Pathways towards Post-Growth (Julia Steinberger, Jason Hickel, Giorgos Kallis)

It's not the data that's weird it's not the analysis that where it is the result people do not like this result they think it is very strange that uh one can get more and more social progress with less and less energy use this goes against what people are expecting and so there's sort of an allergic reaction to this it's not only an ecological crisis that we face but a profound social crisis uh That's characterized by very high levels of inequality that we face as well and so addressing um this double crisis is is is the

objective of our project but also this should be the objective of of progressive social movements to understand the ecological and social Dimensions together analyst now or liberal analysts are saying okay or the growth makes sense but politically it's it's a non-starter So and it's such a huge change that we can't imagine it happening in the current liberal democracies where you can just get like marginal changes in this with a lot of sweat and then they are reversed and it's true I mean this critique is very true so we want to work with it [Music] foreign

and welcome to the circular metabolism Podcast the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers policy makers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our Societies or in other words their resource use and pollution emissions and how to reduce them in a socially just systemic and context-specific way I'm your host is from metabolism of cities and today we have a very very special episode that we'll explore how To escape from the growth economy and ensure social welfare and planetary sustainability for all most of the people listening and watching to to this podcast already

are aware about the ecological crisis the societal and the Injustice crisis that we're facing right now and how perpetual and infinite economic growth driven by GDP as the only indicator is one of the systemic causes behind all of that numerous Scholars have proposed Post-growth donut economics and a number of other Visions for a desirable just an ecological restorative future however it is sometimes unclear how to make this possible how to make this desirable future a reality to explore how to develop a post-growth future I have the pleasure to talk with not one but three fantastic

guests and I call them the Trinity of degrowth or postgrowth today with us we have Julia Steinberger professor of ecological Economics from University of delozan jurgos kalis Professor of ecological economics and political ecology at the University autonoma de Barcelona and finally Jason hickle professor at the social and cultural anthropology department at the University at autonomate Barcelona as well together they were awarded a ERC so European research Council Synergy research and Action Project entitled post-growth deal also between parentheses real So many of us are extremely excited and curious about this project however we cannot find too

much of it online and that's why we have this podcast episode today so that you can tell us a bit more about it let's let's leave it to there with all that being said Julia jurgos Jason thanks so much and welcome back or welcome to the podcast thank you for having us yeah thanks very much great um so you have this project but before We dive in this project I would like perhaps because there is the interdisciplinary element into it or transdisciplinary element to it the Synergy Grant I would like perhaps for you to share

with us how you arrived to post growth because none of us were born in this or started with post-growth as our academic endeavor and you all come from different academic and research backgrounds um You are interdisciplinary researchers as well so Julia you were a physicist back in the day then industrial ecologist and now ecological Economist and you mix a number of them uh your ghosts you were an environmental engineer and you turned a political ecologist and ecological Economist and Json your economic Anthropologist turned ecological economics as well so perhaps I would like to take a

couple of minutes from each one of you to to tell what were Some key turning points in your research career that told you okay post growth might be an important element to explore and I would need to reach it with other disciplines and not only the ones I was trained by so perhaps Julia we can start with you and and then we can move with your colleagues thanks so I still and I think that this is a why I was really uh cringing and feeling quite unworthy when you mentioned this a horrible expression of The

Eternity because I came to this topic quite late I think I was doing industrial ecology and ecological economics I was looking at where you could see decoupling or not decoupling or efficiency or rebound or those kinds of things and I was not at all convinced about the necessity of tea growth or post growth I wasn't I wasn't I wouldn't say they were that I was against it I just I was very um Uh not not convinced of the necessity I would put it that way and I sort of had to convince myself through my own

research and through the research of colleagues to the fact that this decoupling this green growth is not happening in reality if you do see it it's very partial and not fast enough and that we need radical changes quite rapidly in order to put things to put ourselves on a safer trajectory and so that's when I became Um really myself convinced and started paying a lot more attention to the work of people like yoga centers and that I should have been paying attention to all along perhaps and and others as well I mean there's lots of

really the great researchers in this domain like you know Matthias schmeltzer and all kinds of other people so thanks uh yours perhaps you would like to how was your journey between becoming an environmental engineering I think you were working on Water back in the day um and then perhaps you asked what if we don't continue building more pipes or what was the The Journey there oh it's too much water and I got drunk I got for the water you know if you work on the same topic over and over I was telling someone the other

day you know at the end not not I mean not to to brag but you know if you work 10 12 years on a very narrow Topic at some point you've Listened everything that can be said about you've thought about it and then you're just uh becoming updated to the latest controversy what has changed you know privatization and civilization but the basic the basic ideas are there and then I felt uh you feel you start feeling stuck while with post-growth or the growth is not the same because it's about everything so you can never you

can never know enough about it you Know you can you can read and read and read from politics to to models to I mean it includes everything um no the transition I mean came to me in the sense that when I arrived in Barcelona in 2008 to work with John Martinez alier and his groups that they were standing environmental conflicts around the world the one of the main figures of ecological economics uh John Martinez he wrote one of the first books the first Meeting of the Society of ecological economics took place in Barcelona 87 I

think or something like that I got trained here in a summer school in 1999 I was just an environmental scientist as you said and then I did the I came for for a different reason to summer school here and I was introduced to ecological economics and I really liked it and then I turned my PhD around ecological economics so I was coming as a junior professor in Where I wanted to be and around at the time that I came a little bit later I think that was the first International Conference on the growth taking place

in Paris and most most of the students here and John went there I didn't know what it was and I I don't know why I was bored of going to Paris so so I didn't go I think I was only the only person who didn't go I was working in empty corridors for a while and then everyone came back super Excited and it's like I was very good you know Etc and then somehow I started reading about it what was this conference on the growth what is the growth and it resonated with many ideas that

I had I mean my postal code Berkeley was with Richard norgard who was a Critic of the idea of development of unilinear development of the idea economists understand development and I was also trained in Political ecology which is let's say very broadly speaking it's a Marxist and uh for codeine critique of capitalism so these were my two lines of training but what I lacked especially from political ecology and the Hallmarks is critique which I think it's very incisive but it was lacking a little bit uh effort to formulate the alternative to link to groups that

demand different things and that was what one could find in Barcelona that there was much more engagement with social movements with indigenous groups with mobilizations here in Catalonia and then when this whole thing started being formulated around the concept of growth the concept of degrowth the critics economic growth that is I think fundamental for ecological economics I jumped on the train so of course there has been numerous degrowth uh an ecological economic uh conferences since then we're Gonna get back to the Beyond growth conference as well a bit later on uh how about you Jason

what was your journey in navigating these troubly Waters well for me I came at it from um from World System research which is what I was doing uh in my prior life I I was based at LLC before and I just finished the book I was writing a book on global inequality and neocolonial uh structures in the world economy and I finished it and I gave it I gave The manuscript to a colleague and he said you should probably talk a little bit about the ecological crisis since this is a big deal and you should

have some kind of reference to it now so I started looking a little bit at flows of materials and emissions and energy and so on then I realized wow you can't tell the story of global inequality in the world system without paying attention to these so like like physical material flows and I realized that Um that uh the way that the world economy operates is that growth in the global North um depends on this massive extraction of materials and energy and embodied labor from the global South which is deeply deleterious to their capacity to uh

uh to advance National development objectives and also you know offshores all the ecological damages and social damages uh associated with Northern Growth um and so this became fascinating for me and I really wanted to understand it more and and I discovered I discovered post-growth as a result of this basically I started reading work uh by people in the field and then I met yorgos by chance in London who sat me down in a cafe in Russell square and he was like look uh yeah he was like look there are these ideas You have to pay

attention to them so you know and I was like I don't know if I'm totally convinced but then I started reading and I thought wow this is a fascinating field that um uh is really like I mean really captivating and exciting and uh and I felt I could contribute something with uh with a political economy kind of analysis and that's that's more or less what I've been doing so I've always come at the question of degrowth from a kind Of let's call it a kind of anti-colonial perspective I suppose um uh and that remains really

interesting to me yeah and I think that's what I enjoy very much with this field is that it comes with layers of understanding and even if I come from one particular let's say tradition of research measuring flows and and stocks and stuff like that I I I realize that I need to to relearn Everything every time I discuss with another scholar in this field which is so enriching and perhaps we can use uh just another question to discuss about the the diagnosis before we dive in into the the project and in your case uh Jason

I think you you just mentioned it um you say that um well of course there is a intricate relationship between the relationship between inequality and Ecological destruction uh and how these are masked or caused by capitalism or new ways of colonialism uh you talk a lot about resource plundering you talk a lot about whose growth is it really or who is developing who um yeah these are of course in in your book The the list is more um do you want perhaps to to elaborate a bit further about how these relationship between the two so

Ecological and societal um streams are deeply rooted in the past um and we we are somehow in a in an inter interim interwoven systems that does not allow to to do one without the other so even Gringos will continue and push towards more inequality could you clarify about these elements yeah that's it's 500 years of History we're talking about that again I guess very I guess very briefly we could just Say look I mean it's it's kind of apparent to all and very well established that um that uh that the industrial Rise Of The Core

economies in the world system uh depended on a huge appropriation of resources and labor from the global South right uh for you know for most of the first several hundred years of capitalism and then there was of course this incredible um moment in the 20th century when uh Global South countries you know fought and successfully managed to achieve um you know independence from colonial power and they begin organizing their economies around uh around human developments objectives you know locally uh for the first time ensuring access to Universal Services and nutritious food and decent wages Etc

et cetera and this triggered this uh this crisis in the world system right where it became more difficult for capital in The core to achieve the rates of uh expansion and return that they had enjoyed for so long under the colonial period because suddenly resources in the global South are being mobilized around human needs rather than around servicing capital accumulation in the core and so they responded with this with a series of interventions I mean including uh um you know coups and invasions but also structural investment programs which sought to cheapen Labor and resources in

the global South and reorganized production once again around Servicing uh Northern accumulation this time primarily through global commodity chains where producers in the global South would uh would you know uh be generating technological goods and you know textiles and so on and sweatshops uh for very very low prices I mean that's more or less the economy we live in today which Um which is I mean there's an incredible Paradox I think we have to pay attention to it which is that um the world economy is extremely productive right I mean more productive than anyone 50

or 100 years ago could ever have imagined and yet nonetheless huge portions of the human population live in deprivation right and most of that deprivation of course is in the global South in the periphery of the world System but even in the core economies in the US and the UK et cetera even in the European Union there's extraordinary levels of deprivation uh people can't make basic ends meet they can't afford Health Care and housing Etc et cetera what's going on here right uh it seems to be a paradox um and the reason of course is

simply that that under capitalism the objective of production is to maximize and accumulate profits not to meet human needs right and so the Result is of course A system that massively overuses resources and yet still fails to meet human needs and this is deeply paradoxical I think it's incredibly important to point out the fact that it's not only an ecological crisis that we face but a profound social crisis uh that's characterized by very high levels of inequality that we face as well and so addressing um this double crisis is is is the Objective of our

project but also this should be the objective of of progressive social movements to understand the ecological and social Dimensions together and of course when we when we heard the Ursula Wonderland at the at the conference talking about this new well not new green deal but all of this we can imagine signing treaties with Argentina on new uh Supply chains of Critical materials and all of that we can of course imagine about future reconfigurations of neocolonialism and all of this so yeah uh I'll bookmark this we can come back to it uh in the in a

future reference in the conversation um Julia you mentioned just before that you're at the beginning you started looking at the relationship or kind of the decoupling whether it existed or not I remember I think it was in 2014 uh I saw a conference I was in a conference with you and you presented something about the HDI and material footprint I think it was a scatter plot of of the countries and um over there you kind of saw that well there's no the strict relationship the the the more footprint the the more uh you you will

provide services or the more footprint the more um resource efficient you'll be or or More GDP will be more resource efficient so you kind of started to debunk or question these core assumptions that we had uh five years beforehand right and I'm wondering I also remember in her previous discussion that this was heavily dismissed back in the day that this this was not well accepted although you had hard data can you perhaps share a bit this diagnosis what were some of the steps And what you concluded back in the day when comparing ecological components and

social components yeah so so it was out of the material footprint because I think that data became it became available internet actually later and I think Anka shafarzig actually did some work on that so I was looking at things like carbon Footprints so carbon with him um trade corrected carbon with data from Klein feeders and I was looking at Energy use just like plain old energy use and uh and what was what's kind of interesting is like that that topic was not purely original so one of the things I did is I was reading these

old um Global energy development reports that uh I think it was United Nations development program had put together on energy and development that were super interesting and I found this plot that showed that this relation between human development and energy was changing over Time and I was like well that's weird and nobody's ever talked about that it was just this one plot and it wasn't published in peer review and I'd only remember the guy's first name which was Carlos which is unfortunate and uh and I was like okay well let's check that and when I

checked it I found that it was true for basically any indicator of social progress you might want to find and um and so I was basically putting Together what this this picture of both International and change over time and the data is pretty simple the analysis was pretty simple I don't have a very complicated brain and it kept getting rejected I think the paper got rejected six times and nothing changed over the course of it getting rejected except it just got a bit more complicated because they're like oh you're doing population weighting of your data

and we don't do that and what If that changes I'm like I have to do with it with population reading and without population waiting anyways nothing really changed uh but finally it did get published in ecological economics thank God and um it was just sort of my first wake-up call of like okay it's not the data that's weird it's not the analysis that weird is the result people do not like this result they think it is very strange that uh one can get more and more social Progress with less and less energy use this goes

against what people are expecting and so they're they're sort of an allergic reaction to this but for me so for me that that made me think okay it's worth it's worth digging more and understanding what would be possible if we took this reality seriously because the other thing I thought was super strange and interesting was when you talk about this result to people um their reactions are if they get it Their reactions are super weird they're like oh okay then everything's gonna be fine it's like it's not because it's possible to do better with lower

resource use that we're actually going in that direction like there's massive inequality there's massive deprivation there's massive over consumption and we're going towards this you know this expansionist machine that Jason was talking about in terms of the capitalist World economy and just because a better future is possible does not you know in the data corner somewhere does not mean that that's what we're actually doing like why why are you even thinking that and that was another thing that made me realize that people are not understanding underlying power relations and they're not understanding what it takes

for a good future to be realized it's not just the possibility like that we exist in a in an option space where We automatically seek out the best Way Forward I think people think that maybe because of the economics education indoctrination that we're supposed to be in an optimizing system or something I don't understand it but it made me understand both of these things that uh that uh that there were different Pathways that weren't being explored but also that people didn't realize what it would take for the to really get system Transformation to make those

Pathways realizable and that sort of set me on my current track yeah I can imagine I mean me uh a very naive engineer would also think this is a logical step like we have a theory we have a solution there we go someone just didn't read enough or didn't do the right policy so far and we're gonna do it and you know in a couple of years uh things gonna solve themselves uh naturally but of course we're gonna come into the Well the orchestration and how the current growth machine does not enable future Alternatives and

I think over there that's transitions smoothly to to you yoga's with well you're questioning of political and Democratic aspects of flows and stocks so in political ecology transition traditionally we we don't own we don't know we don't look at numbers per se but we unders we try to question the numbers saying who gets access to those flows Why do they get access to to these flows where are these flows and so you ask a number of other questions in order to politicize let's say some of the more industrial ecology approach which is just measuring stocks

and flows right was that some of the ways that you understood that well water per se is highly political and the flows in stocks as well behind it and who produces the numbers and the metrics and what do the metrics count And why so I mean when I was starting water that was clear I mean you the way what was defined as a drought Etc it's for someone who is not into technical stuff you would think okay there must be some objective definition of drugs that everyone agrees to you know but of course it's not

like that because the way drought is understood it comes with a very particular understanding within which it is Um doesn't question the increase of demand it it naturalizes the problem as being just a matter of weather I mean there are all sorts of things and all sorts of decisions that they are taking on when do you what do you define as an anomaly that then counts as a drought that actually they're very political decisions in which scientists um tend to think they're a political I Mean this happens also in conversations today about planetary boundaries but

also more relevant to us when we talk about the girls GDP it's it's an obvious indicator that has assumed power for the reasons it has that we can analyze historically politically economically and it is a measure that it's taken for granted what it means but there have been huge um simplifying conventions behind it That they were nothing but innocent or neutral they have distributive consequences I mean you decide what you count and what you don't count you don't count the the work conducted at home mostly by women you don't count the loss of forests and

clean air Etc you only count the expenditures to clean it the problem with GDP are well known but even when they are well known they are Considered as like oh they did this mistake or War we could improve it and make better indicators what political ecology brings to the pictures to understand why these things happen and why they persist they are not just a matter of a technical mistake that some technicians haven't realized in some other technicians are going to improve in the future due to Goodwill you know so So when I started studying about

the girl the first thing I did is like to start to start looking at the histories of GDP and growth they are extremely interesting you know because you see all the debates that they were taking place in the 1930s and 40s when GDP was started being counted how did they decide what is in what is out the political struggles in the U.S Congress where the conservatives didn't want to be actually measured which is Interesting because they were they didn't want the private Enterprise's taxed and they the Republicans let's say of the day you know and

they were afraid that by a better metric system of the whole economy it would get a better picture of Revenue also private companies you would tax them more it was a government project GDP you know so it was a lot of reaction to it from let's say Anti-government um political factions but then of course you know there's the whole thing what GDP measured what not then how did it get standardized at the international level what abstractions took place there how did it take place in the context of the cold war with Soviet Union how did

Soviet Union try to measure its economy however then they were trying one to To overshoot the other in terms of GDP growth and that was linked to the military competition so all this stuff are political in the broad sense you know so to think about something even I'm not talking about growth or capitalist growth where it's obviously that's political even to think of the simple thing of how do we measure growth which is a GDP and it seems like a neutral innocent number and it's full of politics of course Uh just before we move on

Julia Jason perhaps you don't know that but uh Euros would do you have on your right hand is this the amarti still this one is a Mars of course yeah I'm keeping it a little bit too long for the for the custom the tradition the tradition is by the end of March you put it under a tree and then you make a wish but I prefer to wait until July and August and celebrate my Vacations by putting it in a tree in a directory by Then but it's fine yeah okay now we have the um

the considerations the the diagnosis of the problem right we we are in an ecological and Injustice crisis uh both are caused by political choices and it also means that we have Alternatives we don't necessarily need to consume that much to get to the same social outcome so these are let's say how we Triangulate the problem and then you fit them on a board and you say okay we need a project was this during the London the famous London meeting between jorgos and Jason where you had coffee and they you said we need a project or

who who was behind it I mean you you wrote a number of Articles already together in postgrosa scenarios I think um but what was the impetus behind this project who who kind of uh pushed it Burgers pushed it but not as far back when when Jason was too young and Nina said that I didn't try to scare him too much you know he was young you lured him in with the growth and then once he took the bait then you started yanking him a nice life in London he wasn't he wasn't up for that no

but the meeting in London was very far back it was in 2015 or 14 or something like that so the project We started working on it in 2000 21 22 I mean I'm not sure um yeah but at least two years ago from now we started working on it so it was 2021 so it was much later I mean yeah Jason as I said the story is Jason got gradually into the growth and at some point there was an opportunity where professors came here in Barcelona he came and then within the overall thinking of how

can developers that send a research group Here in Barcelona but also internationally um I was thinking of an individual Literacy for myself perhaps Jason for himself because here in Catalonia there are also other elsewhere in Europe this type of grounds are valued a lot in an academic trajectory but they also give you the opportunity you know to build the team build their long research agenda so they are they are welcome schemes let's say And useful and then yes uh I we were thinking of what team would we like to make and Julia was an obvious

um person to First Contact and collaborate with because these are Synergy grants and synergies they they they put a lot of emphasis on the complementary they know bringing different research expertise and agendas together And I think I injection cover to one extent the political economic political ecological part of it but at different scales I'm I'm more interested on the politics on the local Politics on the movement politics station looks at the big International political economy between majority and minority World Etc but then we lack let's say the necessary uh technical skills to put the models

in Place to to really think of how a particular infrastructures in a post-growth context would look like and also you know have also the real numbers and the real models that give us a picture of what another in the future could look like so it was an obvious Synergy between the three of us I mean you could travel to other possible synergies but I think it was a between More people it's not just the three of us so I don't think it's a trinity as you said I mean there are there are many many more

capable and great people know and we are among them but it was one good strong Synergy and also there were good vibes from our first meeting so that was a good reason to continue working like that yeah I can imagine I mean I think I'm sorry I think in general we just kind of Realized that there's so much uh additional research that we all want to do um I mean this this field is one of those things where like questions multiply you know and new ideas are are being born every day and it feels like

there's there's a lot that we want to discover and it pushes it's constantly pushing our Horizons and inspiring our imaginations and um eventually we felt like the resources That we had available to us in terms of our own time and uh and so on we're just not enough for us to be able to answer all the questions that we thought were important and so the possibility of working together and building a big team around around this research was just really I mean it felt like the right time right I feel like the right time uh

uh in terms of the trajectory of this field uh um and I'm very I'm very Grateful that it worked out because otherwise we'd only be able to answer a fraction of the questions that that Inspire us and this is a real chance to to make a a broader contribution I think in general also like both yogas and I were incredibly inspired by the kind of empirical work that Julia was doing um and uh I think the the potential of that kind of approach was was just so clear To us uh and I think that the

the project we put together um is able to mix political economy and political ecology and uh and empirical modeling approaches in a really exciting way uh that's I hope will make a yeah a profound contribution yes I mean just by reading it it seems that also you know during the last five years there was the the foundations of works of your colleagues as well I mean Apologies yes Trinity perhaps it's not the right term but you know I I try to find something uh something catchy for for this but the idea was that you have

so many colleagues as well that have built foundations that we are at a certain level that we can question and empirically test a number of fundamental ideas and I think that we we have passed the idea tests and now I think more and more people agree with post-growth more and more People are behind it but we are now into this second phase of postgrowth where we kind of need more um theoretical empirical and applied elements to to make this a reality and I think that's where I I welcome very much your your transdisciplinary research and

you say in I think in the ground that you have five pillars of postgres that you want to explore right uh so this time I didn't invent it you invented the Five Pillars uh let's start with one and I think the first one perhaps is also fits a lot with this Empirical research of you Julia where you say you want to explore and determine the planetary spaces of possibilities modeling the use of resources needed to live decently and as a third point to identify how we can have a convergence between North and South um Julia

you have worked on this for a couple of years now on the provisioning of services and essential needs What is an excess what is the right amount what is decent these are vast questions can you perhaps mention what are these you know provisioning uh well provision of services and where do they fit in the puzzle so provisioning systems actually has its own uh third work package right which is work package three so that's the the third pillar so are we discussing the first pillar which is possibilities are we discussing the Third one because indeed when

I saw the third one I thought it was the counterpart of the first one so the first one is more ideation the first one is um as far as I'm concerned well you know so first of all the Five Pillars and the five P's postgroup that was because he is the greens behind the operation so you we need something catchy and cute and I was like really and then so I can't complain Anymore but I you know um at first I was I was unconvinced to say the least but uh so it's amazing because it's

postgrowth you know so it's that's right because then a friend of a friend of mine who has a Marie Curie project that I mean The Advisory Board reminded me I have also the five piece you know you took it from there and I said oh my God I forgot that well there they were the five P's of Something else you know I mean the thing when I because my previous project was called living well within limits and I had an Advisory Group already and I emailed them and I was like you know what you think

of these different project titles blah blah blah and they got back you know and they they answered they all like living well with the limits better and then one of them one of the project actually had started at the first Advisory board meeting was like do you know you stole that from Tim Jackson he has a whole chapter on that and for that he did for the sustainability commission I was like dude I asked you you could have told me it was like I didn't you know I mean I didn't mean to steal it from

it so I had to write this really embarrassing email to Tim Jackson saying really I I'm I'm sorry about this I I can only apologize also it's John O'Neill's fault Um because he should have told me um so so the the fruit but going back to the project the first P around possibilities is sort of an empirical package so the mo the the thing that sort of ties things together in that one is that we're trying to basically lay the quantitative and qualitative groundwork around some of these post-growth ideas so we're trying to lay out

the big picture scenarios or trying to understand the material requirements Material labor Etc requirements of well-being um do a whole bunch of footprinting um and we are uh the there's two qualitative aspects around what are examples of g-growing or post-growing econ or flatlining not low growth economies that what it policies have they put into place to put their population what does that look like so learning from those empirical examples and learning from empirical examples for Instance during the pandemic of what are the the economic activities and the sectors that are the most crucial uh to

keep an economy going and to keep the population protected against it again and then uh there's a sort of culminating that there's this idea that we would try to do overall one of the most ambitious things we're proposed to do in the project which is over um alternative uh integrated assessment model scenarios consistent with the Future and that's super ambitious and we have to see how far we get with that so we're working on it um but yeah that's a that's a that's that's already a stretch but that's what the first one does is lay

the empirical groundwork and sort of culminating in this idea of an overarching uh alternative modeling pathway yes indeed and um I had uh Lawrence Kaiser as well on the podcast on Integrated assessment models and perhaps it's important to mention that none of the scenarios reviewed by these C ipcc sorry um have a convergence between north and south and I think this is this opens up a million other possibilities and Alternatives if you you have another constraint which is the one of convergence because right now we just Have one constraint let's bring the uh I don't

know greenhouse gas emissions down to 1.5 degrees but of course now you and the possibilities they they are I don't know if they're narrower or or wider by adding more constraints I don't know if you when when you think about that uh this possibility space do do when when you think about it do you see it as a constraint one or as a abundant one man who wrote the book on them it says Sitting in the yogas would you like to another man who wrote about north-south convergence is also he doesn't have it okay it's

the game of hot potato I see here yeah yeah I can say something about no self-convergancies abundance that's cool um no look I mean really this has to be emphasized uh the existing climate mitigation scenarios are deeply unjust and this should trouble all of us in the sense that look They basically they basically start with the assumption that the global North countries should continue to increase production every year for the rest of the century right growth and maintain very high levels of energies and they Square this uh with the Paris agreement targets by suppressing energy

use in the global South uh right in some cases suppressing it to below the levels that are required to Meet uh basic needs um so this is like this is deeply Colonial uh and it's surprising to me actually there's a broader a broader discussion about this I don't think the model is necessarily intent like necessarily intended this but it's certainly the way that it's come out and uh and so one of the very urgent things we want to do is think about okay what if we what if we take client mitigation Seriously but also take

uh um take uh global inequality seriously and think about what's going to be required to ensure access to energy uh um to meet decent uh decent living needs for everyone on the planet and I think that's really I mean it's interesting because basically what we see is that the the so-called green growth scenarios are balanced on the backs of the world's poorest people and this is unacceptable and I think that Like we talk a lot about like the technical unfeasibility of green growth Visions Etc et cetera I think that we have to also pay attention

to the Deep inequities that are at the heart of green growth visions and once we confront that fact then it becomes clear that a different kind of approach is needed and this is what we're referring to is north south convergence we have to increase energy use in the global South in order to meet uh decent Living standards very clearly but in the global North a significant reduction in energy is going to have to be achieved even assuming like quite rapid technological change which we Embrace by the way um so so we need models and scenarios

to pay attention to that and that's one of the exciting things that we hope this project will do you always you want to bounce back on the on the limiter element abundance versus Limits and uh what's that possibility is a well space of possibilities I didn't really understand to be honest the question because I was paying attention to the north south convergence ipcc and then I heard some words that seem to be mine but I didn't get the connection no it was at the beginning I was asking Julia whether the fact of constraining more even

further um the models and you know this space by not only having an ecological limit but Also having a social limit does that kind of pushes and and squeezes the the space of possibilities or because we we take the shackles off of growth growthism we we kind of unleash the and and make the space of possibilities much larger than before is there a or how do you think about it I mean I also had a discussion with these two authors uh Frederick Albert and uh Carl Vineland on the scarcity uh book that they wrote and

I think this ties back on Inversely proportionality than your limits book so the scarcity and limits or abundance and limits what are your thoughts about this so I'm not sure if I have something wise to you I I I mean I think the current system is producing scarcity all the time so I don't think that these scenarios of non-convergence their scenarios of abundance in any sense right so I mean there are scenarios of continuous inequalities continuous of deprivation for majority part of the planet even though they supposedly achieved with unrealistic assumptions some kind of better

climate future than would otherwise be the case so I think our intention is to create scenarios that they are both socially acceptable and socially just and socially um Beneficial as well as climatically sustainable I mean here I mean I'm not someone who uses the donut I I barely mentioned it but now the way you framed it it sound sounds to me like the donut now that there is like a social minimum that we have to achieve I am and also stay with him I don't know certain climatic thresholds um and this social limit is a

universal idea of everyone in this World being equal so the goal the minimum part of the donut should be we should aspire to to a future where everyone in this planet has more or less the same you know there's no no justification whatsoever why to plan for futures were some people in some parts of the world by virtue of being born there or being born To respondents there they will have like a thousand times more than people born somewhere else so that's that's a minimum you know I think that's that's a minimum goal and that's

how it's ready in our project so we want to create models not incorporate this goal alongside as you said climate goals um and I think in so is it in this work package if I understand correctly where you also look at existing case studies Where this type of Lifestyles have been achieved or will I think Julia didn't understand well it's not Lifestyles that say no no it's something because I'm responsible for that this for this first work package of possibilities was a little bit the package where we put all the interesting ideas we had them

we didn't know exactly where to put them so the rest I think the other packet is a little bit the other pieces are more consistent the first P was a Pay for everything you know and me really not the P um so I guess I had to put there the interest to study the experience of low growth economies or no growth economies in the last year so like to to be bold and start trying to learn also from stagnation because stagnation of course is not postgrowth but stagnation is stagnation and we have we cannot only

think about postgrowth in the abstract But also think and learn from what different people in different governments have tried in periods of of where growth has not been possible to begin with so that's the objective there and we might get to study more detail the experience of Japan the last 20 years maybe the experience of a country like Cuba in the special period I mean these are examples that they're often Mentioned but really studied the release intention that we have here and then the other was to to reflect a little bit on what happened during

the pandemic you know that not because we want to close bars again to avert climate change because I think bars should remain open um but because we want to it was a very particular and special period where a very big part of the economy most put in hibernation And there was a very important distinction introduced that didn't exist before between essential and non-essential sectors and services most of the times was essential for Capital but at least as a distinction it it is important because it speaks very much to our emphasis on human needs versus Superfluous

types of production and consumption and when we talk about Insension and non-essentials this so during the pandemic not intentionally unintentionally there was interesting experimentation of how do you handle the closing down of parts of the economy how do you distinguish what you maintain and protect at all costs and what is super Evolution you can let go you know or you can do without it for a while a very different context of course virus social distancing and all these things That's that's has nothing to do with our scenarios of the growth or of climate change but

as an approach I think it we should study it I mean it's it's obviously something unique that happened it's a social experiment of of a big scale and before the pandemic we couldn't think of what would it mean for the economy to under operate for one or two years you know now we have this thing it has happened so we should learn from it Um we might come back to some other possibilities in the future of the first peel let's let's try to get to the second P which is I guess policy policy packages if

I understand correctly um and of course over there these need to be contextualized and there will also be differentiated as well what we need to add in our lives and what we need to remove from our lives Um we need to to to add well-being we need to add care we need to add a number of elements and at the same time we need to to reduce uh phase out fossil fuels substitutes some elements with some others we need to cap I guess some resources um so what are some of the elements that you envision

in this uh second B and who who feels uh particularly interested by developing these piece I can talk really briefly about this yeah I mean I guess kind of the the uh the centerpiece of this of this particular pillar is to put together what we're calling post-growth deals um and the idea is effectively to uh to develop a coherence policy a coherence on empirically informed policy framework that say the the EU or a particular EU country or other country in the core could Implement uh to achieve um you know something approximating uh a Safe and

just degril transition right uh in a way that's that's uh that scales down less necessary forms of production but also um ensures uh strong social outcomes at the same time without the kind of Destruction that normally accompanies things like recessions and so on right so an equitable and Equitable transition uh which hasn't really been worked out yet I mean there's lots of policy Proposals out there um which are interesting I think there's kind of a convergence that's occurring within the field around some of the core policies that would need to be implemented like Universal public

services and a public job guarantee and uh ends uh working time reduction Etc et cetera um but it's never really been put into a kind of yeah like a coherent Economic Policy framework and that's what we want To produce from this um for the global South it's a little bit different so for the global South we want to think about what kinds of policies and strategies um governments in the global South could use to reclaim productive capacities and reorganize them around around producing for human needs and human development objectives uh locally right so again like

like it's totally nonsensical that so Much of the resources and labor and lands uh in the global South are mobilized around servicing accumulation of the north and they could be mobilized instead around around human needs uh right closing the the massive Gap in Social outcomes between periphery and core but this requires you know radical approaches to to fiscal policy to monetary policy to Industrial policy et cetera et cetera so we went to map out what that would look like as Well um so different strategies for different parts of the world but uh um but that's

kind of the idea of this of this package of them and then we also have we also have the idea of modeling some of these policy outcomes through uh say for example stock flow consistent models just to see um you know if you implement this kind of policy package then what are the Outcomes uh in terms of say Employments or in terms of um or even more more interestingly in terms of social outcomes and and uh and ecological impacts and so on so and this is the kind of empirical data we would like to be

able to present to policy makers and say look I mean this is the you know a possible policy framework and this these are the likely effects given the assumptions that our models Etc so At least it can start a conversation about about alternative trajectories yeah of course when you were mentioning about the the two different sets of deals I was internally hoping that you would pronounce also the term modeling and when when you said that I was like oh that is going to be I was thinking how hard this must be and when you said

the word I was like okay uh I'm very curious About how this is gonna pan out and does that immediately fit in with the next one with the service provision and the word package where there is more modeling or is there like an integrated model across the spine of of the project or or these uh smaller models that that run in parallel or how does that work yeah so pair for this print rounds of selection and at some point you have to go to interview and Then you have lots of people who help you out

if you're lucky and we were very lucky lots of people helped us out by asking you hard interview questions as practice and it was Michael Jacobs who went through her proposal and was like you guys have six different models or seven or whatever it was and um you're like oh yeah that's right anyway there was not an overarching model uh that is not one of our Ambitions but but we'd like to advance in each direction That we're sort of trying to push forward to have at least some idea of how changing the things we're interested

in changing would result in in different outcomes and so the the third working package around provisioning systems is this idea of democratizing the economy um basically um facing the problem that right now our political system and political decision making stops at the boundary of the Quote unquote lots of scare quotes free market and that basically our democracy our Democratic decision-making process does not go into what is extracted produced and consumed that that's something that we're supposed to sort of let the market figure out for us and we are supposed to only interact with it as

workers and consumers but not ever as Citizens with some kind of decision-making capacity um that that goes beyond that and so the Idea this idea of democratizing provisioning assistance is basically trying to address the fact that when we look at the system of capitalism we're looking at a global interconnected system of profit accumulation that Jason described um we're looking at a macroeconomic system of finance and monetary interconnectedness and how governments Finance different programs and so on which is another aspect but we're also Looking at sectors uh like the automotive industry or like the fossil fuel

industry or like um uh the real estate and Housing Industry that are hugely problematic and anti-democratic in the way that they push both inequality and um resource use uh and this is something that we that if we need to to face our basically move towards a post-growth future where people have better living conditions and Working conditions we need to face what those Industries are doing and so the idea of this work package is that this has to be thought through sectorally there are a lot of ideas around democratizing the economy in general like democratizing Finance

or the monetary system but very very few people are thinking through it sectorally and that's what I'd like to push forward so this is my work package even though I I am not this is not my area it's an area I've stumbled into it's just this is what I thought needed to be um needed to be thought about and I think it's really it's really quite crucial because a lot of these proposals are very naive I think that this is also something that you know it's good to have proposals good to have ideas um but

this is also something that Jason's facing and the second work package around policies which is you have these laundry list of policies and Maybe they'll work out great or maybe they won't but we need to understand how they're going to interact with the macro economy and how they're going to interact with each other and the same is true for these ideas around democracy the economy you know everybody's going around saying we should have worker cooperatives okay um is one size fits all ever a good solution for anything uh you know there are people who are

Saying we should just have commenting okay is you know so so I think it's really about having more subtlety learning from existing examples and trying to have a a more synthetic representation of the the risks and pitfalls and that's where the modeling comes in so the idea of the modeling here is that we have some synthetic representation of what different decision-making and institutional configurations can do across these Really entrenched sectors and and sort of try to represent what some differences could do in terms of Social and environmental outcomes as opposed to others but this this

part is very challenging I don't have a very very good idea of how we're going to do it let alone do it right so I'm looking for uh anybody who's listening to this if you have any clever ideas please do send to them uh that your email I will try to read Um that would be great thank you very much because it's just it's just very hard to think about how you represent alternative decision making in terms of sort of uh those kinds of uh outcomes and I mean in your previous papers you kind of

reverse uh the problem instead of having it top down how much we consume and therefore what does it where does the consumption end up you you try to reverse it and say Okay let's let's stop a moment let's think about what do we really need and what is the most efficient way to get there um sorry you want to jump in on this well that's that that kind of modeling fits more in the kinds of modeling that we're going to be doing in word package one which is around this possibilities material possibilities for living well

within limits for for achieving North-south conversions within planetary boundaries this other um this uh so where package three is much more focused on the political economy and the organizational capacity we need to get there because right now we have we're not in a situation where we can decide for ourselves what is being produced and what is being consumed and how we would do things differently because we're under the decision making of very powerful very vertically entrenched and Interconnected uh sectors that you know for if you go through Transportation agri-food um uh real estate and housing

yeah you're you're there you're really basically you start seeing how hard it is to to to sort of Liberate the an entire Society from uh from the the imperative of overproduction and over consumption and one of the one of the pathways for this would be giving people just Democratic Decision making over okay how do you want your own how do you want to run your own transportation system not just uh oh by the way we canceled all the bus services and they all suck because of chronic underfunding and why don't you go buy a car

now and get into car debt and then you're going to have to live in a different place outside of the city because you won't be able to afford a nice place close to the city center et cetera et cetera you know so instead of Sort of pitting people as consumers against these systems let's try to pit ourselves as organized citizens yeah and these are I guess we're going to come back to this to the fifth blur which is participation or practical implementation I guess that these are fora that will also come hand in hand into

thinking of this or because I I guess as a citizen it's hard to imagine because we're stripped so much of our possibilities and of of our Freedom to choose today we we don't have the practice or the muscle to to to rethink what what is our extents of control agency and participation in these discourses so I can imagine this ties with work package five is that the case or work package five is also throughout the the project where we also talk about the the policies and the possibilities or how do you envision participation in all

of this your question and picked uh that one up or Participation you mean of stakeholders and public or work package five and bringing things into practice Yeah I think they each have different sort of ideas of how we'd really love to do that so that goes also it's also tagged as a research Action project and so I mentioned you want to earn a transdisciplinary one so of course it's a uh it jumps from the work Focus three to Five yeah yeah I know whether you were asking something else so you just keep smiling you know

so I Was preparing we'll come to that don't worry you are following a pattern I know I know but I like to put something in the wheels you know I'm not very flexible uh yes I mean the general idea there was that we wanted to somehow put these ideas in in the test of reality of real processes political processes for this battery Processes I mean we'll have to admit that when we were doing the proposal it was probably the least well thought part of it because the rest of the project were the core questions that

each one of us has come up over time and the ones where we felt they would most benefit from the collaboration of the three of us the the last one on participation was a desire that we all shared but not somewhere has been the core of our research at least Not not recently although we all want our research to be relevant and also inform action I'm sure if not few election um showing that we are still open we we are not set on what we're gonna do we know that we want to create processes where

our knowledge is put to the test of people to the evaluation of people of stakeholders and and we see where it goes processes of co-production of Knowledge um on my part I mean what I want to do is to see to what extent some of the ideas we will be developed pink coming for my processes of local planning participatory planning at a more local scale at the municipal scale or something that is dear to my heart as a Greek to the island scale because we have to if we are three researchers now addicted that in

one way or the other And we are interested in Islands I was going to say in one way or the other we are Greeks now we are all three Greeks and we are all three interested in one way or the other on islands and we were thinking that it's a nice scale nice local scale a small scale bounded scale in one in which different Islands we have developed the relations and research collaborations over time where we could try The scale some of these ideas and see whether they make sense for local communities whether they make

sense for local decision makers whether they can offer alternatives to futures of over tourism and commodification and commercialization so so this is one scale the island the other is like the small municipalities or bigger municipalities here in Catalonia or elsewhere We are not 100 set on the cases yet uh because I'm I'm really interested to find cases where the demand to do something in the direction of post-growth is coming from the authorities there rather than us trying to find somewhere to do it you know because my experience my math sold uh back in the past

experience a little bit with participatory science participatory planning processes that if If there is no if it's not coming the demand from from the people on the ground and it's you as a scientist going there and trying to to move things it doesn't really work well so right now we have contacts with at least two or three islands that they are very promising but there are important people there interested to try and see how input from our science can inform local post-growth planning processes and also with a Medium scale municipality here in Catalonia where the

new authorities are quite Progressive and they want to try some of these ideas ideally I would say I mean but again this is an ideal I'm not promising it but ideal uh I would like us to develop like some kind of procedural blueprint for using postgrowth ideas um to develop plants towards postgrowth At the local levels something similar to the donut economics labs [Music] but not in terms of the donut more in terms of the ideas that we are more interested in which is about post-growth transition Justice within and between uh places Etc of course

the the island idea is very dear to my heart as well uh and you're Greek too right yeah yeah yeah I know you are I know you're I'm joking and With the paper I mean sorry you have the three of you have a tradition to just publish Banker papers uh month after month and it's hard to keep up but of course the one on nikaria is very close to my heart so yeah uh if I had to choose one it's out of uh contextual rather than of course uh just the Merit of everything that you

all have done um okay let me just revert back to order before we go to some uh more broader questions Um so sorry I I broke the pattern of going through the list of work packages let me just go back to normal and we missed the final B the p number four yeah exactly of course this is about politics so I guess politics are not uh the sexiest one but uh please make them sexy yorgos you want to explore the types of political movements to realize these post-growth Visions uh yeah because it's a main obstacle

I mean politics where even some uh conservative Analyst now or liberal analysts are saying okay this was growth or the growth makes sense but politically it's it's a non-starter so and it's such a huge change that we can't imagine it happening in the current liberal democracies where you can just get like marginal changes in this with a lot of sweat and then they are reversed and it's true I mean this critique is very true so we want to work with it and the We are working with it by looking at three scales we're looking at

the scale of movements what movements are struggling and in what ways and when are they effective to open up spaces uh alternatives to capitalist growth you mean activism you mean uh I mean yeah I mean yeah yeah I mean social political movements but but we are interested in movements that they are not just social political I mean they have an ambition to change also to take political power Uh in one way or the other one might think of trade unions might think of the municipalist movement might think of organizations in food sovereignty Etc and the

second skill that we are interested is uh institutional politics and Party politics operating mostly at the national scale so on political parties on government that they have flirted with ideas close to the ones We are exploring and then what is the experience from this political efforts where did they stumble what are the obstacles they face how could they be strengthened and then the Third big question where we don't have the expertise and I think there is maths expertise around but it should be part of the question is geopolitics so in what sense the current scenes

or changes or Non-changes in the world order how are they opening or closing opportunities for trying different economic Futures in different places and generally the way the world system is organized in terms of power politically institutionally how does this um prohibit postgross political projects and how This might sense this obviously links to the more material economic analysis that Jason is performing in terms of unequal exchange it's it's a counterpart I would say it's a political counterpart and of course as you were mentioning it I was thinking of the the policy deals that Jason was mentioning

just before about how does that interfere with the political movements uh Jason you were invited also Recently to the to the Dutch Parliament he well during the Beyond conference you were also part of the plenary session uh also the other sessions uh I don't know how much you can share of course but uh what are some of your feelings when you are invited in in these venues what are the type of discussions when we have to compare them with just what Euros mentioned right so where what is the are they just curious they want to

learn What the opposition has to say in order to be prepared and to to balance arguments uh is it a new way to to present an agenda do they feel that this is a an opportunity or something that they need to invest upon or what is your feeling when when you speak with politicians and parliaments in in these fields yeah that's a good question I'm still trying to process this myself a little bit but my senses from from closed door meetings that have occurred Say after I spoke at the Dutch Parliament and so on my

my sense is that politicians on the left and the green the green parties the progressive green parties in particular are are clearly aware that that existing approaches are not working and are are also are are eager for alternative Pathways and I think that they're increasingly open to post-growth ideas because they see that's where the energy is at and that's where ideas are coming From and so they want to learn about it right but they're also terrified because because they're not sure like what kinds of you know what kinds of narratives are gonna are gonna make

this possible um what kinds of political movements you know will this require Etc and so I think that they're they're kind of in an exploratory phase is the sense that I have um but I think that the more we're able To unite uh social and ecological problems and solutions together the more it makes sense for them right because there's just no way that any politician on the left uh can legitimately go out and talk about and talk about D Rose um without you know without uh clearly triggering the massive uh sense of insecurity that huge

numbers of people under capitalism live under right live with constantly and so there has to be a Strong social policy platform that is going to um that is going to assuage those concerns like we have to fundamentally address the question of economic insecurity the question of structural unemployments you know uh etc etc it only then can we really have a like a rational conversation about what to do about ecology and and you know radical climate action Etc so they're looking for that synthesis I Think uh and my senses once they are able to see that

then there's potentially quite a lot of uh I mean there's there's a lot of potential I suppose and uh in a popular postgrowth deal that could emerge and I think they see that um but there but there's still convincing to do and I think that's that's that's where this project comes in right like like they want to know um how it's going to work uh you know What the empirics look like um and so on I think that's like what we'd ultimately like to provide to kind of uh what should I say it kind of

expands the Overton window of what's politically possible um but ultimately I think that we're all very clear on one fact which is that uh it doesn't really matter what's empirically possible of course that's important for us as scientists but um but uh but the possibility of a postgres Deal or a postgres transition rests entirely on the balance of class power and the balance of political forces and so the social movements and political movements that are uh that are necessary to achieve such a transition against the interest as Julia mentioned of uh the oligarchic ruling class

who benefits her prodigiously from the status quo Those movements have to be built and that's and that's uh that's not a small task and right now those movements don't exist in the form that they need to and that's um I think that's really what's what's going to have to occupy all of us for the uh for the foreseeable future of course um what's something that is missing is this uh either social acceptance or mass push From uh labor movements and from uh well from the labor movement in general yeah but I was thinking also if

we mobilize the concept of environmentalism of the poor from um have you discussed with any parliaments uh in Africa in Latin America and other parliaments have I mean you and in general in your Laboratories as well your goals perhaps we can go there later on or they are there any Laboratories That you would like to to to experiment uh with or together uh um well on on the other side of the plundering let's say so they said I don't know if you have discussed with parliaments elsewhere than than Europe and what's their take on all

of this are they also open or the discussion of well uh development is very much the the prevalent one and these go to the to the side well I think it's clear that I mean there's something happening uh Uh you know across the global South that's disrupting the balance of geopolitical power a little bit right now right I mean you can see this emerging from some of the Latin American governments who are now questioning uh you know their Reliance on uh uh the the currencies of the corns the specifically the US dollar you're looking at

like more regional trade integration um And so on and that's something interesting I think increasingly you know there's there's kind of a resurgence uh politics in the global South that is gaining steam right now and um and they're experimenting with new ideas around industrial policy and monetary policy a little bit but I would also caution that this is this very early days And we'll see how the core Powers respond I mean it's always a really this is a tricky situation um but in general that's I mean that's that's primarily the focus uh right now in

terms of radical politics in the south at least the government level is is to think about that like how to overcome the obstacles they face in an imperialist World economy um in terms of social movements I think That there's yeah there's a lot there's a lot of interests uh and mobilization in the rounds um you know pushing against extractivism by Foreign by Foreign multinational companies uh and the kind of ecological harms of that you know inflicts on on communities across the global South so uh so there's different kind of factions of these of this discontent

I suppose that we see yeah and and Europe I'm Sorry Julia you wanted also to to Chairman yeah because uh I realized that we didn't talk about one of the things that I'm most excited about in terms of these Global North and Global South um Pathways and also the policy proposals and sort of trying to explore these these different things which is I think um we're going to be able to do some labor footprinting which is something that a lot of people are doing but we'd Like to really integrate that with uh this question of

what Lifestyle Changes in the global North would look like in terms of you know reducing resource use and then what that frees up when we get rid of for instance unequal debt uh and unequal Exchange in the global South and we can sort of see you know who's going to work for who so who is currently working for who what is the appropriation of global South labor in the global North through our Overconception right now and how that could flip and how the global South countries might be able to reinvest in their own uh living

conditions much safer much more prosperous living conditions so this idea of integrating labor um because everybody is always saying oh well you know the global North over consumption is just generosity because we're employing the Global Services you know bull crap and uh but you know But basically put some numbers and some modeling into that and I think that that's going to help change the narrative and the perception of what a post-growth future could look like because I think a lot of people are afraid of for jobs and livelihoods and so just sort of pointing the

way towards what that alternative could look like I think would be quite exciting and maybe another thing I'd like to say is in terms of this work package five and Going into practice is that one of the things I'm excited to do is to try to initiate dialogues with political parties you know maybe here in Switzerland and also with International diplomacy so there are groups of international diplomats at the various U.N locations and one of them is in Geneva which is not far from where I am and so basically try to start um these discussions

at Ground okay what Does an alternative uh what do Alternatives look like who's interested in this um and and what feedback do you have what you like would you not like what you what you what more questions do you have what questions would need to be answered for you to go back to your governments and and actually propose this uh or your political parties and go back and propose this so I think really just starting these these these I these Dialogues just sort of spread the ideas out and test the ideas against people who rely

on um basically convincing you know convincing their populations that this is something worth going for I think that that's gonna that's something that I'm really looking forward to doing this project yeah I had um as well on the podcast and she was mentioning how she wanted to initiate sufficiency diplomacy so they did this first efficiency Summits between France and Australia through these diplomatic ties so I'm curious to see how that goes indeed uh like where are some best practices that can then be also pushed through diplomacy kind of showcasing how post-growth is this new um

well element that you want to push as as value you know as as a as a natural value that you want to to have solidarity and you want to share with The rest of the world how you managed in your own context to implement it so I would be very curious yet to see how that goes um just for these case studies and I'm wondering so here goes you mentioned some islands perhaps a municipality in um in Catalunya perhaps some other islands that we they will be identified also in the future do you have also

counterparts Um in rural areas in areas that are industrial or extractive and how they will change these are not case studies sorry let's not confuse it so we're not doing any case studies of post-growth what we said is we want to try a little bit and develop some this is part of something we wanted at the beginning and establish some dialogues at different levels with diplomats said Julia I said with local Communities but the the point is not to try different communities and see how so it's not a researcher it's more like piloting processes to

see how our ideas could could be part of a planning process at the local level so in that sense it doesn't matter what type of community it is you know because it we are piloting the process maybe it works maybe it doesn't work or we learn something from it But it's not an effort to do case studies of post-growth processes or anything like that just to make clear yeah okay great um yeah I'm just asking this I also have a friend who wants to to see uh to experiment with what she calls untraceable uh cities

or territories which have no almost no impact to the environment and see how little I mean how can you reduce to an absolute Minimum to everything and go to these degraded places a landscape of extraction Landscapes of pollution and at the same time restore them and have kind of a post-growth lifestyle so I thought of him and his project when I was asking this a particular question um so we have we now have the five PS that will fertilize the the soil and then bring New new ideas perhaps just some general questions before we wrap

this up um of course there is one element which is dear to to my heart which is urban areas or territories and how does this land in territories and um lastly I I discussed with Federico savini who works on post-growth cities and and degrowth cities and tries to implement that and we're discussing uh a number of what we have just said today and how Uh how we Implement them in cities so how do we take back the play the land from let's say fossil fuel infrastructures and then convert it into something else how do we

de-financialize the built environment and not make it as a spatial fix etc etc and I was thinking if we have to reverse engineer it once again I think and we don't have a lot of empirical studies into this that's why I'm asking to to you three perhaps you Have already given a thought to this the the easiest way forward for for me was when reading uh one of your the decent energy standards uh Julia where you mentioned what were some of the square meters that would be decent for everyone I think it was 15 square

meters per person plus five fourth of canoodle space or something like that and I tried to say okay so if I take the case of Brussels I think they have 45 million square meters of residential Space and it's 1.1 million so let's say one by having the 20 square meters we have almost half we can reduce by half the square meters of residential footage and I'm thinking about cities and a number of territories where we just have too much right we have just too much stocks and just because we have too much stocks we need

to maintain them and these will perpetuate uh more consumption and unequal consumption so Something needs to be reimagined in the existing not in the future not in the new but in the existing and um and I'm do you have any ideas about what how do we scale down from the existing we sacrifice we we well we put away or what are some of the steps with perhaps of where you live right now you know in your physical territories what are some if we were to take some of the potential outcomes of your projects in six

years times and Apply them in where you live what's can we do this exercise and think about what will change in your in Luzan and in Barcelona let's say um Julia do you want to yeah so actually there's a colleague here who's a Sasha Nick who's also working with Philip Talman on an Android project who's uh and so you know all of these people since they're at epfl and doing some sort of uh calculations and saying Listen we don't need new buildings we need to repurpose existing buildings so that people have this flexibility of you

know changing their living space changing their overconception of living space now I'm not um I really want people to I hear a lot of people saying hey we need to implement this 15 square meter thing um it's a first model it's a very simple model we made our lives you know we told Mildred Hopkins who led the work uh had to do a lot of simplification and you know for instance one of the things that's over simple in this model is 20-year 20 degrees year round which is a comfortable temperature both for cold and hot

but you could bring the temperature down to 18 degrees in colder climates and still be comfortable and safe in terms of your living conditions and you can raise that temperature in hotter climates to something like 26 Degrees and still be okay so that's already one thing where one of the reasons we get to 15 meters is because of this 20 degree thing if you change the temperature you get to more space right so don't don't take any of this stuff as religious model it for yourselves people and that and then this idea but I think

that we have to take seriously this idea that in current Urban situations uh one of the things we need to face is the real estate sector And the construction sector and their um imperatives their growth imperatives around always building new stuff as opposed to doing the much more necessary socially and environmentally necessary work of retrofitting existing and making the existing Living Spaces a lot more flexible because that's one of the things in the UK for instance which is actually I know better than Switzerland for various reasons I was there for longer the in the UK

you're stuck with Two-bedroom houses two-bedroom apartments three bedroom houses three bedroom apartments well actually the two bedroom apartments and you have very little Studio space and you have very little one bedroom space and um even the two bedroom space I think is a bit Limited in terms of uh the the sort of terrorist housing and so people uh because of smaller household sizes would quite like to move into those Kinds of spaces but they just don't exist so I think it's it's a lot of this creative architecture around taking the existing build stock and turning

it into something that suits the needs of changing household sizes or also has this idea of co-housing and turning you know not always having to build new co-housing developments but taking existing building stocks and creating communal spaces communal guest rooms Communal playrooms the kinds of things that are very attractive in Eco housing or co-housing right now how do you do that that's the real architecture Challenge and the other one is around the state you know giving space back from Cars so repossessing the car space and turning that into parks into living space into Recreation space

I think that that's really really important and you use the word sacrifice which um I think is is right now we're being Asked to sacrifice a livable planet so I always like to put that sacrifice front and center I think is probably the most important one like you know we're just not going to be able to live in any kind of decent stability in any kind of um you know the the the the billion you know millions and millions and millions of people possibly billions will be dying on our current trajectory that's not good let's

keep that sacrifice in mind for front and center so I think It's more about trade-offs and I think that the one of the things we always have to put forward is the increase in quality of life that we gain from uh changing the our provision of basic needs away from the sort of Market based every individual for themselves to this sort of more common you know Universal Public Services Public um public luxury private frugality type of picture and I think that putting forward what we gain is really important Uh I've been asked a couple of

times by people to tell us more about your renunciation ideology and I'm just like right this is an email I will not answer right now because that is not you know when you choose that framing you're already you're already um admitting defeat to some extent uh so I think it's really it's really much more about saying okay this is the parameter space that we have and we can Go forward in a very different way um in terms of the north-south uh convergence uh Jason do you see any change in a territory once we we converge

in the future would that radically change a number of uh elements that you will see around you in your city and in your territory or something uh different that you will um Envision in terms of territories thanks To this convergence well uh yeah so so I grew up in in eswatini in southern Africa and uh I mean even just the cursory visit to that so that country will reveal um how messed up you know uh the world economy is and the integration of the South into it uh in in swatini I mean it's a very

productive land and it's uh and there's a huge portion of that territory that's given away to it's given over to producing uh Sugarcane under extremely exploitative conditions um and the land is owned and controlled by by British companies now and it's not so different actually from under colonialism uh meanwhile a huge a huge portion of the population uh uh cannot access even the most basic nutrition I mean think about this right talk about a massive misuse of land and so um it's not difficult to imagine how a Different arrangement of the economy which allowed countries

like SRT needs to have more control over their own productive capacities through more monetary and fiscal sovereignty would be able to re-mobilize that land around meeting human needs domestically and and I mean end poverty in a very short period of time I mean really like the kinds of the kinds of production that is necessary to end poverty is actually really not difficult to do we're talking About uh we're talking about houses you know electricity sanitation systems nutrition you know clinics schools most of this kind of production can be done with domestic materials and labor it's

not rocket science actually it's simply a matter of being able to reappropriate and reclaim productive capacities and reorganize it and uh and so you know this this discourse is out there that poverty is this intractical problem intractable problem and we'll take Generations to solve if ever totally wrong it can be addressed more or less immediately I mean very very quickly we've seen this happen before under revolutionary conditions and and that's the kind of aspiration that I think we should have now and uh um and so under a scenario where we achieve the kinds of Transformations

that we that we discuss and model in in this work that's the kind of change you would see happen very quickly and I think that's incredibly Inspiring yeah this is very nicely also complementing what Julia mentioned about the it's not about sacrificing but also all of the Fantastic possibilities that we have when we when we take out the shackles and and yoga is perhaps to to finish in terms of the political side of things where do you do you see any I mean of course uh I'm not talking necessarily about parties or but the way

that Democratic processes Will take place in this post-growth uh territory how will how will this take I mean how we will you experience it in your in your practice in your life would you have different levels of uh of choices that you you need to take some some resources need to be dealt at a certain levels and democratically we figure out what is the the the urgency that we need to tackle together have you Do you Wander from time to time what uh will this look like in the future yeah I wonder I remember I

worry I worry it might not look at all like that it might look like uh or Orban in Hungary all over Europe and in the US you know so it's it's more likely scenario where people like 70 of the population doesn't vote the other 30 votes dedicatedly and votes right-wing and far right only go On equals proportions and then there is a opposition that is just liberal which is the same which is a problem also today so so there is a very bad scenario I need some folding so it's a little bit hard for me

to I mean I am utopian but not to utopian you know so I don't want to to think too far away I mean the reality right now is that there is a turn to to write slash far right in Europe and It has to be stopped and the other reality is that within the radical left and even within social Democrats there are people open to our ideas so the immediate the immediate priorities how these voices and that's generally how there will be a space reserved for social Democrats and the radical left in the greens and

then within this spaces how our ideas are are [Music] going to be accepted and perhaps with some few enlightened liberals or or conservatives that they are open also to to think differently so that I mean immediately within within the current system then of course the current system of democracy has a liberal democracy has many problems has led to a generalized apathy and this is a problem so they again the immediate Challenge is how to stop this apathy I mean you know in my in when I was growing up in Greece like elections were a big

thing 90 percent of people were voting and I remember everyone being out with flags now you were going with your current you had the flag of the party you were voting and then they were sort of Lucky being grilled everywhere had their own flag so it was like a big thing you know and then I I read that in these elections were of course right Plus far right Triumph to 52 percent which is unprecedented uh in recent Greek history only 40 percent of the population voted so it's it's a huge reduction it's less than I

remember 80 to 90 was like taken for granted in Greece I I don't I don't know when they started changing but definitely I think it's it's recent and 40 percent is demoralizing which means that this system is no longer really Democratic It's like a small minority of people and for the ground majority of people it doesn't mean anything so why don't they vote not because they are ignorant or lazy but because they probably rightly think that whoever is elected doesn't make a big difference for them um probably for the worst I mean that they are

all equal they are all equally bad so the challenge again there for Progressive progressing in the sense of uh socialistic or socialist forces is to really prove that they can make a difference and uh motivate again people and take them out with flags and have again a real class of ideas ideally after yes we need much more decentralized democracy we need to be involved politically not just every four years when we vote we need more opportunities for a direct input we need more assemblies we need More yeah but that's that's a little bit too far

right now I think compared to where we stand well of course we also need to to remind that in Greece there was also a history of dictatorships and after that I mean the the left and the right were not just left and the right they were heavily political stances that uh uh stained uh many generations after that so yeah but people believed that there would be a change you know because To go out I mean I remember going out with the car and like beeping your performance Hawking celebrating who won't because you thought that this

would make a difference in your life and actually you know when when a socialist I I guess I'm older than you so I can't remember so I remember when a socialist government for the first time a left-wing government was elected in Greece in 1981 and it was not just honking because the The guy was uh papandre with all his problems later but because they were there were like real differences in your life I mean I remember my parents were working six days and he was elected and they were working five days and then suddenly they

were all sitting home taking it easy so it wasn't just theoretical that we just liked about Andrea because he was better in the public of a debate on the television or you know because he he was nicer in the Morning thoughts like it's what's happening today he was like the next day yes we were working less in in the school in the uh I was in the elementary school and they were still beating us up I mean I remember being slapped and I was a good student as you can imagine for being a professor today

right but I received a lot of beating in the pop Andrea elected next day it's forbidden to hit anyone uh rights to to women you know like they Weren't anywhere in Greece before so you know salaries political positions for women all these things were real differences material differences so they weren't symbolic I mean they were to a large extent also symbolic but they were also real and I think this is what is missing today like to vote someone and really the next the day or the next month say okay this made a difference to my

life I'm gonna vote Them again you know and again and again I'm gonna take also a flag for them and also on your souvlakia and that's like the other brothers sorry sorry we're vegetarians we're not eating so lucky yeah yeah falafels we don't have Falafel singer is but something like that so just to wrap up um so many great uh elements that I well that now the word expects from you so we we in one year we'll be uh you know knocking on your Doors and uh and hoping for Solutions and the and having everything

ready for us do you have in the meantime in anything for us to to read to listen to watch do you have any inspiring or not inspiring uh you know uh song book uh article movie something that you would like to to share for us to be patient I just finished listening to a very good podcast so I'm just saying the last thing I did But I really liked it so it's from uh it's called let me see that I think the podcast is called it's a Jacobin magazine podcast it's called The Dive I believe

and it had a great one on artificial intelligence I was like such a pleasure to listen there were like three marxists one of them previously working for Google just deconstructing the whole hype and all the around artificial intelligence and how this Capitalist grows in Silicon Valley are using it of course there are real changes happening but how they're building up all this hype to avoid real regulation and also how they are doing it to I mean to as always the main objective is to slash labor rights and reduce the cost of Labor I mean anyways

it was great because we hear so much about that physically telling this and it's all about Exterminator and the artificial intelligence escaping and then I listened to some marxists and I said okay these guys will make Finance because the rest somehow didn't make sense you know something was off with it this whole narrative so please listen to it if you're worried about artificial intelligence yeah great thanks because it's also now a nice way to postpone through climate action because AI is now the new thing to to worry about somehow Um Julia Jason anything that you've

read listened or watched that you would like to share uh I'll go next so in terms of research because you said what can people expect I think this is a good place to say that there's lots of other research projects on T group and closed growth coming down the line and existing uh so I'm not gonna I'm gonna fail to list all the ongoing projects but uh there's a 2B which involves Dan O'Neill and Milena Brooks and other fabulous people there's the wise project led by rudger hochstra on alternative indicators that's not particularly deep earthquake

but at least moving away from TDP um there's uh Mario pencera has a project on post-growth business models uh Simona dalessandro is continuing his fabulous modeling work and one of the big challenges we have is we have to work we want to work with all these people we are not we refuse to compete We want to work with um and so uh this is something that is a is a challenge for us right now is to think about how we can best collaborate across this fantastic research landscape in Europe right now and there's going to

be more and more of this research coming down the line and we really have to show Confederate ourselves because um I think Simona dalessandro he we were speaking in Brussels and he said we have one chance And this is it so we have one of the ways one of the burdens on us is to not mess this up is to really work together so I just wanted to say that as well um the the other thing uh in terms of recommending reading uh or listening everybody needs to read the nutmeg's curse by uh Emma tafgosh

everybody everybody this is um a really good book and one of the reasons it's really a good book is because he does things like site Json a Lot and Robin wallkemer and other people so uh you know you you get a lot of thinking condensed into one fantastically readable book so please do do yourself a favor this summer and read that fantastic Jason I'm glad that Julia mentioned the other projects because I was going to say the same I mean there's lots of people who are doing this and and uh and really like it's actually

too big to Keep track of it's funny a couple of years ago I felt like there's so few people working in this space I mean even at the time it was actually pretty big but but now I mean it's just it's overwhelming and very exciting and uh and I feel it's it's encouraging somehow now it's like um we have a lot of solidarity and companionship in the research Community towards the objectives that we share so That's that's great um in terms of books that have or texts that have inspired me I mean uh I I

guess since I've been talking a lot about the world system I'll just mention one book that I think is very good on that which is uh it's called capital and imperialism by by patnek and patnek to Indian economists um who have who have taught me a lot and I really owe uh a lot of my insights to to their work Uh so and then there's also there's a Senegalese Economist called um Dongo sambasila who I think is doing amazing work uh thinking about um uh about what Global South governments and social movements can can do

to uh to achieve more freedom uh more economic freedom within there um within their position in the world economy and that's that's to me also very inspiring well my it's good that I'm going on Holiday so I have time to read all of that um thanks so much uh once again I mean it was fantastic next time let's try to to do this in person I think in one year time the the ecological economics uh conference will be with Mario pencera in Ponte Vedra uh and I think it's combined with the international D gross conference

so in one year time let's uh let's reconvene to to talk about Progress and to to discuss a new exciting opportunities and new exciting readings thanks so much Julia jurgos Jason for this fantastic discussion thanks as well to to all of you for listening watching um yeah I think that there is a number of elements that we discussed you can you can go back to the episode with um rash Patel on on cheap nature labor with Jason Moore on the capital scene Tim Jackson you Mentioned him uh Julia and postgrowth as well so yeah there

is such a Vibrant Community and I I want to thank you once again for for this for making this happen and for this discussion as well thanks very much for having us great that's a wrap foreign