Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When we talk about a system beyond economic growth, we don’t have to refer to an abstract future. There are myriad existing examples of projects, mindsets, and approaches beyond economic growth — and not all fit easily into the ‘sustainability’ box.
Returning to the All Party Group on the Limits to Growth, and practical politics, the task is to promote enactable short-range policies that take us towards a post-growth future. These need to be transformational in effect…
Navigating the end of growth will require courage, new thinking, flexibility, and a willingness to make mistakes. It’s understandable why, during “normal” times, people want to stick with what’s familiar. But we’re no longer in normal times.
I read The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a grown-up economy (Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams, Polity, 2019) during summer 2019 and have been dipping back into it ever since. To somebody who asked me what it’s about, I replied, ‘It’s Enough Is Plenty for the current decade; it’s all about how rich countries can share the wealth so that everybody can have enough, and how poorer countries can take varied trajectories that do not result in the maldevelopment we see in many rich countries today’.
In this post, I reflect on the vocabulary we need to be familiar with if we are to raise awareness and develop widespread literacy and skills for responding to all our interrelated problems, from climate breakdown to soil erosion, species extinction, human suffering and inequality. The issue of language and vocabulary has arisen in a number of conversations I’ve had with friends and acquaintances in recent weeks, as we approached the School Climate Strikes on Sept 20 2019.
If we don’t transition away from growth economics and embrace our Arrival and the agenda of making ourselves at home, the world’s richer countries risk destroying what they already have, while shutting out development in poorer countries.
Post-growth policy begins with the very principle that – as the Yellow Vests themselves have pointed out – should inform all ecological policy: greater equality. Indeed, the post-growth movement has long argued that equality can be a substitute for growth.
In part two of Riccardo Mastini’s interview with Giorgos Kallis and Tim Jackson at the Post-Growth 2018 conference at the European Parliament, they trace the history that led to growth being prized above all else and discuss how to conceptualise a future beyond growth.
In the first part of a two-part interview, Riccardo Mastini discusses the possibilities and challenges for imagining a world beyond growth with two key post-growth thinkers at the conference.
At COP24 environmental movements have an opportunity to use their platform to highlight the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact, and even to discuss radical alternative futures that are not dependent on a growth-based economy.
People realize that our growth-addicted economy is driving us into disaster, and they are eager for an alternative. Whatever political movement can speak truthfully to that deep-felt concern and offer real hope — not just green-growth fantasies — will be able to command incredible popular support.
While it may be clear that the wager on endless growth is a bad one, a more difficult question arises: “what would be the characteristics of an economy that does not grow?”. In his book “Macroeconomics Without Growth1” Steffen Lange attempts to construct a framework for answering this question
