks of production and consumption and driving political action -Degrowth as a fundamentally social challenge, involving structural changes of social practices, institutions and ...

By: Julia Steinberger, Sylvia Lorek, Edina Vadovics, Antonietta Di Giulio, Philip J Vergragt, Marlyne Sahakian

Special session proposal submitted by SCORAI Europe, organized by Sylvia Lorek, Marlyne Sahakian, Edina Vadovics and Philip Vergragt. This session introduces degrowth and transformations from the viewpoint of sustainable consumption, understood as an attractive, equitable and empowering ‘new normal’ that involves a good life for all in a constrained world. Based on a SCORAI workshop hosted pri...

By: Shirin Betzler

Knowledge societies that promote equality and innovation over material wealth and production are unthinkable without modern information and communication technologies (ICT). However, there has been growing awareness about the ecological as well as economic and social challenges related to the growth of ICT, such as environmental pollution through the invasive extraction of natural resources, or...

By: Hana Hrstkova

Sustainable food systems signal a need to return to local, organic and low footprint food provisions, implying also reduction of waste and packaging. Rather than looking at the waste issue from the post-consumption perspective (approaches that have dominated over the recent decades), this paper attempts to shed more light on the prevention of consumer packaging waste through unpackaged shoppi...

By: Dr. Ágnes Zsóka, Dr. Maria Csutora

The concept of degrowth has serious implications on consumption. The challenge lies in the most probable necessity of consumption reduction which is still an unpopular idea today. Situations of coercive consumption reduction indicate various individual reactions and severe impacts on subjective wellbeing. Our previous research aimed to analyse how individuals create resilient adaptation strateg...

By: Students of the Summer School on Degrowth, Environmental Justice

A sketch by students of the Summer School on Degrowth and Environmental Justice

By: Barbara Unmüßig, Lili Fuhr, Thomas Fatheuer

The economic and ecological bases of a general prosperity are in danger, the gap between rich and poor is widening. The concept of the Green Economy offers a new model, based primarily on large-scale technological solutions. But the Green Economy cares little about politics, barely registers human rights, does not recognize social actors and suggests the possibility of reform without conflict. ...

By: AG Kritischer Konsum

RLS: Wachsende Müllberge, steigender Meeresspiegel, vergiftete Böden, Kriege um Ressourcen, tote ArbeiterInnen in Fabriken und Bergwerken: Produktion, Transport, Bewerbung, Vertrieb und Entsorgung unserer täglich konsumierten Güter und Dienstleistungen haben schwerwiegende Folgen. Gegenwehr scheint aussichtslos. Denn die Welt wirkt unendlich komplex und die Möglichkeit, politisch Einfluss auszu...

By: Alex Jensen

From the text: . . . One incontrovertible conclusion of all this, it seems to me, is that it is precisely the increasing scale of economic activity – of ‘the economy’ – that is the heart of the multiple interlocking crises that beset societies and the earth today. The relentlessly expansionist logic of the system is inimical to life, to the world, even to genuine well-being. If we wish to inste...

By: Eric Pineault

Abstract: The paper aims to deepen our understanding of advanced capitalism's drivers of growth by drawing on some theoretical insights from radical political economy and ecological economics. Through an institutional analysis of the structure of advanced capitalism as a monetary production economy, it is possible to propose a theory of accumulation that explains the tight coupling of overprodu...

By: Joachim Spangenberg

Keywords: Sustainable consumption, sufficiency, Great Transformation, satisfiers and needs, good life, labour, design, human rights Sustainable Consumption Transitions Series Issue 6, 25

By: Jens Rommel, Jörg Radtke, Gerrit von Jorck, Franziska Mey, Özgür Yildiz

Keywords: Cooperatives; Energy transition; Conviviality; Sustainable consumption

By: Samuel Alexander

Abstract: How would the ordinary middle-class citizen deal with a lifestyle of radical simplicity? Radical simplicity does not mean poverty, which is involuntary and full of suffering and anxiety, and thus universally undesirable. Rather, it means a very low but biophysically sufficient material standard of living. This chapter directly addresses the issue of “two types of austerity”, arguing t...

By: Jason Burke Murphy

From the text: . . . Giorgios Kallis’ keynote presentation steered me towards my provisional answer to these questions. He supports a basic income alongside the promotion of universal access to low-consumption versions of public transportation, education, and health. He sees this as a way of shrinking the destructive aspects of our economy, driven by capital, and increasing other parts of econo...

By: Harald Welzer

Info des Verlags: Bestseller-Autor Harald Welzer legt mit ›Die smarte Diktatur. Der Angriff auf unsere Freiheit‹ eine neue und frische Analyse der großen gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhänge in Deutschland vor, eine umfassende Diagnose der Gegenwart für alle politisch Interessierten. Unsere Gesellschaft verändert sich radikal, aber fast unsichtbar. Wir steuern auf einen Totalitarismus zu. Das Priv...

By: Kristina Deselaers

reparatur-initiativen.de: RepairKids ist ein Leitfaden für alle Reparatur-Initiativen und Interessierte, die ihr Tätigkeitsfeld gern erweitern möchten und mit Kindern und Jugendlichen zusammen reparieren wollen. Kristina Deselaers, Initiatorin von RepairKids und Repair Café Sasel, hat ihre Erfahrungen in diesem Manual verschriftlicht und wir laden nun gemeinsam ein, das Konzept RepairKids zu er...

By: Rotherbaron

Teaser: Zwischen Green New Deal und Abwrackprämie: Über Glück, Lebenszufriedenheit und Wohlstandskonzeptionen einer postmaterialistischen Gesellschaft Aus dem Text: . . . Wie man sieht, bleibt die Definition dessen, was unter “Glück” zu verstehen sei, in der bhutanischen Verfassung absichtlich vage. Keinesfalls beansprucht der Staat, den Einzelnen vorzuschreiben, auf welchem Weg sie glücklic...