Library

Scientific paper • 2019

The ‘state’ of degrowth: Economic growth and the making of state hegemony in Turkey

Abstract: Critical perspectives on economic growth have laid bare the fragility of the assumed link between material growth and socio-ecological wellbeing. The appeal of economic growth, however, goes beyond the economic sphere. As a societal goal, growth is often mobilized to pre-empt and/or co-opt opposition around issues of social justice and redistribution. Not only does the constitution...

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...

Misc • 2019

Degrowth: the realistic alternative for Labour

By: Mark Burton

Degrowth poses a fundamental challenge to a Labour Party that has yet to decide how far it wishes to transcend – and not merely reform – a growth- oriented, capitalist political economy.

Report • 2019

The Green New Deal for Europe: a blueprint for Europe's just transition

By: Giorgos Kallis, Riccardo Mastini, Giacomo D'Alisa, Emanuele Leonardi, Dirk Ehnts, Bill McKibben, Jason Hickel, Stefania Barca, Teresa Anderson, Grace Blakeley, Friedrich Bohn, Sam Bright, Nick Dearden, Nicoletta Dentico, Laura C. Zanetti-Domingues, Skender Fani, Julia Fish, Charlotte Hanson, Nick Jacobs, Tessa Khan, Mat Lawrence, Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Ruth London, Julian Brave NoiseCat, David Powell, Jérémy Rodrigues, Jakob Schäfer, Christoph Schneider, Giovanna Sissa, Isaac Stanley, Will Stronge, Sean Sweeney

Europe today confronts two crises. The first is an economic crisis, with rising levels of poverty, insecurity, and homelessness across the continent. The second is a climate and environmental crisis, with severe consequences for Europe’s front-line communities and even more perilous ones on the horizon. Both crises are the products of Europe’s political decisions, and they are closely bound...

Misc • 2019

Limits. Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care

By: Giorgos Kallis

Western culture is infatuated with the dream of going beyond, even as it is increasingly haunted by the specter of apocalypse: drought, famine, nuclear winter. How did we come to think of the planet and its limits as we do? This book reclaims, redefines, and makes an impassioned plea for limits—a notion central to environmentalism—clearing them from their association with Malthusianism and the...

Scientific paper • 2019

Public Support for Sustainable Welfare Compared: Links between Attitudes towards Climate and Welfare Policies

By: Max Koch, Martin Fritz

Abstract: The emerging concept of sustainable welfare attempts to integrate environmental sustainability and social welfare research. Oriented at a mid-term re-embedding of Western production and consumption norms into planetary limits, it suggests the development of “eco-social” policies in the rich countries. In this theoretical context, this article empirically investigates the...

Scientific paper • 2019

The economic and energy impacts of a UK export shock: comparing alternative modelling approaches

By: Lukas Hardt, Karen Turner, Paul Brockway, Grant Allan, John Barrett, Peter McGregor, Andrew Ross, Kim Swales, Marco Sakai

This study investigates how an increase in exports (a key pillar in the UK Industrial Strategy) could impact energy and industrial policy by comparing two types of energy-economy models. Achieving the targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions set out in the UK Climate Change Act will require a significant transformation in the UK's energy system. At the same time, the government is pursuing...

Misc • 2019

Community, connection and localism

By: Helena Norberg-Hodge

Localisation can lead to a sustainable and more fulfilling future for people and our planet.

Misc • 2019

Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies

By: Iñigo Capellán-Pérez, Carlos de Castro, Luis Javier Miguel González

A novel methodology is developed to dynamically assess the energy and material investments required over time to achieve the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in the electricity sector. The obtained results indicate that a fast transition achieving a 100% renewable electric system globally by 2060 consistent with the Green Growth narrative could decrease the EROI of the...

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...

Scientific paper • 2019

Is less more... or is more less? Scaling the political ecologies of the future

By: Paul Robbins

Imagining progressive environmental futures, especially among critical scholars, can be a fraught enterprise. While some theorists and activists turn towards the social emancipatory power of modern technological interventions at scale, others point to the revolutionary power of degrowth, simplicity, and conviviality. These competing political geographical imaginaries are often strident in their...

Scientific paper • 2019

Environmental justice, degrowth and post-capitalist futures

By: Neera M. Singh

Struggles for Environmental Justice, more widespread in the global South, are often framed as traditional societies defending “old ways of life”; while degrowth, a relatively new movement in the global North is seen as striving for a “new ways of life.” I argue that both assert or aspire for other ways of being and belonging to the world and open possibilities for post-capitalist futures. In...

Scientific paper • 2019

Frugality as a choice vs. frugality as a social condition. Is de-growth doomed to be a Eurocentric project?

By: Roldan Muradian

I argue that the degrowth movement reflects the values of a particular social group, namely the well-educated European middle class that share progressive-green-cosmopolitan values. This feature creates significant barriers for its dissemination among lower-income social groups in other parts of the world. There is an important difference between frugality as a choice and frugality as a social...

Scientific paper • 2019

A socio-metabolic perspective on environmental justice and degrowth movements

By: Anke Schaffartzik, Arnim Scheidel

Degrowth and environmental justice movements share overarching aims of sustainability and justice and pursue them through radical social change and resistances. Both movements are diverse and comprised of groups that originate and operate in different contexts. The ever-growing metabolism of the world economy presents an obstacle to both movements' aims, while a socio-metabolic perspective...

Scientific paper • 2019

Not So Natural an Alliance? Degrowth and Environmental Justice Movements in the Global South

By: Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, Patrick Bond, Ivonne Yánez, Lucie Greyl, Serah Munguti, Godwin Uyi Ojo, Winfridus Overbeek

Both environmental justice (EJ) and degrowth movements warn against increasing the physical size of the economy. They both oppose extractivism and debt-fuelled economies, as well as the untrammelled profit motive which fails to incorporate full environmental and social costs. They both rely upon social movements that have led scholarship in its activities and achievements, in part through...

Misc • 2019

I am not alone

By: Julia Steinberger

Dear Life, I was not aware, when I was born, that I was born onto a battlefield. I was not aware, as I learned to walk, that I was stomping over the habitats of many creatures. I was not aware, as my mother drove me to school, that we were riding roughshod over the unmarked

Misc • 2019

The liberatory potential of local action

By: Brian Tokar

Local action is often the best remedy for the failings of the current system — a worldwide confederation of democratic communities can have the same impact at a global scale.

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...

Misc • 2019

My Personal Journey Into the Post-Growth Way of Thinking

By: Martin Oetting

I come from the dark side. Between 1994 and 1999, I studied at two business schools. Then I worked in advertising and marketing from 1999 until 2016 — for 17 years. First I was an employee in a couple of advertising agencies. Then I got a doctorate in Marketing and helped build our own specialised

Scientific paper • 2019

Commemorating economic crisis at a liminal site: Memory, creativity and dissent at Achill Henge, Ireland

By: Tim Edensor, Thomas SJ Smith

This paper draws on a case study of Achill Henge, County Mayo, Ireland, to examine the interplay between economic crisis, rebel creativity and shifting geographies of commemoration. Built in 2011 in a remote part of the west of Ireland, Achill Henge is a highly contested monument. Unfinished and under perennial threat of demolition, the Stonehenge-like structure was originally conceived as a...