Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

Vol. 19, No. 8, August 2023 Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor

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The Best Degrowth Directory Juan Pablo Arellano This article was originally published by Heliocene, July 2023 under a Creative Commons License Image credit: Tobias Tullius, Unsplash. Click the image to enlarge. For fast, definitive information about the field of degrowth and its global community, Heliocene recommends the Degrowth Database. Here’s why… Degrowth is trending. Just a few years ago, literature on degrowth comprised only a handful of scholarly papers, while articles about it in the mainstream press were as rare as hens’ teeth. That changed thanks to accessible books such as Less is More (2020) and Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (2021) that ignited people’s imaginations about a new economic future. Now, there are more than one thousand papers on degrowth policy proposals alone and it seems like there are articles about degrowth in the press every week, including in The New Yorker, the Financial Times and The Economist, not all of which are well informed or objective. Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. Jason Hickel, 2020 Degrowth is a new transdisciplinary field of research founded in the physical and social sciences. It is also a fraternity of activists seeking to shift the Overton window through winning support for degrowth policies, a community of people sharing information on how to live in degrowth-aligned ways and an emerging business sector experimenting with post growth approaches to creating value. How long will it take before the idea of degrowth becomes a sustainability buzzword and the definition becomes a ‘de rigueur’ statement on every organisation’s sustainability page, co-opted by those who don’t care to understand its deeper implications. This is how the Brundtland Report definition of sustainable development is used, whether an organisation actually contributes to sustainable development or not. A lot of misinformation is sure to be produced about degrowth through its rising popularity and reactions to that. It is becoming increasingly important to know where to obtain the most up-to-date and most reliably researched information. The Master’s of Degrowth at the Autonomous University of Barcelona was developed by world-leading degrowth scholars at the ‘think+act tank’ Research & Degrowth. One of the master’s students, JP Arellano, a member of the open collective Organising the Degrowth Network, has worked with course lecturer Tim Parrique to pull together the Degrowth Database, a definitive database of degrowth groups, people, policies, papers, media, books, education, conferences and assemblies. To ‘see’ the degrowth universe quickly, look no further. Heliocene, too, was founded by a student of the Barcelona master’s, and strives to offer a synthesis of leading edge degrowth thinking for the business and policy making communities, with an emphasis on Aotearoa New Zealand perspectives. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Juan Pablo Arellano, a member of the open collective Organising the Degrowth Network, has worked with course lecturer Tim Parrique to pull together the Degrowth Database, an annotated listing of degrowth research and activist groups, complete with links and points of contact. |Back to Title| LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE          LINK TO THE HOME PAGE

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