The Institutionalisation of Degrowth & Post-growth : the European level – Call for papers

When ? September 17th (2018)

In preparation to the main event at the European Parliament, Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Research&Degrotwh network invite and convene the active forces of the degrowth and post-growth communities for a 1 day seminar with a double objective:

1° learning from experiences: there are numerous accounts of cultural and scientific contagion which have taken place at the EU-levels since the existence of the European institutions. Examples include management methods (e.g. New Public Management), concepts (e.g. ecosystem services), policy agenda (e.g. Beyond GDP/alternative indicators). We convene a set of friendly analysts and activists who lived – in the near and far past – such institutionalisations from within different EU-institutions; the aim is to debate with them in a plenary session on the mechanisms that prevail within the institutions, on the inertias, on accelerators and things to avoid, buttons to push, issues to raise repetitively;

2° crowding together on the most pressing policy agendas: scientific and activist communities are extremely lively and many things happen on specific agendas without everybody being updated. In fields in constitution like ours, we move also in different directions, explore adjacent but diverging hypothesis and questions. It seems important in terms of collective preparation to walk into the EU-institutions with a two-fold common understanding where our fields are:

• state-of-art of factual advances of scientific knowledge, including a consolidation of our main shared messages that we absolutely want to get across (e.g. what is common/shared knowledge with respect to macro-ecological economic modelling? what are our common conclusions from the latest basic income experiments? what should EU policy-makers know about alternative indicators?),
• open and pressing research and policy questions, i.e. where we see a need to invest future R&D efforts (e.g. upcoming research questions on socio-environmental inequalities?), and including recommendations with respect to the type of research we think is foundational to our degrowth / post-growth agendas, and which policy issues are unjustifiably not on the radars of the EU-institutions.

The seminar will organize:

• In the morning, a plenary session on past and on-going experiences of institutionalising ideas, concepts, questions… into institutions, and in particular at the EU-level;
• In the afternoon, a series of thematic parallel sessions around a limited set of themes (typically 4 to 6 working groups with up to 20 participants each) in order to advance on objective 2 above (crowding together) and bring us collectively and content-wise into gear for the two days at the EU-Parliament.

Take a look at our programme here.

Local organizing committee:
Prof. Tom Bauler (ULB)
Dr. Grégoire Wallenborn (ULB)
Julien Vastenaekels (ULB)
Dr. Stephan Kampelmann (ULB)
Prof. Géraldine Thiry (ICHEC)
Dr. Philippe Roman (ICHEC)