Library

Scientific paper • 2019

Who promotes sustainability? Five theses on the relationships between the degrowth and the environmental justice movements

By: Bengi Akbulut, Federico Demaria, Julien-François Gerber, Joan Martínez-Alier

Environmental destructions, overconsumption and overdevelopment are felt by an increasing number of people. Voices for ‘prosperity without growth’ have strengthened and environmental conflicts are on the rise worldwide. This introduction to the special issue explores the possibility of an alliance between post-growth and ecological distribution conflicts (EDCs). It argues that among the...

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

Degrowth and postcapitalism: transformative geographies beyond accumulation and growth

By: Benedikt Schmid

In the light of social and environmental unsustainability and injustice, scholars from geography and neighboring disciplines question incumbent socioeconomic trajectories. Empirical evidence renders the continuing attachment to a growth‐based economy and its reconcilability with ecological limits increasingly implausible. Instead, a lively transdisciplinary debate explores alternative forms of...

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

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...

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

The New Rural Reconstruction Movement: A Chinese degrowth style movement?

By: Rowan Alcock

This paper investigates a grassroots Chinese movement called the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM). Drawing on field visits, surveys, interviews and social media posts regarding a NRRM project and relevant literature I link the NRRM to the degrowth movement. This is likely the first research analysing a Chinese grass-roots movement from a degrowth theoretical perspective. This link is...

Scientific paper • 2019

Need, Entitlement and Desert: A Distributive Justice Framework for Consumption Degrowth

By: Cle-Anne Gabriel, Carol Bond

Post-growth societies seek socio-ecological transformations towards a just and sustainable redistribution and reduced consumption of natural capital. There is no one universally just and ecologically sustainable way of fulfilling these redistribution and consumption objectives; it depends on the criteria used and their underlying ethical teleology. We suggest three distribution criteria,...

Scientific paper • 2019

Who can challenge the imperial mode of living? The terrain of struggles for social-ecological transformation in the German population

By: Dennis Eversberg

This contribution draws on empirical evidence from the 2016 wave of the survey “Environmental Consciousness in Germany” to identify the potential social bases of both support for and resistance to attempts to overcome the current socio-ecological crisis by way of a broad social-ecological transformation. Firstly, the results of factor and cluster analyses of the survey’s items on attitudes...

Scientific paper • 2019

Alternative and Resistance Movements: The Two Faces of Sustainability Transformations?

By: Léa Sébastien, Jérôme Pelenc, Nicolas Merveille, Grégoire Wallenborn, Julien Milanesi, Julien Vastenaekels, Fany Lajarthe, Jérôme Ballet, Manuel Cervera-Marzal, Aurélie Carimentrand, Bruno Frère

This article addresses the issue of sustainability transformations in Ecological Economics through the lens of social movements, by linking environmental resistance movements and alternative movements. We advocate for a more politicized, social-movement oriented and place-based approach to sustainability transformations, and contribute to the development of a more political and emancipatory...

Scientific paper • 2019

A critically modern ecological economics for the Anthropocene

By: Jon D. Erickson, Michael B. Wironen

Ecological economics recognizes economic activity as a biophysical process mediated by social systems and ultimately subject to the constraints of a finite earth system. The Anthropocene discourse appears as validation of the central concerns of ecological economics yet throws into relief its limits as a normative transdiscipline oriented toward social transformation. We review ecological...

Scientific paper • 2019

The state in the transformation to a sustainable postgrowth economy

By: Max Koch

The limits of the environmental state in the context of the provision of economic growth are addressed by applying materialist state theory, state-rescaling approaches and the degrowth/postgrowth literature. I compare state roles in a capitalist growth economy and in a postgrowth economy geared towards bio-physical parameters such as matter and energy throughput and the provision of...

Misc • 2019

Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth

By: Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Alexander Paulsson, Stefania Barca

Since the 1970s, the degrowth idea has been proposed by scholars, public intellectuals and activists as a powerful call to reject the obsession of neoliberal capitalism with economic growth, an obsession which continues apace despite the global ecological crisis and rising inequalities. In the past decade, degrowth has gained momentum and become an umbrella term for various social movements...

Misc • 2019

Degrowth and the Green New Deal

By: Gareth Dale

Radical action on climate change is at last on the agenda. The emphasis is on urgency and action and - for XR notably - ‘truth.’ Questions of long-term strategy are less clear, but strategy platforms have been advanced. Foremost among them are the Green New Deal (GND) and degrowth. This article provides a comparison and sketches lines of convergence

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

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.

Scientific paper • 2018

The Prerequisites for a Degrowth Paradigm Shift: Insights from Critical Political Economy

By: Hubert Buch-Hansen

Keywords: Crisis, Critical political economy, Institutional change, Degrowth, Paradigm shift, Political projects

Misc • 2018

Fabian Scheidler, Harald Schumann im Grips Theater: Chaos. Das neue Zeitalter der Revolutionen

By: Fabian Scheidler, Harald Schumann

Mit: Fabian Scheidler, Autor ("Das Ende der Megamaschine. Geschichte einer scheiternden Zivilisation", "Chaos. Das neue Zeitalter der Revolutionen" (www.revolutionen.org)) und Harald Schumann, Journalist beim Tagesspiegel und bei "Investigate Europe", Buchautor ("Die Globaliserungsfalle", "Der globale Countdown"), Autor der Arte-Filme "Staatsgeheimnis Bankenrettung", "Troika: Macht ohne...

Misc • 2018

Radikale Alternativen

By: Alberto Acosta, Ulrich Brand

Warum man den Kapitalismus nur mit vereinten Kräften überwinden kann Der US-amerikanische Kulturtheoretiker Fredric Jameson sagte einmal, es sei leichter, sich das Ende der Welt vorzustellen als das Ende des Kapitalismus. Entsprechend beherrscht der Wunsch nach Wachstum und die Orientierung am wirtschaftlichen Gewinn seit Jahrzehnten unser Denken. Alternativen zum kapitalistischen System...

Misc • 2018

Doughnut Economics

By: Kate Raworth

Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist Economics is broken, and the planet is paying the price. Unforeseen financial crises. Extreme wealth inequality. Relentless pressure on the environment. Can we go on like this? Is there an alternative? In Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth lays out the seven deadly mistakes of economics and offers a radical re-envisioning of...