Library

By: Luis I. Prádanos

From the text: ". . . In the next few pages, I will lead with the way Spanish authors I mentioned unveil some of the unscientific assumptions behind the neoclassical and neoliberal economics that currently dominate the global scenario in general, and the European Union debate in particular. I then will analyze the common ground within the alternatives proposed by these writers. [. . .] Finally,...

By: Therese Bennich

During the 40 years that have passed since the publication of The Limits to Growth, the concept of degrowth and system dynamics have sometimes developed separately. There is now increasing evidence supporting the conclusions of The Limits to Growth and degrowth is a concept being discussed both in the academic and public debate. There is a need to look at potential ways to adapt to the limits o...

By: Steffen Lange, Peter Pütz, Thomas Kopp

Keywords: Gross Domestic Product Per Capita, exponential growth, linear growth, time series analysis.

By: Giorgos Kallis

45 Minute Video of a lecture by Giorgos Kallis at SOAS, London. He explains how the notion of limits can and should be reclaimed from the hands of Malthusians.

By: Mikael Malmaeus

Presentation by Mikael Malmaeus Historically, value theories used to be at the heart of critiques of capitalism. However, contemporary economists rarely focus on value theories, and the labor theory of value has not been discussed in relation to macroeconomic growth or in the context of degrowth. In this article it is theoretically and empirically demonstrated that economic values at the macro...

By: Federico Demaria

Presentation by Federico Demaria Degrowth was first used and find its roots in the 1970s debate of the limits to growth. At the beginning of the 2000s it was launched as a slogan by activists, and in the following decade turned into a frame for a social movement as well as a concept debated in academia. Although its origins have been traced (Demaria et al 2013), two main issues remain contes...

By: Fabrice Flipo

Political prayers lie on the growth’s comeback to ensure financial incomes to be given out. That for science is seen by many essentially as a tool to provide techniques able to raise productivity, whatever the environmental or social consequences. For those reasons, and especially since the second half of the 20th century, public policy and investment have allowed unprecedented technical develo...

By: Thomas Frisius

It is already evident that current present-day industrial nations can offer a basic income without risking the collapse of the economy. Even the supply with an unconditional basic income (UBI) is imaginable. However, it is not obvious whether an UBI sufficing for more than the subsistence consumption can be realized in a degrowth economy. A simple mathematical model is applied to estimate the f...

By: Julien Rossi

Data surveillance by private companies and public intelligence agencies is intricated, and research has shown how citizens have become willing participants in their own surveillance. This brings forth a new type of governmentality that is legitimised by hegemonic imaginaries on “Big Data” and innovation which are closely related to the imaginary of technological growth. The Snowden disclosures...

By: Dennis Eversberg, Barbara Muraca, Eric Pineault

Modern western societies stabilize themselves through economic growth. As long as growth is maintained, stability is continuously, yet dynamically restored. It is getting increasingly obvious that this dynamisation logic is reaching its limits, triggering negative effects for the socio-economic, political and cultural reproduction of capitalism. In industrialized countries, further growth seems...

By: Miklós Antal

Presentation by Miklós Antal Language use and cognition are generally underappreciated topics in alternative economics, even if effective communication is essential for social and political impact. To challenge the economic growth paradigm, the concept and term degrowth has recently been embraced by various activists and scholars. Drawing on a body of evidence from cognitive science, psycholog...

By: Elke Pirgmaier

This paper is a theoretical contribution to the economics of degrowth. It is motivated by the fact that degrowth proponents attack capitalism for its drive for accumulation which relates to a range of socio-ecological crises. The emphasis on growth translates rather quickly into the development of concrete degrowth proposals. While the activist spirit is admirable, a profound understanding of t...

By: Bastian Ronge

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité were the famous keywords of the French Revolution. Modern philosophy reflected intensely on the concepts of freedom and equality, but neglected fraternity or rather solidarity. Hence, solidarity remained a “wishy-washy concept” (Jaeggi 2001, 287) until today. In my presentation I suggest conceptualizing solidarity as a form of life. That means: I will put forward th...

By: Unai Villalba

Recently many authors have analyzed the links between the Buen Vivir (BV) and Degrowth (DG) paradigms (Escobar 2010, 2015, Thomson 2011, Unceta 2013, 2014, D’Alisa et al. 2015). They see many similarities between both proposals regarding: the critic of growth, the need for transition strategies, the re-conceptualization of wellbeing, new values, the commons, etc. But there are too some differen...

By: Céline Surprenant

Book review of "Olivier Rey, Une question de taille, Stock, 2014, 288 p." From the text: . . . In Une question de taille, Olivier Rey, too, makes disillusioned observations about the progress associated with modernity, post-modernity, indeed hypermodernity. Yet, while his predecessors, such as Günther Anders in The Obsolescence of Man (1956), have highlighted the losses (p. 31) that characte...

By: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Alexander Paulsson

From the text: In what follows, we articulate three ways of understanding growth that should be challenged by degrowth: first, reliance on biophysical throughput; second, capital accumulation and productivism more generally; and third, perpetual strive for quantitative expansion of national economies (measured in GDP). We also propose that growthocene can be a suitable way to characterise the e...

By: Giorgos Kallis

The publisher: It’s a deep dive into “degrowth” this week on the Cultures of Energy podcast. We welcome (6:57) Giorgos Kallis, a political ecologist and ecological economist based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who has authored several influential papers on the theory and practice of degrowth as an antidote to contemporary notions of green economy and sustainability (http://www.degr...

By: Athanasios Karathanassis, Peter Nowak

Aus dem Interview: . . . Was wäre für Sie der Maßstab für einen Gipfelerfolg gewesen? Eine wirklich historische Wende hin zu einer »Dekarbonisierung« wäre etwas anderes gewesen: das verbindliche Abschalten von Kohlekraftwerken, das sofortige Bereitstellen der erforderlichen finanziellen Mittel für den Aufbau regenerativer Energiequellen, die ersetzend und nicht ergänzend zu fossilen eingesetz...

By: Rowan Alcock

From my research on Degrowth China is conspicuous in its absence. Degrowth theory, in order to be a global movement, should begin to research this increasingly important country in more detail. People may believe that one of the world's biggest environmental polluters where multiparty elections are illegal could not possibly have an indigenous degrowth movement. However in my paper I argue that...

By: Hans-Joachim Lauth, Christian Wagner

Für die 8. Auflage wurde dieser Klassiker unter den Einführungen in die Politikwissenschaft erneut aktualisiert. Er gibt einen studien- und problemorientierten Überblick über die zentralen Fragestellungen und Themenfelder der Politikwissenschaft. Behandelt werden: Historische Entwicklung und aktueller Stand des Faches, seine theoretischen und methodischen Grundlagen und – ausführlich – die ein...