Library

Misc • 2020

Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?

The critique of economic growth, once a fringe position, is gaining widespread attention in the face of the climate crisis.

Scientific paper • 2020

Ecological macroeconomics in the open economy: Sustainability, unequal exchange and policy coordination in a center-periphery model

By: Jeffrey Althouse, Guilio Guarini, Jose Gabriel Porcile

This article introduces a novel (environmental) interpretation of a “Keynesian coordination game” and develops four potential scenarios to remaining within a global carbon emissions constraint. With inspiration from research on “ecologically unequal exchange” (EUE), we demonstrate the drawbacks of present “green growth” strategies by considering how pollution- and resource-intensive industries...

Misc • 2020

Wachstum schadet dem Klima. Wir brauchen neue Wege zum Wohlstand

By: Joël Foramitti

Technologische Wunschträume und die Fixierung auf ewiges Wachstum verhindern seit Jahrzehnten eine effektive Klimapolitik

Misc • 2020

Why degrowth should scare business

By: Iana Nesterova, Fabian Maier, Ben Robra, , Simon Parker.

Recently, an article on degrowth appeared in Harvard Business Review (hereafter HBR). Rather than offering a critique of capitalism, the article proposes that degrowth may not be a threat to business after all, and in fact, there are burgeoning degrowth markets waiting to be tapped into by the risk averse. Although we applaud the authors

Scientific paper • 2020

Blue degrowth and the politics of the sea: rethinking the blue economy

By: I. Ertör, M. Hadjimichael

Editorial to the Special Issue in Sustainability Science (15, 2020)

Scientific paper • 2020

Growth in the docks: ports, metabolic flows and socio-environmental impacts

By: Borja Nogué-Algueró

Shipping carries virtually all internationally traded goods. Major commercial ports are fully integrated into transnational production and distribution systems, enabling the circulation of massive flows of energy and materials in the global economy. Port activity and development are usually associated with positive socio-economic effects, such as increased GDP and employment, but the...

Scientific paper • 2020

The Blue Fix: What's driving blue growth?

By: Zoe W. Brent, Mads Barbesgaard, Castren Pedersen

This article explores the politics behind the promise of ‘blue growth’. Reframing it as a ‘blue fix’, we argue that the blue growth discourse facilitates new opportunities for capital accumulation, while claiming that this accumulation is compatible with social and ecological aims as well. The blue fix is made up of three underlying sub-fixes. First of all, the conservation fix quenches the...

Scientific paper • 2020

Contesting growth in marine capture fisheries: the case of small-scale fishing cooperatives in Istanbul

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...

Scientific paper • 2020

Swimming upstream: community economies for a different coastal rural development in Sweden

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...

Scientific paper • 2020

The paradox of sustainable tuna fisheries in the Western Indian Ocean: between visions of blue economy and realities of accumulation

By: Mialy Andriamahefazafy, Megan Bailey, Hussain Sinan, Christian A. Kull

For many coastal nations in the Western Indian Ocean, and notably the islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, and Seychelles, the tuna fishery is considered one of the main pillars of economic development, providing jobs and substantial revenues while ensuring food security. However, the fishery is also an illustration of the paradox behind the idea of the blue economy, where economic growth and...

Scientific paper • 2020

‘Re-grabbing’ marine resources: a blue degrowth agenda for the resurgence of small-scale fisheries in Malta

By: Alicia Said, Douglas MacMillan

The era of blue growth, underpinned by neoliberal policy discourses, has been pervasive in the promulgation of European marine governance and policies in the past decade, with little or no regard for the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. In this paper, we engage with theoretical and empirical observations to reflect on how the promise of sustainable economic growth arising from the...

Scientific paper • 2020

Blue Growth and its discontents in the Faroe Islands: an island perspective on Blue (De)Growth, sustainability, and environmental justice

By: Ragnheiður Bogadóttir

Blue Growth is promoted as an important strategy for future food security, and sustainable harvesting of marine resources. This paper aims to identify dominating ideologies and strategies of Blue Growth in the Faroe Islands, mainly regarding salmon farming and industrial capture fisheries, and to investigate how these ideologies materialize in the social metabolism of Faroese society. The...

Scientific paper • 2020

Performing ‘blue degrowth’: critiquing seabed mining in Papua New Guinea through creative practice

By: John Childs

Scripted as a sustainable alternative to terrestrial mining, the licence for the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining (DSM) site was issued in Papua New Guinea in 2011 to extract copper and gold from a deposit situated 1600 m below the surface of the Bismarck Sea. Whilst DSM’s proponents locate it as emergent part of a blue economy narrative, its critics point to the ecological and...

Scientific paper • 2020

Lessons for blue degrowth from Namibia’s emerging blue economy

By: Rosanna Carver

Globally there has been recognition that there is little consensus attributed to the definition of the blue economy. However, despite this acknowledgement, the blue economy is championed for its development potential by the African Union and subsequently, several African states. Having formalised the agenda in its fifth National Development Plan Namibia is working to implement a governance...

Scientific paper • 2020

Designing sustainability in blues: the limits of technospatial growth imaginaries

By: Duygu Kaşdoğan

In the midst of a global food crisis, the late 2000s saw tensions between rising food prices and demands for biofuels coalesce into a “food versus fuel” debate. In response to ensuing public outcries, governmental agencies, and researchers across the globe began mobilizing around alternative biofuel feedstock. Among these materials, algae emerged as the most “hopeful” sustainable alternative...

Misc • 2020

This isn’t the type of downscaling that degrowth thinkers have in mind!

By: Crelis Rammelt, Willem Hoogendijk, Francis Merson.

In the early 17th century, the bubonic plague is said to have played a crucial role in popping the tulip bubble in the Netherlands. Today, the coronavirus (COVID-19) is leading not only to a health crisis, but also an economic one. The outbreak is sparking realistic fears of a deep global downturn. Our globalised, just-in-time,

Misc • 2020

Coronavirus in times of climate change: a reflection

By: ASEED

"What is is that you value and want to keep? What do you have to let go of in order to stop making matters worse? What is it that we have lost in our industrial society and need to bring back?"

Misc • 2020

How to beat coronavirus capitalism?

By: Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Lia Rose

An online teach-in with Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, with a musical performance by Lia Rose. The current crisis is laying bare the extreme injustices and inequalities of our economic and social system. We are in a battle of visions for how we’re going to respond to this crisis. We will either be catapulted backward to an even more brutal winner-takes-all system — or...

Scientific paper • 2020

Editorial - Deep Restoration: from The Great Implosion to The Great Awakening

By: Barry Gills

In this short essay for Globalizations I wish to make some initial reflections in response to the present ‘triple conjuncture’ of global crises. This triple conjuncture is an interaction among three spheres or vectors of global crises, together constituting a crisis of capitalist world order. The three spheres of the global crisis are: climate change and ecological breakdown; a systemic crisis...

Report • 2020

Crises in the Anthropocene through and beyond corona

By: Governance & Sustainability Lab

Undisciplined perspectives from the Governance & Sustainability, University of Trier