Library

Presentation • 2016

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

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...

Scientific paper • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 – Framing the Privacy Debate and Big Data Governmentality in Degrowth Theory

By: Julien Rossi

Presentation by Julien Rossi Data surveillance by private companies and public intelligence agencies is intricated, and research has shown how citizens have become willing participants in their own surveillance. This brings forth a new type of governmentality that is legitimised by hegemonic imaginaries on “Big Data” and innovation which are closely related to the imaginary of technological...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 – Can technologies help to reduce the physical and human degradation in transition towards a degrowth society?

By: Pasqua L'Abbate

Presentation by Pasqua L'Abbate This article outlines the role that technology has to play in order to enable human beings to move towards a degrowth society. Against the background of the problems we face today, the authors E.E. Schumacher, N.Georgescu-Roegen and others have been re-examined. This work also explains the concepts of entropy and emergy and the “fourth” principle of...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - An understanding of materialistic values in post-socialist Europe. Exploring demographic determinants and implications for working patterns

By: Saamah Abdallah

Presentation by Saamah Abdallah Degrowth is a post-materialist movement, which places value on the biosphere, human wellbeing, and justice, above and beyond the possession of material goods (Degrowth Declaration, 2008). And yet surveys suggest that levels of materialism are higher in post-socialist countries than in Western European countries (Kyvelidis, 2001). In the sixth round of the...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Alternatives to Enculturation of Children into Consumers

By: Madalina Balau

Presentation by Madalina Balau In Romania all parents want to offer their children a better life and a better future, sometimes with their own sacrifice, yet the years following communist regime have brought unsustainable development, present in environmental degradation and social insecurity. After living in communism and knowing how bad it was, people have been accustoming for the last 26...

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...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Between the enlarged scope of neoliberalism and the socialism that mutates: The sustainability dilemma in China’s overheated market for ‘fictitious commodities’

By: Xiaorui (Rae) Wang

Presentation by Xiaorui (Rae) Wang Basing on Polanyi’s (cf. 2002 [1944], 1957) insights that are particularly pertinent to the arguments that have centred ecological economics, this paper sets out to investigate the Chinese context within which this kind of trade-offs have been made. The findings indicate that, the so called “socialist market economy” in China implies above all the State’s...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Money and subjective well-being

By: Christopher Boyce, Filka Sekulova, Martin Ftiz

Academic special session, with Filka Sekulova, Christopher Boyce, and Martin Fritz Interest in subjective well-being in public policy has been growing steadily over the last decades arriving at a voluminous and thematically diverse literature. A reoccurring theme for debates is the extent to which short and long-term income growth relates to well-being. Although many studies have shown that...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - How to stop monetary growth pressure?

By: Mark Joób

Presentation 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...

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 - Un-common business sense. Toward a growth-independent transformative management model

By: Jana Gebauer

Presentation by Jana Gebauer Empirical studies on firm size and growth show that the larger proportions of companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), are voluntary or forced non- and slow growers. Yet, the generally unquestioned postulate is that growth is the entrepreneurial raison d’être and an indispensable (societal) obligation for an economic actor. In this spirit,...

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...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - From capitalist accumulation to a solidarity economy

By: Barbara Muraca

Presentation by Barbara Muraca Starting from a critique to Growth as a major driver of our economies, the consequences it brings along, from environmental impacts to control over the marginalized, and as the mono-culture of our times, Muraca develops its limits and shows the alternatives beyond Capitalism. She explores what it means living in a society where basic needs services are valued and...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - On degrowth in the South: The Case of India

By: Alex Jensen

A thorough and detailed overview of the socioeconomic situation in India and the extent to which the Degrowth discourse can be extended in countries beyond the Global North. The speaker explores the aftermath of the neoliberalization of India: from GDP and billionaires growth to the extreme wealth gap alongside increasing inequality, unemployment, extreme air pollution, fossil fuels...

Presentation • 2016

Degrowth Conference Budapest, 2016 - Are we there yet? How practitioners, multipliers and the public perceive the status and perspectives of a new economy.

By: Jana Gebauer

The presentation shows what needs to be done in the movement in order to achieve more visibility and, more importantly, feasibility. In the same framework, tools like multipliers and institutions should be embraced to foster cooperation and convergence in projects and approaches for an alternative economy.

Presentation • 2016

Synergies between the degrowth movement and the global ecovillage network

By: Stella Veciana

The primary question of this analysis relates to specific key issues fostering actual and potential synergies between the degrowth and the ecovillage movement. As analysis frame, first some distinctive perspectives around de-growth are introduced on the basis of interviews with experts of the Global South and the Global North. More than reinforcing the criticism of growth societies and...

Presentation • 2016

The degrowth side of post-development (and vice versa)

By: Tzekou Eirini-Erifyli

Although it's been over 20 years since the first edition of "Development Dictionary" (Sachs, 1992), which marks the beginning of the debate on the end of the era of development and the transition to the age of post-development, and about 15 years since the emergence of the degrowth discourse as an activist slogan (Demaria et al, 2013), and despite the many similarities shared by the two...

Presentation • 2016

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

By: Defne Gonenc

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

The Indignados as a Socio‐Environmental Movement: Framing the Crisis and Democracy

By: Viviana Asara

This study analyses the framing processes of the Indignados movement in Barcelona, as an exemplar of the latest wave of protests, and argues that it expresses a new ecological–economic way out of the crisis. It finds that the movement was not just a reaction to the economic crisis and austerity policies, but that it put forward a metapolitical critique of the social imaginary and (neo)liberal...

Analysis • 2015

Post-Development Discourse: Lessons for the Degrowth Movement

By: Lasse Thiele

From the text: Is degrowth only conceivable in the context of “oversaturated” industrial societies while the global “South” remains dependent on growth? Lasse Thiele challenges this assumption, noting that "assumptions underlying such demands are quickly revealed to be rooted firmly in Western ideas of progress and growth." > read part 1 > read part 2 This article is also available in...