Opinion piece: "The rise - and future - of the degrowth movement". By Federico Demaria

The rise - and future - of the degrowth movement 

By Federico Demaría, ICTA-UAB



A decade after the first international 'degrowth' conference, Federico Demaria charts the evolution of the term from a provocative activist slogan to what he says is now an academic concept taking hold with policymakers

This year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first international degrowth conference in Paris. This event introduced the originally French activist slogan décroissance into the English-speaking world and international academia as degrowth.

I want to take stock of the last decade in terms of conferences, publications, training and more recently policy making. I focus only on the academic achievements in English, leaving aside both activism and intellectual debates in other languages - these are huge, especially in French, Spanish, Italian and German.

This is not because I think it is more important, but simply because it is the process in which I have been personally involved.



International conferences 

The academic collective Research & Degrowth (R&D) aims at the facilitation of networking and the flow of ideas between various actors working on degrowth, especially in academia.

For this reason - as well as in order to increase the visibility of the degrowth ideas and proposals in the public space - R&D has organized the 1st (Paris 2008) and 2nd (Barcelona 2010) conferences, and called with a Support Group for the 3rd (Venice and Montreal 2012), 4th (Leipzig 2014) and 5th (Budapest) ones. Apart from demonstrating the latest research in the field, the conferences aim at promoting cooperative research and work in the formulation and development of research and political proposals. In keeping with this spirit, in 2018 there will be three international conferences: