Library

Scientific paper • 2016

Looking for sustainability on local level: Social metabolism of three small-scale organic farms in the Czech Republic

During the last century, we have witnessed unprecedented growth in both global food production and associated environmental, social, and economic problems connected to the increasingly industrialized, globalised and commodified food production. In reaction, the issues of food security, food sovereignty and, more generally, sustainable food production have gained momentum within the academic...

Scientific paper • 2016

What are the degrowth implications for long-distance trade?

By: Filka Sekulova

Degrowth has enjoyed an increasing attention in academia with more than 150 peer-reviewed publications over the last 8 years. Trade, however, remains a grey area. This article aims to explore the implications of degrowth for long-distance trade, using the multifaceted perspectives and disciplines which the term binds together. From a political ecology angle growth in the South has taken place...

Misc • 2016

Die Welt reparieren - Open Source und Selbermachen als postkapitalistische Praxis

By: Christa Müller, Andrea Baier, Karin Werner, Tom Hansing

Weltweit entstehen immer mehr Initiativen des Selbermachens, in denen eine Vielfalt von Anliegen und Problemen kollektiv bearbeitet werden. In diesen – jenseits von Markt und Staat angesiedelten – kollaborativen Zusammenhängen wird ein basisdemokratisch orientiertes Verständnis von Zusammenleben und Urbanität erprobt und zugleich nach ökologisch und sozial sinnvollen Lösungen für grundlegende...

Art contribution • 2016

Eco-modernism vs. Degrowth

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

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

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 – Technologies for a Degrowth Transition. A Faustian Bargain?

By: Tomislav Medak

Presentation by Tomislav Medak I'll broach the degrowth transition from the combined perspective of social construction of technology and world system theories. I'll seek to demonstrate how dominant technological complex functions to integrate yet thwart the advancement of semi-periphery. Narratives of a socially more just and ecologically more sustainable future would frequently have us...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Science and degrowth

By: Fabrice Flipo

Presentation 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...

Scientific paper • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Non-Monetary Degrowth is Strategically Significant

By: Anitra Nelson

Presentation by Anitra Nelson Even for many radical adherents of degrowth, money is a common-sense — not simply capitalist — tool, so alternative currencies and banks abound. This paper argues against this common-sense logic, as follows. The most direct and efficient form of degrowth requires as-local-as-is-feasible production focusing on people’s basic needs, implying that future distribution...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Economic values, capital accumulation and degrowth

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...

Scientific paper • 2015

Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model

By: Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros, George Dafermos

Commons; Peer production; Resilient communities; Degrowth; Desktop manufacturing; 3D Printing

Misc • 2015

Innovation – Exnovation

By: Luise Tremel, Martin Schweighofer, Cordula Kropp, Michael Kunkis, Jiska Gojowczyk, Franziska Engels, Martin David, Daniel Belling, Sophia Alcantara, Sandra Wassermann, Amrit Bruns, Maximilian Schmies, Maria Seewald, Sebastian Johann, Franziska Vaessen, Sarah Schmitz, Lenard Gunkel, Moritz Boddenberg, Alexander Kleinschrodt

Über Prozesse des Abschaffens und Erneuerns in der Nachhaltigkeitstransformation Der Verlag: Das Zauberwort Innovation beherrscht nicht nur die öffentlichen Debatten über nachhaltige Entwicklung sondern auch den wissenschaftlichen Diskurs um gesellschaftliche Nachhaltigkeitstransformation. Das Antonym Exnovation, d.h. die Abschaffung von Altem, ist dagegen kaum gebräuchlich und nur...

Scientific paper • 2015

Reimagining the New Industrial City: articulating an alternative ethos of waste and production through ‘closing the loop’

By: Ingrid Elísabet Feeney

About the article: Ingrid Feeny provides another participant-observation of an alternative economy in practice. The Plant is designed to “close the loop” on urban food production in a South Chicago neighbourhood. A zero waste philosophy plays a central role in practices as by-products of one set of food production activities and even the renovation of the building itself are used as raw...

Scientific paper • 2015

Exchange and refurbish: practicing decoloniality through rethinking discards and degrowth

By: Erin Araujo

About the article: Degrowth theorists highlight the importance of communities of practice; creating working alternatives to growth is central to the overall project of diverse economies. Erin Araujo’s work with El Cambalache (The Swap), a collective that shares and repairs donated items in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, is an example of a degrowth economy in action. Araujo links...

Scientific paper • 2015

Diverse Economies of Urban Mining in Australia

By: Ruth Lane

About the article: Ruth Lane’s empirical study of three electronic waste recovery facilities in Australia shows that diverse economies are already part of mainstream economic practices. Rather than arguing that recycling is a material example of “circular economies,” a concept that is already heavily critiqued in discard studies, Lane shows that while sections of the commodity chains created by...

Scientific paper • 2015

Why Discards, Diverse Economies, and Degrowth?

By: Max Liboiron, Josh Lepawsky

About the article: Lepwasky and Liboiron instigated this special Forum collection because of a need to bring three relatively new scholarly discussions together: degrowth, diverse economies, and discard studies. They offer an overview of terms and discussions, then make an argument for why the three discourses need one another. On one hand, organizing economic life so it is not premised on...

Misc • 2015

Reparieren: Projekte, Orte und Akteure einer Bewegung

By: Andrea Baier, Daniel Überall, Sarah Schill, Linn Quante, Tom Hansing

Eine Broschüre über Offene Werkstätten in der unter anderem die Gesellschaftliche Bedeutung der Werkstätten diskutiert wird. Außerdem gibt es kurze Texte von verschiedenen Experten wie Niko Paech, Christine Ax und Stefan Schridde und es werden einzelne Werkstatt Initiativen vorgestellt.

Presentation • 2015

Frans Berkhout ESEE2015 Plenary: Transdisciplinarity and Ecological Economics - Challenges of the engagement agenda

By: Frans Berkhout

Plenary speech by Frans Berkhout at the 2015 European Society for Ecological Economics Conference at the University of Leeds in July 2015.

Scientific paper • 2014

Sharing is the new owning – subjectivities of the maker culture

By: Karin Bradley

Abstract: In recent years what is termed “the sharing economy” has grown, i.e. sharing and swapping of tools, clothes, spaces and services. Sharing practices are indeed not new but have been reinvented in contemporary contexts characterized by economic decline and/or environmental concerns, often facilitated through the use of digital technologies. This paper deals with the rationales of...

Scientific paper • 2014

Worktime Reduction and Rebound Effects

By: Johannes Buhl

Abstract: Worktime reduction is considered to be essential when it comes to theories and models of de-growing economies. So far, productivity gains are re-invested in favor of economic growth. Consequently, rising opportunity costs of time per growing national income lead to time rebound effects, since time savings become as precious as economic life speeds up. This comes with resource...

Scientific paper • 2014

Dual Development and the denial of social requirements by logics of Growth and Degrowth ("Special Session: Social Inequality and Degrowth")

By: Stefanie Huertgen

Abstract: I argue that a coincidence of growing profits and growing consumption / wages cannot be presumed any longer. Even if many participants of the Degrowth-Debate do so, the equation of economic Growth of enterprises and consumptive Growth of the population (at least in the Global North) is in itself bound to imaginations coming from the postwar (“fordist”) period and the class-compromise...

Scientific paper • 2014

The Absolute Reductions Project

By: Sylvia Lorek

Abstract: The REDUCTIONS project is designed to identify the potential for absolute resource and energy use reduction of production-consumption systems at all levels and to explore ways to realise this potential. While lots of ideas about reductions are made only few concrete examples of achieved reductions are documented. The REDUCTIONS project intends to fill this gap. It combines the...