Library

Scientific paper • 2016

From Star Wars to the Dark Ages

One of the key drivers of the globalised modern economy has been cheap and convenient energy, particularly oil, with governments and industry seeing low cost supplies as critical to economic growth. Despite the energy crisis of the 1970s, there is optimism that, driven by technological developments, market forces and human ingenuity there will be no shortage of supplies: further finds will come...

Scientific paper • 2016

Geothermal Energy Education in Hungary

By: Peter Praczki

ABSTRACT To escape the current global economic crisis, the petroleum-based industrial society is trying to maintain the continued economical growth by maximizing fossil energy capacities. The added renewable resources - solar, wind, hydro or geothermal - will unfortunately not be able to compensate the decreased use of fossil energy resources. The only way to avoid a drastic global...

Scientific paper • 2016

Global Environmental Justice in the Transition to Sustainability

By: Joan Martinez-Alier

The growing metabolism of the world economy implies increasing ecological distribution conflicts. The economy is not circular, it is entropic. A non-growing industrial economy would still require “fresh” supplies of fossil fuels and of other materials. In the EJAtlas (www.ejatlas.org) we are mapping many of those ecological distribution conflicts on extraction, transport, and waste...

Scientific paper • 2016

Global village – stories from Ukraine

By: oksud518

This research is an exploration of the case studies of social initiatives that are emerging in Ukraine at the time of current crisis. It explores the roots, reasons, motivations of these initiatives as well as its potential to propose alternative tools and mechanisms of living to the broader society. These tools and mechanisms are further explored though degrowth and also sustainability...

Scientific paper • 2016

Grassroots movements in Hungary.

By: Zoltan Ferencz

The emerging environmental problems in the 1960s and 1970s were the basis for “Grassroots movements”. The explicit focus on ecological and social sustainability, which is a defining characteristic of ecovillages, arose in the 1990s. In earlier communities, of course, there had been efforts to live in ways that were ecological and in close contact with nature, but the specific sustainability...

Scientific paper • 2016

Green Economy and carbon metrics

By: Tilman Santarius, Silke Helfrich, Lili Fuhr, Lili Fuhr, Thomas Fatheuer

Reconciling climate protection and resource conservation with economic growth in a finite and unjust world remains an illusion. With its positive associations, the term “green economy” suggests that the world as we know it can continue. However, making this promise requires deliberately downplaying complexity and having powerful faith in the miracles of the market economy and technological...

Scientific paper • 2016

GREEN ECONOMY AS DEGROWTH´S FRIEND OR ADVERSARY

By: Branko Ančić, Branko Ančić, Lili Fuhr, Jelena Puđak, Lana Peternel, Nikola Petrović

From the beginning of the ´90-ies and first attempts to conceptualize green economy as a new socio-economic concept which tackles environmental and economic problems of unprecedented scale, green economy was not brought to a table of political and academic debates until recent global crisis occurred. Expansion of credits and its consequence in sharp rise in debt-to-GDP ratios, job losses and...

Scientific paper • 2016

Growth and Accumulation Under Capitalism and the Impossibility of Degrowth

By: Davor Mujezinovic

Elements crucial to understanding the drive for growth under capitalism, as well as other mechanisms and forces that are endemic to it, are missed by mainstream ecological economics. This is not due to faulty analysis, but simply because such elements are not included to begin with due to particular choices in the 'pre-analytic vision'. The inclusion of certain concepts, tools and categories...

Scientific paper • 2016

Has degrowth outgrown its own name? In defence of an ugly frame.

By: Joan Martinez-Alier, Federico Demaria, Filka Sekulova, Francois Schneider

Degrowth was first used and find its roots in the 1970s debate of the limits to growth. At the beginning of the 2000s it was launched as a slogan by activists, and in the following decade turned into a frame for a social movement as well as a concept debated in academia. Although its origins have been traced (Demaria et al 2013), two main issues remain contested and in need of clarification: 1)...

Scientific paper • 2016

Home-front transitions beyond growth: a Swedish case

By: Pernilla Hagbert

The environmental impact and distributive implications of the built environment and our residential environments as mediating human endeavors is significant. Approaches addressing the resource intensity associated with modern ways of living need to go beyond a neo-liberal focus on individual consumption choices, thus widening the framing of sustainable homes as incorporating more than rational,...

Scientific paper • 2016

Housing for Degrowth

By: Claudio Cattaneo, Francois Schneider, Anitra Nelson, Anitra Nelson, Natasha Verco

Communal eco-housing and households offer degrowth strategies and prefigure necessary change. Living in collective housing means sharing goods and services, eco-efficiencies and politico-cultural experience of commons forms of governance. Scholars active in eco-collective housing (squats, housing commons and co-living) in various European, Oceanic and USA sites talk about: creating sustainable...

Scientific paper • 2016

How can local Network growth economy serve to global degrowth?

By: Adam Cajka

An average village in India does not really benefit from the current economic system. The story of Kuthumbakkam, a village in Tamil Nadu, shows how people can locally create viable economy based on the regional sources and inter-village exchange. Main charasteristics of the Network growth economy are high localisation of production and consumption and focus on self-sufficiency. Initial...

Scientific paper • 2016

How Much Degrowth Is Required?

By: Daniel O'Neill

One of the difficult questions facing the degrowth community is how to achieve a high level of human well-being for 7 to 9 billion people without exceeding planetary boundaries. Drawing on data from the Degrowth Accounts and other recent work, we attempt to quantify the biophysical requirements of a “good life”, and relate these back to established planetary boundaries. We investigate the...

Scientific paper • 2016

How to construct the alternative to capitalism? Discovering the commons in the environmental justice movements

By: DEFNE

Environmental justice movements are taking place at an ever accelerating rate through out the world. Through mobilization of people with diverse societal backgrounds, race, ethnicity, age, gender and income levels, they not only challenge the existing state-society-economy spectrum but also contain important clues about an alternative to capitalism. As crisis vocabulary has become a chronic...

Scientific paper • 2016

How to Measure the Progress of Degrowth Policies

By: Rakesh Saxena

The concept of degrowth is not about ‘reducing the growth’ or recession but about giving up the obsession of an economy with growth. It recognises limits to growth and emphasizes building a society based on frugality, sharing, cooperation, conviviality, equality, etc. Even green growth based on improving environmental efficiency is difficult to sustain. In this form, degrowth is as relevant to...

Scientific paper • 2016

How to minimise material waste when learning & investigating for more convivial practices?

By: Marion Real

In convivial communities individuals are looking for being autonomous and self-educated in the way they are learning how to repair bikes, how to cook in solar hoovens or how to better produce foods. The Do it yourself and opensource philosophy is being propagated in actual practices. The question of eco-efficiency of learning activities is rarely explored and could appear as a contradiction...

Scientific paper • 2016

How to overcome the loneliness of the long-distance runner?

By: Zsolt Boda

Karl Polanyi argued that a market economy can only function in a market society. Paraphrasing him we may say that a sustainable economy can only function in a sustainable society. An essential feature of such a society is that its social norms and institutions reward future-oriented, responsible decisions and actions while hindering myopic and materialistic choices. The mainstream model of...

Scientific paper • 2016

How to stop monetary growth pressure?

By: Mark Joób

Generally, there is not enough awareness of the central role the monetary system plays with regard to sustainability. One of the main reasons is that for several decades economics has been dominated by a monetary theory that gives a false description of the monetary system and the role of money in the economy. Assuming that money on the macroeconomic level is basically neutral, traditional...

Scientific paper • 2016

HÁZIKÓ – an agro-social enterprise and a living lab

By: Gábor Bertényi

HÁZIKÓ is an agricultural-social enterprise launched in 2014, and it is one of the very few players of the alternative agro-food domain in Hungary that has managed to become an acknowledged market player while preserving its original social, environmental and quality principles. The company’s mission is to enhance the market participation of small-scale agricultural enterprises, while providing...

Scientific paper • 2016

Imagining biofuels in the Black Earth: A historical-materialist policy analysis on the influence and limitations of the EU's bio-economy strategy on Ukraine

By: Christina Plank

Ukraine is known for its expanding agricultural production on its fertile black earth. Following the global trend in supporting liquid biofuels, in 2012 the country introduced a blending target of seven per cent bioethanol to be reached by 2016. This is strongly related to European Union’s policies, in particular the Renewable Energy Directive, and the country’s membership in the European...