Alx π'This is not the time for timid responses, it's the time for courage'
Amazing closing words of hope by @jasonhickel
Adelaide Charlier closing her speech drawing upon the clear historical reference on 'I have a dream' MLK speech, it's kind of powerful and sad at the same time, not sure I necessarily agree with it. Remarking however that we need to pass from dream to reality and policy.
Opening plenary just closed and here is a recap of what we've learned so far:
- politicians still cling to the hope of 'fixing growth' or 'different growth'
- the Club of Rome finally fully clarified that NO, they ARE NOT advocating for a different growth, but for a different economy
- environmental movement should embrace political and social discourse
- it's good to dream about a different future, but it's time to shift from dream to policies.
Of course there has been much more, I just underpinned the striking points for me. Again, the conference is completely livestreamed and free to be watched online here:
https://www.beyond-growth-2023.eu/
They also have a Slido for Q&A
https://app.sli.do/event/k8JKbRKfB71i3i9mGPu1ez/live/questions?m=mxrd0
I'll be following the Focus Panel 3 and 5, but will stop the live-tooting until the second plenary this afternoon (I'm on a PhD deadline tomorrow, be nice, please!)
Anyone is welcome to contribute to this thread posting other focus panels or even from the one I'm following. Use this thread as a collective space, but please avoid discussions and remember to be respectful. I reserve the right to filter posts that aren't in line with the thread
Panel 3 starts with a great intro from researcher Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, stating: 'My first name is activist, my surname is scholar'
the round of introductions closes wonderfully with Professor Raj Patel starting: 'I'm here because I'm curious about degrowth, and I am worried degrowth might be bullshit' if we don't address and discuss the profound problems of migration and ecofascism
Panel 3 - Ritu Verma 'You might have an oil spill and still have economic growth, but what about the environment?' - 'GDP is a colonial concept'
Panel 3 - Raj Patel: 'Italy in 2008 paid back Libia for her colonialist past' but this is only a very small part of the story of colonialism
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'We can stop calling people Vasco de Gama and Christopher Colombus as 'travelers''
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'The 'World' that has been constructed is a 'world' build by the plunders'
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'The notion of exporting - externalising - a problem (to poorer nations) has been the only modus operandi (by rich nation)' and let's not forget the 'militarisation of economic growth'
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'Can we please stop to call it 'developed or developing', 'rich or poor', they are Extractivist Economies.'
Panel 3 - @jasonhickel 'Catch up development by the Global South is impossible, it's like saying that if Amazon workers will work hard enough will catch up to Jeff Bezos'
Yep, the tech industry offers really a lot of concrete example of extractivism in case people need closer realities to relate to.
Panel 3 - Raj Patel: 'Capitalism is a way to avoid paying your bills through cheap labour, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy, cheap money, and cheap lives'
'cheapening' the world is such an important and powerful concept
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'Beyond asking 'who is who', we should ask 'who is the 'we'''
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'Are we going to ungrowing the entitlement and the inequalities that dominate this part of the world'
So important that they are calling out that also degrowth can be constructed on colonialist values and world construct.
Panel 3 - Ritu Verma: 'There are important lessons in the South - ageism and the invisible work of women [not only in the household] that subsidises the economy'
Panel 3 - @jasonhickel 'Production is what we do, is our relationship with the living world and we should have a proper democratic discussion on what production means'
Panel 3 - @jasonhickel 'Growth critical ideas are the core of anticolonialist thinkers'
Debunking the myth that degrowth and post-growth are concept born just in the minds of white scholars
Panel 3 - Rita Verma: 'When we talking about wellbeing we talk about the a long sense of contentment' different from happiness which is a fleeting emotion on which GDP thrives
Nice to hear the 'buen vivir' philosophy being brought to the table
Panel 3 - Rita Verma: 'There are many approaches that claims to be beyond growth but they aren't. We need to conceptualise all the alternatives that are proposed'
Panel 3 - Rita Verma: 'We can't have the world economic order being dictated by economists and engineers'
Loving how she is emphasising the centrality of the cultural pillar of sustainability and the call for a transdisciplinary approach
Panel 3 - Raj Patel: 'Degrowth needs a place, and you need to fight for it' and 'What kind of EU do we want to engage with degrowth, it depends on what the EU is'
'We need to be materialist to avoid to engage in magical thinking'
Panel 3 - Raj Patel: 'If the care economy is bought by colonialism than I'm not particularly thrilled about it'
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'We all have indigeneity'
this was in the context of reforming language with more precise word like 'displaced communities', 'marginalised' and 'exploited'
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'Bear in mind that 'Human Rights' were constructed in a moment when part of the world were not even considered fully human'
'We need to recognised the problems we carry on with ourselves'
Panel 3 - @jasonhickel 'We need an Ecological Proletariat' built on alliances between students, environmentalists and political movements
Panel 3 - Lebohang Liepollo Pheko: 'There are ONG and aid and humanitarianism concepts that reproduce othering'
Panel 3 - Raj Patel: 'We have an issue of what we mean as technology'
A break now. Thank you for all following this thread. See you back this afternoon.
Welcome back. Panel 5 is just starting and I'll try to do my best while keeping up with my everyday work.
This panel is about finance welfare systems #BeyondGrowth
This panel is about finance welfare systems #BeyondGrowth
Panel 5 - Juliana Wahlgren: 'The current welfare system is not working because it benefit only a small part of people, works only in emergency, and doesn't address social service'
'All is done to alleviate poverty, not to eradicate poverty'
'If we want to move beyond growth we need to think who owns our economy'
Panel 5 - Milena Buchs: 'There is a mutual relationship between growth and welfare'
'Welfare beyond growth needs to be designed on a completely economic system'
Panel 5 - @timparrique 'Can we afford degrowth? This is a problematic start, because we have no choice (...) Whatever the cost of degrowth today, it is less than the cost of the collapse of tomorrow'
Panel 5 - @timparrique 'Money is not the real limiting factor in the transition, resources are'
Panel 5 - @timparrique 'Economic growth is for increase the cost of welfare system'
'Growth is design to make the price goes up'
'We need a cap on the price of essential service to decouple welfare from growth'
Panel 5 - @timparrique 'It is not a production problem, it's an allocation problem'
Not entirely agree, but there is some truth in here
Panel 5 - Simone D'Alessandro 'We need policies that support and sustain workers during the transition'
Panel 5 - Milena Buchs: 'We need to think about freedom and the different of 'freedom to' and 'freedom from''
we need to protect the freedom of others
Panel 5 - @timparrique 'Everything is already rationed, because a lot of people already don't have access to a lot goods'
'We need to decommodify essential good so that rationing becomes a political rationing and to instead one controlled by purchase power'
Panel 5 - Simone D'Alessandro: 'It's not a problem of narrative, we need solutions to sustain workers that will loose their jobs'
'We are a rich society that can afford a transition'
Panel 5 - Philippe Lamberts: 'Democracies are fragile, but if they will not make they right choices they will bury themselves'
'We need to restore trust between people and policymakers'
'It's too late to change smoothly, but we can still do it in an organised way'
Panel 5 - @timparrique finally giving some clarification on the meaning of local currency (though I remain sceptical about it)
Panel 5 ends and I think some nice ideas have been thrown, though I would have liked some more concrete proposals, which I feel is mostly what is lacking now.
However, the panel focused a lot on labour and workers struggles, especially on resistance as transition are - no matter what - disruptive, and that's a good reality check that is often overlook in street activism.
See you for the closing plenary
#BeyondGrowth #ClimateDiary #degrowth
Plenary 2 starts with Aurore Lalucq introducing us in French to remember that we are a diverse community. I appreciate it, but I might be slower as I have to translate her speech from French. I wonder if all speaker will use their own language (which would be great, tbh)
Plenary 2 - Maros Ε efΔoviΔ: 'The debate beyond GDP must be an open one, and it must be a continuous dialogue amid all stakeholders'
Plenary 2 - Kate Raworth taking off with a fantastic rubber pipe going up representing 'the shape of progress'
Plenary 2 - Romina Boarini: three reasons to think about wellbeing in this context:
Why: our society is not thriving because of increasing inequalities and spread of mental illnesses. The most vulnerable, the youngs and the elderlyare the one paying the cost'
Plenary 2 - Romina Boarini:
How: OECD wellbeing framework that includes all a series of criteria, and it focuses not only on the average numbers, but also on how they are distributed
Plenary 2 - Romina Boarini:
What type of policies:
- job creation: high quality jobs (high security and stability)
- going beyond the short-term pragmatic approaches
'Big system change can only come with big decision in governance'
Plenary 2 - Florence Jany-Catrice
'we need a collective introspection on the role of numbers in our decision making-process'
Plenary 2 - Florence Jany-Catrice
we need an agreement on what need to be measured'
Plenary 2 - Giorgos Kallis finally introduces the concept of the #pluriverse and uses the #South concept applied to Southern Europe (I have really a lot to say about it but in another post!)
Plenary 2 - Giorgos Kallis: 'as I was presenting the model of degrowth in that Southern island a woman stopped me to say to me: we are already living like this, why are you telling this to us?'
Plenary 2 - Giorgos Kallis: 'There are and always have been different model of prosperity that are being destroyed while I'm speaking'
I like how he avoids romanticising rural lives, and doesn't advocate for all the North becoming like the South, but at least they just be allowed to exist and be supported
Plenary 2 - Kate Raworth: 'We currently have a system of finance versus life, and we need to redesign a finance system that work for life'
The first day of the conference ended and here a small recap:
- there's a general agreement that moving beyond growth need a rethink of social values that govern our own construction of the world
- various speakers pinned problems of social struggles and trade off, and call for moving on from slogan to what the consequences of transition are in everyday people's life
- intersectionality and pluriverse are there, but they could be addressed more specific.
That's all from me today, see you tomorrow here on the #fediverse for another super long thread about #BeyondGrowth though I can't guarantee I'll be so dutifully microblogging!
Pauline von Hellermann@alx thank you smuch Alx for your fantastic work yesterday - lookikg forward to today!
@pvonhellermannn Thank you Pauline, let's see how it goes, that's my first live-blogging ever!
Quim Nuss SzΓ©kely
GeofCoxExactly: "Call for moving on from slogans to what the consequences of transition are in everyday people's life."
@alx I loved Giorgos #Kallis' talk just now! - about the already existing #Degrowth practices in #Ikaria #Greece. Especially as this is exactly what I think and write about too, and where, again, I feel anthropology and in particular #HistoricalEcology can make a massive contribution. In fact, let me share here a thread I did about this a while ago here. There are already existing #Degrowth practices throughout the world #ClimateDiary
Pauline von Hellermann (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image 1/52 Good to see this Guardian Long Read, but as a historical ecologist I would like to add: humans do not just either stay within boundaries or destroy nature. It's often been a positive, dynamic human-nature symbiosis, with humans actively shaping and creating forests & #biodiversity #historicalecology β here a (long!) thread with examples from across the world https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/25/cop15-humans-v-nature-our-long-and-destructive-journey-to-the-age-of-extinction-aoe
@pvonhellermannn yes, but we shouldn't romanticise none of those knowledges. They are full of struggles and also of very questionable constructs. This is what I like about Kallis. His book 'Limits' is a very good example on how taking inspiration, establishing dialogue, and trying to understand other knowledge doesn't mean to idealise them (which as Liepollo Pheko was recalling today, it's still an act of 'othering')
@alx agree completely; huge anthro lit critiqueing both the romanticisation as well as appropriation of ideas of indigenous knowledge. That's kind of how i came to all this. but i have reached a point where i am really tired of all the academic critiquing too, especially when the vast majority of people are not even aware of other possibilities right within their reach. And yes, of course many struggles, but those are really in all economic models for most people, apart from super privileged
@pvonhellermannn I'm very sorry Pauline, but I am quite tired today (following the conf/microblogging/writing my annual monitoring report for my PhD) and I'm not fully understanding your last part. Are you saying that other knowledges are within the reach of people without even realising it? (I'm genuinely asking because I really feel my brain is a bit overloaded today!)
@alx if you read fhe thread i shared, you get some idea. Iitβs framed around biodiversity fostering practices but there is a lot of overlap with alternative prosperity and degrowth. I mean agro-ecological practices throughout the world, including UK, that still exist or were only recently abandoned so not that difficult to revive. All this to say that transition not so hard if we think of degrowth practices not as alien but really still quite close. To rephrase Latour: we have never been 1/2
@alx 2/2 completely modern. We did a first small workshop around this with @RadicalAnthro in March - Camilla sorry I donβt seem to have saved the link, can you share it here perhaps?
Btw was thinking of this again listening to this interview with Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, where she talks about how oil in #UAE was only discovered in 1964 - SO recent. Before that all nature-based culture and economy
https://www.outrageandoptimism.org/episodes/climate-and-nature-one-and-the-same
ES MichelsonDear @alx Yes! and big decisions in governance, at least in democracies, are difficult to achieve. So democratic processes are both the answer and the challenge.
Thank you very, very much for live-blogging this and using #ClimateDiary hashtag. I would not have found it otherwise.
@alx
Yes, I see #MentalHealth in my research almost every day. The other thing I see is a very, very embedded sense of mistrust of institutions of all kinds. Government, corporations, other civil-society organizations that are painted as corrupted and enemies.
Yes, I see #MentalHealth in my research almost every day. The other thing I see is a very, very embedded sense of mistrust of institutions of all kinds. Government, corporations, other civil-society organizations that are painted as corrupted and enemies.
PampaExcruciating! To that audience it sets a new benchmark for patronising.
jcmortreux@alx @timparrique so true and completely buried under the social constructs we have been brainwashed to take for granted.