“Green growth is doomed to fail, since it refuses to acknowledge the root cause of climate change: continued economic growth which proves impossible to dematerialize”. This is an excerpt from the short essay PhD researcher Jacob Smessaert submitted to The Economist when they asked young citizens of the world “What fundamental economic and political change,…

Julia Spanier, Jacob Smessaert, Leonie Guerrero and Guilherme Raj are organizing a conference session at the next Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Third Biennial Conference: ‘Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration‘. Instructions for submitting contributions Please send you abstract proposal (250 words) to Julia Spanier (j.r.spanier@uu.nl) and Jacob Smessaert (j.d.a.smessaert@uu.nl) until the 10th of November 2019. Session…

We have published the second publication of this research programme! Feola., G. 2019. Degrowth and the unmaking of capitalism: beyond ‘decolonization of the imaginary’ ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18(4): 977-997. [open access] Degrowth is incompatible with modern capitalist socioecological configurations, and in fact requires their ‘unmaking’ to open space for post-growth and post-capitalist alternatives. The…

30 August 2019. Giuseppe Feola presented the paper De-growth as deliberate and generative ‘space making’ for post-capitalist alternatives at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference in London, United Kingdom. The paper is forthcoming as a full journal article in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.

28 August 2019. Olga Koretskaya presented the poster: A framework for reading economic diversity in food networks and its application to community supported agriculture at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference in London, United Kingdom. The poster, which was co-authored by Giuseppe Feola, proposes a framework that expands our understanding of economic diversity in…

21 August 2019. Giuseppe Feola presented the paper Un-making the world in struggles for socioecological transformation at the 14th Conference of the European Sociological Association in Manchester, United Kingdom. The paper built on the recently published paper Capitalism in sustainability transitions research: Time for a critical turn?and on a forthcoming article in ACME: An International Journal for…

Giuseppe Feola, Olga Coretcaia, Laura van Oers, Leonie Guerrero, Guilherme Raj and Jacob Smessaert co-organized, with colleagues from Copernicus Institute and the Dutch Degrowth Platform, the 1st Utrecht Degrowth Symposium at Utrecht University. This symposium, the first of this kind in the country, brought together over 360 participants from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, and from…

19 June 2019. Giuseppe Feola presented the paper: Polyhedric degrowth: On the prospect of a degrowth transformation at the 13th International Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics in Turku, Finland. Abstract Degrowth proposes a project of radical socioecological transformation. Yet, the degrowth scholarship has overall under-researched the socio-political conditions for a degrowth transformation. This…

We have published the first publication of this research programme! Feola, G. (In press). Capitalism in sustainability transitions research: Time for a critical turn? Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions. DOI: 10.1016/j.eist.2019.02.005 [open access] This article argues that sustainability transition research (STR) has failed to engage in any significant analyses or critiques of capitalism. This article argues that capitalism is not…

06 February 2019. Giuseppe Feola presented the paper: Breaking out! Five propositions on the deliberate unmaking of unsustainable socioecological systems at the Leverage Points 2019 conference in Lüneburg, Germany. Abstract Societal sustainability transformations imply a disruption of modern, capitalist socioecological relations that inform destructive modes of interaction with the natural environment. Radical civil society initiatives may hold…