Tracks / Open Special Sessions

1. Imagining post-growth Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) futures

  • Critical examinations of the nexus between economic growth and technoscience in different contexts and sectors
  • Exploring the (uneasy) relations between science, technology, and activism
  • Rethinking STI discourses and practices through a  post-growth / degrowth lens 
  • Identifying barriers and opportunities for shaping technological and scientific imaginations with degrowth-minded ideas 
  • Discussing technological complexity in alignment with degrowth /postgrowth futures and  understanding the trade-offs involved
  • Challenging platform-based capitalism and the gig economy
  • Examining the impact of environmental disinformation strategies, post-truths, conspiracy theories, and fake news
  • STI policies for degrowth: assessment and critique 
  • Identify institutional and governance mechanisms to align STI with degrowth values of democracy, conviviality, autonomy, and simplicity
  • Reshaping scientific institutions to enable degrowth 
  • Politics of transition and strategy: how can social movements (eco-socialism and degrowth) enable transition?

2. Theoretical perspectives and debates around STI and degrowth / postgrowth

  • Science and Technology Studies (STS) 
  • Philosophy of technology and science
  • Decolonizing STI
  • Feminist techno-science
  • Is small always beautiful? Technology, infrastructure, and questions of scale
  • Post-normal science as a new paradigm for addressing the science-democracy gap
  • Science and epistemological pluralism: complementarity or an impossible combination?
  • Science is political! Steering science towards envisioning and promoting a degrowth society
  • Slow science/technology
  • Epistemic justice and plural ways of knowing

3. Human creativity and innovation without growth

  • Reclaiming creativity discourses from growth-oriented innovation
  • Defining creativity and innovation in a world where economic growth is not the primary focus
  • Decolonizing and collectivizing innovation and creativity
  • Theories, examples, and methodologies for creativity and innovation in a degrowth/postgrowth context
  • Creative methodologies for responsible innovation 
  • Fostering creativity through artistic interventions
  • Art-science collaborations 
  • Empowering creative and innovative practices through degrowth: barriers, governance, institutions, and self-organization

4. Political economy and political ecology

              • (Re)organizing provisioning systems beyond growth: markets, states, and commons
              • Centralized economies and planning 
              • Commodity frontiers, environmental distribution conflicts, and other challenges for socio-environmental justice
              • Geopolitical questions 
              • Corporate/state land grabbing, Indigenous rights, and land stewardship
              • The political economy/ecology of green technologies 
              • Implications of war, violence, and militarization for sustainability transitions
              • Labor, livelihoods, and just transitions
              • Distribution, equality, and social justice, including the rural-urban divide
              • Debates on anti-capitalism, post-capitalism, diverse capitalisms
              • Feminist political ecology/economy

              5. Policy assessment, critique, and alternative proposals

              • Green Deals and Circular Economy without growth
              • Universal Basic Income
              • Care Income
              • Rethinking the welfare state and public services without growth
              • Job-sharing, shortening the working week, and green job guarantees
              • The role of public policy as a catalyst for radical socio-ecological change
              • Democratic process, participation, and multi-level policymaking 
              • Agenda 2030: Assessment, critique, and alternatives to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
              • Environmental treaties and global governance 
              • Postgrowth analyses of sectoral policies: transport, housing, energy, etc.

              6. Ecological macroeconomics

              • Ecological macroeconomic models 
              • Managing without growth
              • Doughnut economics 
              • Beyond GDP: Alternative macroeconomic accounting
              • Indicators and composite indicators
              • Carbon budgets, climate mitigation and adaptation policies
              • Cap and trade and market reforms
              • Monetary, fiscal, and financial policy transformations
              • Behavioral ecological economics and incentives
              • Input/Output models

              7. Ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation

              • Biodiversity conservation, biophysical measurements and indicators
              • Planetary boundaries, overshoots, and impacts
              • Analyses of ecosystem service characteristics ( distribution, excludability, rivalry, substitutability)
              • Payments and compensation for ecosystem services, including approaches such as “the polluter pays”, “the beneficiary pays”, “full cost recovery” and others.
              • Tools and policies for ‘No Net Loss’ or ‘Net Positive Impact’ 
              • Justice, governance, and decision-making in ecosystem services management and biodiversity conservation
              • Critiques of ecosystem services monetization and alternative approaches (including non-valuation)

              8. Energy, resources, and energy/matter flow analyses

              • Food, land use and deforestation
              • Materials, energy, waste
              • Pollution
              • Strategic minerals
              • Industrial ecology and material flows analysis
              • Trade, production, and consumption patterns
              • Resilience and sustainability in rural and urban areas
              • Trade and ecological impacts
              • Transport and mobilities
              • Water resources management
              • Methodological advances in material/energy flow analyses

              9. Blue economies and degrowth / postgrowth

              • Questioning “blue growth”
              • Oceans: resources, rights, governance, and institutions
              • Carbon storage
              • Climate change adaptation and mitigation in oceans
              • Decolonizing the blue economy
              • Jobs, livelihoods, and coastal communities 
              • Island nations
              • Blue justice 
              • Blue extractivism (minerals, energy, food, transboundary water transfer) and resistances 

              10. Challenging dominant values, ideologies, and imaginaries

              • Eco-feminism, gender, intersectionality
              • Postcolonial and decolonial critique and indigenous worldviews 
              • Non-anthropocentric and non-speciesist/multi-speciesist approaches 
              • Non-consumerist lifestyles: downshifting, voluntary simplicity, anti-consumption, commoning, etc.
              • Ethics of limits and self-limitation 
              • Amplifying subaltern voices 
              • Hegemony and counterhegemony
              • Pluriverse and alternative development pathways 
              • Travel and transformation of imaginaries

              11. Enabling radical change and institutional transformation

              • Trade unions, social movements, and other civil society organizations as catalysts for socio-ecological change
              • Nowtopias and prefigurative politics for postgrowth transitions 
              • Mobilizing mass publics to address the climate emergency 
              • Confronting power structures and  vested interests
              • Authoritarianism, state surveillance and the criminalization of dissent
              • Communication strategies, social media, and mass media: the use of new metaphors, narratives, etc.
              • Engaging with Artificial Intelligence and Big Data from a degrowth / postgrowth perspective
              • Building strategic alliances across the ideological spectrum
              • Green parties, electoral politics and postgrowth/degrowth
              • Shall we blow a pipeline? Debates on violence, disruption, and direct action in challenging the status quo
              • Ethical considerations and dilemmas in eco-activism and advocacy

              12. Transformative businesses and organizations in a postgrowth context

              • Taxonomies and theories of postgrowth organizations 
              • Debates on for-profit vs non-for-profit organizations; competition vs cooperation; private property vs commons (and how to think beyond these dichotomies) 
              • Degrowth/postgrowth organizations and strategy
              • Value(s) and valuation in postgrowth organizations
              • Mutualist systems, collaborative and cooperative business models
              • Rethinking supply chains and logistics for a finite planet 
              • Alternative finances for community and sustainability 
              • The role of social entrepreneurs and alternative business models
              • Assessing the benefits and challenges of localized production and consumption networks
              • Grassroot economic experiments: local currencies, repair cafes, product sharing, etc.
              • The role of the state: public-owned businesses (utilities, and other sectors)

              13. Putting wellbeing at the center of the economy

              • Exploring human needs, capabilities, and essential requirements for human flourishing
              • Cultivating different meanings and understanding of the good life
              • Studying the relationship between (de)growth and collective wellbeing
              • Moving beyond materialism and consumerism: exploring creative leisure, alternative hedonism, consumption corridors, etc.
              • Strategies for delivering decent healthcare for all in a postgrowth world.
              • Assessing the effects of pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss on mental and physical health; understanding climate trauma vs resilience
              • Fostering the wellbeing of marginalized and vulnerable populations
              • Developing strategies for managing eco-anxiety and other mental health challenges associated with the ecological emergency

              Open Special Sessions

              SS03. FaDA Session: Commonisation of care

              The covid pandemic showed that care work is still disproportionately performed by women and feminized populations, both privately and in state-led institutions. This trend, embedded in the fabric of…

              SS11. Post-growth in the urbanized periphery

              There is a growing body of literature analysing the principles of degrowth across the specific challenges of urban planning and urban studies. However, this scholarship remains overwhelmingly urban,…

              SS12. Post-growth Urban Infrastructures

              The session provides an opportunity to focus on how post-growth and degrowth theory plays out in specific geographies and the infrastructural technologies that make places liveable. There is already a…

              SS20. Waste and degrowth

              Waste is the immanent outcome of any social metabolism. Metabolic processes continuously produce wastes in the form of discarded materials, heat and pollution that accumulate in the environment. The…

              SS24. Embodying degrowth, healing from alienation

              We may achieve the transformation of the system, but if we have not transformed ourselves along the way, we will be destined to equally corrupt the degrowth society. This is the starting point for a…