Taking Degrowth Seriously

This project creates a two-day workshop involving some of the world’s most current thinkers and practitioners on degrowth. It enables the coming together of world experts who have never before all been in the same room or shared their thinking and experiences. It results in cutting-edge case studies and strategies for degrowth and sees the creation of a network that will continue to build on the workshop discussions. 

The workshop aims to:
• gather knowledge on specific examples of successful degrowth initiatives in order to build case study examples
• pinpoint what specific benefits degrowth has had in these case studies, and what risks were entailed
• create a set of strategies for putting degrowth in place; a roadmap that can be of practical assistance to those seeking a degrowth pathway

The contribution to knowledge is the way in which the workshop and the resulting web presence and network will focus and hone the ideas of current thinkers on degrowth, but more crucially, place those ideas in the context of degrowth ‘on the ground’, thus providing crucial evidence that it is a workable strategy rather than pure ideology as its critics assume.

The workshop supports the wider goals of the ISRF by:

1) developing interdisciplinary expertise in a specific area. Specifically, it draws upon the work of what might usefully be called the ‘first generation’ of degrowth thinkers, and brings together the ‘second generation’ of degrowth thinkers with those actually facilitating degrowth in practice. 

2) enabling a better understanding of social processes and how the idea and practice of degrowth can be part of them, inform and shape them. Specifically, it does this by learning from those actually engaged in degrowth processes. This is a meeting of degrowth theory and practice that has not ever happened in a focused way.