Library

Misc • 2019

Degrowth: the transformation needed to combat climate breakdown

Previous global ‘efforts’ to tackle climate breakdown have failed dramatically, because they have been based on a fundamentally flawed economic paradigm: growth. The concept of growth is an altar at which economists, politicians and businesspeople across the political spectrum have worshipped for decades. Unfortunately, where the planet’s long-term habitability is concerned, it is this obsession

Misc • 2019

UN climate talks: 'in moral terms… it’s evil!'

By: Nick Breeze

The negotiators at this year’s COP25 in Madrid achieved nothing, despite warnings from many voices about the acceleration of the climate crisis.

Misc • 2019

9 tips for talking to your family about degrowth during the holidays

By:

The holidays are special; a chance to stop working, slow down and spend time with family and friends. The numerous family gatherings will likely involve discussions about the state of the world, politics, climate change, and maybe even degrowth. In case you find yourself in this scenario, we have put together this list of tips

Misc • 2019

The World We Made - An urgent new play about our future

By: Jonathon Porritt

A dramatisation of Jonathon Porritt’s book The World We Made—adapted for the stage by CUSP fellow Beth Flintoff—received its ‘world premiere’ at the Change Festival in October 2019. The play takes a retrospective look (from the year 2050) of the changes that took (will have taken) place to combat climate change and achieve sustainability. With support from the ESRC and local citizen groups, the...

Scientific paper • 2019

LowGrow SCF: A stock-flow-consistent ecological macroeconomic model for Canada

By: Tim Jackson, Peter A. Victor

This working paper presents a stock-flow consistent (SFC) simulation model of a national economy, calibrated on the basis of Canadian data. LowGrow SFC describes the evolution of the Canadian economy in terms of six financial sectors whose behaviour is based on ‘stylised facts’ in the Post-Keynesian tradition. A key feature of the model is its ability to provide a systematic account, not only...

Interview • 2019

Capitalism and Climate Breakdown with Gareth Dale

By: Political Economy for the End Times

A new podcast by "Political Economy for the End Times", interviewing Gareth Dale. The topics discussed are capitalist time vs. ecological time, catastrophism and civilisation collapse, ideologies of economic growth, green growth, socialist techno-utopianism, degrowth, and the Green New Deal.

Misc • 2019

Against economics

By: David Graeber

A book review by David Graeber of Robert Skidelsky's new book Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

Scientific paper • 2019

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

By: Max Koch, Martin Fritz

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 relationships between...

Misc • 2019

Old Man on a Bike: a story of how cycling keeps us all young

By: Mark Sutton

Mark Cramer, commentator on the subject of cycling into later life and best practice infrastructure has released a new book filled with incredible stories of how cycling contributes positively to society the world over.

Report • 2019

Degrowth of Aviation - Reducing Air Travel in a Just Way

By: Matthias Schmelzer, Filka Sekulova, Francois Schneider, Magdalena Heuwieser, Adrian Haßler, Chandni Dwarkasing, Elli Reckmann, Irene Iniesta-Arandia, Larry Edwards, Laura Machler, Manuel Grebenjak, Nuria Blázquez Sánchez, Rose Bridger, Sara Mingorría

In July 2019, the Stay Grounded Network met in Barcelona to discuss how to counter the massive growth in the aviation sector. A new movement for degrowing aviation and fostering climate justice was born. The results of the conference and further discussions fed into this report, outlining numerous measures to reduce air travel in a just way. (Excerpt)

Scientific paper • 2019

The political economy of degrowth

By: Timothée Parrique

What is degrowth and what are its implications for political economy? Divided in three parts, this dissertation explains the why, what and how of degrowth.

Interview • 2019

Cle-Anne Gabriel on Degrowth & Wellbeing Economies

By: Cle-Anne Gabriel

Cle-Anne Gabriel is a Lecturer at the University of Queensland, and the Business School’s Director for the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education. Her research focuses on the areas of sustainable development and postgrowth futures. During our conversation, Cle-Anne Gabriel questions the compatibility between environmental sustainability and economic growth. Is a...

Scientific paper • 2019

Shifting Education Towards Sustainability – How Degrowth Can Transform Education for Sustainable Development

By: Sofia Getzin

Key pedagogical approaches that work at fostering critical reflection and fostering transformative action become more effective when they are applied in a degrowth context.

Presentation • 2019

Celebrating Economies of Change: Brave Visions for Inclusive Futures

By: Women & Environment International magazine

Climate chaos and worsening income disparities (both local and global) make it more important than ever to forge respectful alliances between academics and front line community activists --the majority of whom are women. Information-sharing of many varieties, and mobilizing this knowledge for local grass-roots action as well as policy formation (and removing perverse policies!), should happen...

Scientific paper • 2019

The local dimension in the degrowth literature. A critical discussion

By: Elisabetta Mocca

Degrowth is establishing itself as a theory within the ecological and post-development scholarship. At the core of degrowth is a local-centric perspective, whereby small urban agglomerations are considered as the key actors of the political and economic system of an imagined post-consumerist and post-capitalist society. Degrowth proponents thus argue that the fundamental steps to achieve a...

Misc • 2019

Housing for Degrowth: Principles, Models, Challenges and Opportunities

By: François Schneider, Anitra Nelson

This groundbreaking collection on housing for degrowth addresses key challenges of unaffordable, unsustainable and anti-social housing today, including going beyond struggles for a 'right to the city' to a 'right to metabolism', advocating refurbishment versus demolition, and revealing controversies within the degrowth movement on urbanisation, decentralisation and open localism. International...

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...

Study • 2019

L'entreprise sobre : essai sur un concept juridique émergent

By: Valentin Baudouin

L’entreprise est une liberté ambigüe, elle est autant un facteur de progrès que de risque. La crise écologique actuelle conduit les entreprises à prendre conscience des effets de leurs activités sur la société dans son ensemble et l’environnement. Pressées par de nouvelles normes sociales de la société civile, les entreprises sont amenées à modifier leur comportement, notamment à travers une...

Misc • 2019

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary

By: Ashish Kothari, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta, Arturo Escobar, Ariel Salleh

Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary contains over 100 essays on transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values. It offers critical essays on mainstream solutions that ‘greenwash’ development, and presents radically different...

Misc • 2019

A multi-sited ethnogeography of degrowth activism in France and Quebec

By: Anne-Laure Pailloux

This paper presents a multi-sited ethnographic study of degrowth activism in France and Quebec that demonstrates how the researcher, who is both localized and positioned, constructed the study. The field of study, defined as an interknowledge network rather than a delimited space, is described in its spatial dimension through the concept of mobility. The socially situated nature of the...