UNMAKING team presents at 9th International Degrowth Conference in Zagreb

Julia Spanier, Leonie Guerrero Lara and Jacob Smessaert presented three papers and co-led a workshop session at the 9th International Degrowth Conference in Zagreb, Croatia.

Julia Spanier, Leonie Guerrero Lara and Jacob Smessaert, with Christina Plank and Michaela Pixova. Fertile Ground: Building solidarities and alliances between food sovereignty and degrowth across the rural urban spectrum. Degrowth and Food Sovereignty movements have a shared interest in defending and creating systems of production and reproduction based around the flourishing of human beings and nature. Both movements also share commitments to deepening democracy and building alliances for transformative change. However, in many contexts, these movements are not working closely together. What obstacles, gaps, differences in political and organising traditions, or unexplored questions are blocking deeper and more substantive collaboration? How are degrowth and food sovereignty movements seeking new alliances and coalitions? Where are there possibilities for coalition-formation and the mutual strengthening of these two movements for transformation? This workshop aims to bring together activists and academics to collectively explore and unpack alliance-formation between degrowth and food sovereignty movements (including urban food movements). It will devote special attention to tensions and possibilities for organising across the rural-urban spectrum, on the one hand, and between global North and global South on the other. Short presentations and an interactive discussion with panelists during the first 45 minutes will present cases, tensions, and questions about drivers, obstacles, and possibilities for new alliances. The latter 45 minutes of the workshop will be used for an interactive exercise with workshop participants to harvest experiences of alliance-formation, tensions or obstacles, and questions for further collective exploration.

Julia Spanier, Leonie Guerrero Lara and Jacob Smessaert: Fertile Ground: Building solidarities and alliances between food sovereignty and degrowth across the rural-urban spectrum. Degrowth and Food Sovereignty movements have a shared interest in defending and creating systems of production and reproduction based around the flourishing of human beings and nature. Both movements also share commitments to deepening democracy and building alliances for transformative change. However, in many contexts, these movements are not working closely together. What obstacles, gaps, differences in political and organising traditions, or unexplored questions are blocking deeper and more substantive collaboration? How are degrowth and food sovereignty movements seeking new alliances and coalitions? Where are there possibilities for coalition-formation and the mutual strengthening of these two movements for transformation?
This workshop aims to bring together activists and academics to collectively explore and unpack alliance-formation between degrowth and food sovereignty movements (including urban food movements). It will devote special attention to tensions and possibilities for organising across the rural-urban spectrum, on the one hand, and between global North and global South on the other. Short presentations and an interactive discussion with panelists during the first 45 minutes will present cases, tensions, and questions about drivers, obstacles, and possibilities for new alliances. The latter 45 minutes of the workshop will be used for an interactive exercise with workshop participants to harvest experiences of alliance-formation, tensions or obstacles, and questions for further collective exploration.

Leonie Guerrero Lara: Degrowth and agri food systems: a research agenda for the critical social sciences. Degrowth has become a recognised paradigm for identifying and critiquing systemic unsustainability rooted in the capitalist, growth-compelled economy. Increasingly, degrowth is discussed in relation to specific economic sectors such as the agri-food system. This paper builds on the foundational work of Gerber (2020) and Nelson and Edwards (2021). While both publications take a rather specific analytical or disciplinary focus—the former specifically connects critical agrarian studies and degrowth, the latter explores the contributions of the recent volume ‘Food for degrowth’—this paper takes stock of the emerging body of literature on degrowth and agri-food systems more broadly. It proposes research avenues that deepen, expand and diversify degrowth research on agri-food systems in four areas: (i) degrowth conceptualisations; (ii) theorisation of transformations towards sustainability; (iii) the political economy of degrowth agri-food systems; and (iv) rurality and degrowth. Together, these avenues devote due attention to a variety of agents (ranging from translocal networks to non-humans), spaces (e.g. the rural), theories (e.g. sustainability transitions and transformations towards sustainability) and policies (of the agricultural sector and beyond) that thus far have received limited attention within the degrowth literature. The critical social science perspective on degrowth agri-food systems, which is advanced in this paper, illuminates that the present unsustainability and injustice of hegemonic agri-food systems are not merely a problem of that sector alone, but rather are ingrained in the social imaginaries of how economies and societies should work as well as in the political–economic structures that uphold and reproduce these imaginaries. Download the full paper here.

Jacob Smessaert: Emergent more-than-human anarchisms in a Pyrenean agro-ecosystem. This paper explores the concept of more-than-human anarchisms by connecting eco-anarchist ideas and practices with recent literature on cosmopolitics and more-than-human political work. We try to understand the practical emergence of autonomous human-other-than-human political communities. For this, we study an agro-ecosystem in the Catalan Pyrenees where a peasant collective runs a 90 ha mixed animal husbandry farm. We use a variety of methods (participant observation, more-than-human participatory methods) to map and explore different human-more-than-human alliances, contradictory or conflictual relationships, as well as question their potential for building multispecies democracies. As such, this paper’s contribution is threefold: 1. it establishes the theoretical basis for exploring more-than-human anarchisms, 2. it proposes a rich empirical account of these emergent anarchisms in action, and 3. it explores degrowth’s potential political alliances with agrifood movements and more-than-human nature.