Library

Misc • 2020

Degrowth Vienna 2020 - Communicating Degrowth

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 regulatory...

Presentation • 2020

Degrowth Vienna 2020 - The Psychology of Degrowth Adoption: Insights from the Perspectives of the Utopian Impulse and the Regulatory Focus Theory

By: Dario Krpan, Frédéric Basso

Presentation [part of the standard session "Communicating Degrowth"] 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 regulatory focus theory—one of the most widely used theoretical frameworks in social psychology—and used it to frame how degrowth...

Presentation • 2020

Degrowth Vienna 2020 - Transformations Beyond Growth: A Diverse Practices Approach

By: Tom Smith

Presentation [part of the standard session "Communicating Degrowth"] This talk stages a conversation between diverse economies and practice theory literatures, outlining the distinct paths these two areas of scholarship have taken to explore current patterns of growth. It argues that their simultaneous consideration would benefit radical and critical scholarship, especially in understanding...

Presentation • 2020

Degrowth Vienna 2020 - An anthropological contribution to degrowth

By: Lucía Muñoz Sueiro

Presentation [part of the standard session "Communicating Degrowth"] Social Anthropology has great potential to contribute to degrowth debates and proposals, hardly explored until now. I propose three ways to do so, further exploring one of them, inspired by the question: what can be recovered from the near past, still accessible in the present, for the future? The degrowth project needs new...

Scientific paper • 2020

Emergence of New Economics Energy Transition Models: A Review

By: Sarah Hafner, Aled Jones, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Irene Monasterolo

Well-known academic and non-academic institutions call for a new approach in economics able to capture features of modern economies including, but not limited to, complexity, non-equilibrium and uncertainty. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of ecological macroeconomic models that are suitable for the investigation of low-carbon energy transitions and assess them based on the...

Misc • 2020

Ecosocialism and/or degrowth?

By: Michael Löwy

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

Presentation • 2020

Degrowth Vienna 2020 - The environmental impact of lifestyles changes, satisfying human needs and grassroots activists

By: Gibran Vita

Presentation [Part of the standard session "Practicing Degrowth"] The present work aims to contribute in three major ways- 1) By connecting fundamental human needs by Max-Neef et al to global carbon emissions and their satisfaction. 2) By employing an Environmentally Extended MultiRegional Input-Output (EE-MRIO) to assess the outcomes of massive consumption-related lifestyles changes...

Scientific paper • 2019

Activities of degrowth and political change

By: Pasi Heikkurinen, Pierre Tosi, Jana Lozanoska

Abstract: Hannah Arendt's three-fold conceptualization of human activity offers a useful base for understanding the necessity of degrowth and the kinds of activities required to achieve it. The article argues that the different roles of labour, work, and action should be acknowledged and scrutinized in detail to appreciate the underpinnings of contemporary over-production and over-consumption,...

Scientific paper • 2019

A Degrowth Transition: Pathways for the Degrowth Niche to Replace the Capitalist-Growth Regime

By: Christos Zografos, Claudio Cattaneo, James Scott Vandeventer

Facing the intertwined environmental, social and economic crisis requires us to seriously consider alternatives to the current capitalist system, including the emerging concept of degrowth. Existing understandings of degrowth have focused on characterizing the shape, the key elements and the proposals for a degrowth society. However, its dynamic and evolving nature as an alternative vision of...

Scientific paper • 2019

Green growth or degrowth? Assessing the normative justifications for environmental sustainability and economic growth through critical social theory

By: Kristoffer Wilén, Maria Sandberg, Kristian Klockars

Abstract: Scientists agree that changes in the organization of human society and economy are needed to stop the degradation of the natural environment. The most commonly proposed solution, green growth, has been increasingly criticized, but the offered alternative of degrowth has remained a marginal undertaking in academia and in practice. This article further develops the argument for...

Scientific paper • 2019

From ecological macroeconomics to a theory of endogenous money for a finite planet

By: Romain Svartzman, Dominique Dron, Etienne Espagne

This paper takes stock of the achievements and gaps of the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics, which has brought insights from specific schools of macroeconomics—most notably post-Keynesian—to ecological economics, with a strong emphasis on the endogeneity of money. Ecological macroeconomics has proposed fiscal, monetary and prudential reforms to boost ‘green’ investments, and...

Scientific paper • 2019

Do Beyond GDP indicators initiated by powerful stakeholders have a transformative potential?

By: Olivier Malay

The last four decades have seen a proliferation of new indicators aiming to challenge GDP. But do they really produce new outcomes? By observing the rankings they produce (compared to those produced by GDP), the potential of 6 Beyond GDP indicators to suggest a way towards a more social and ecological society has been examined. The conclusion is that rankings from indicators initiated by...

Scientific paper • 2019

Keeping multiple antennae up: Coevolutionary foundations for methodological pluralism

By: Giorgos Kallis, Richard B. Norgaard, Jessica J. Goddard

Methodological pluralism has been a tenet of ecological economics since the journal's inauguration. Pluralism has fostered collaboration and forged new insights across disciplines. However, to counter the hegemonic voice of mainstream economics and inspire action on climate change and inequality, ecological economics requires coherence to produce meaningful knowledge from diverse research...

Scientific paper • 2019

Overcoming the process-structure divide in conceptions of Social-Ecological Transformation: Assessing the transformative character and impact of change processes

By: Stefanie Sievers-Glotzbach, Julia Tschersich

A fundamental transformation towards sustainability in face of complex social-ecological challenges needs to initiate deep changes of those incumbent system structures that support unsustainable trajectories, while at the same time encouraging a diversity of alternative practices. A review of transformation approaches towards sustainability shows that these do not (sufficiently) link processes...

Scientific paper • 2019

Crisis, liminality and the decolonization of the social imaginary

By: Angelos Varvarousis

Abstract: The decolonization of the social imaginary has been proposed as an important dimension of the transition towards a degrowth society. However, although omnipresent in the degrowth literature, the terms “social imaginary” and “social imaginary significations” have not been adequately explained. This creates a level of mystification that limits the analytical value of the degrowth...

Scientific paper • 2019

Degrowth: A metamorphosis in being

By: Pasi Heikkurinen

Abstract: The call to transform the growth society lacks an analysis of the human will. Problematically for degrowth, the enactment of this so-called will to transform has undesired matter-energetic consequences. Every act of transformation requires matter–energy, adding to the cumulative throughput of societies. To revert the ecospherical metabolism from a state of overshoot to one of...

Scientific paper • 2019

Climate justice, commons, and degrowth

By: Patricia E. Perkins

Abstract: Economic inequality reduces the political space for addressing climate change, by producing fear-based populism. Only when the safety, social status, and livelihoods of all members of society are assured will voluntary, democratic decisions be possible to reverse climate change and fairly mitigate its effects. Socio-environmental and climate justice, commoning, and decolonization are...

Report • 2019

P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival

By: Michel Bauwens, Alex Pazaitis

Towards a P2P Infrastructure for a Socially-Just Circular Society How shared perma-circular supply chains, post-blockchain distributed ledgers, protocol cooperatives, and three new forms of post-capitalist accounting, could very well save the planet. The key issue addressed in this study is how to change a system which incentivizes and rewards extraction — but cannot recognize and reward the...

Scientific paper • 2019

Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

By: Ryan Gunderson, Diana Stuart, Brian Petersen

Abstract: In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that...

Scientific paper • 2019

From sustainability to sobriety

By: Valentin Baudouin

Considering the current ecological crisis, the concept of sustainable development, or ‘sustainability’ appears to have failed to meet the goals laid out by its authors at the 1992 Earth Summit of Rio de Janeiro. Sustainable development was originally perceived as the torchbearer of a new project, a new hope of protecting humanity’s general interest, a ‘magic formula meant to reconcile free...