Episode 9: Degrowth
Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist, political ecologist, and Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. His research is motivated by a quest to cross conceptual divides between the social and the natural domains, with particular focus on the political-economic roots of environmental degradation and its uneven distribution along lines of power, income, and class. His current work explores the hypothesis of sustainable degrowth as a solution to the dual economic and ecological crisis. Giorgos is the author of the books 'Limits' and 'The Case for Degrowth'. He joins us from Barcelona, Spain.
We speak about:
his intellectual journey and working across disciplines
the history of the hegemony of growth
degrowth as one critique of capitalist economies
3 layers of articulating degrowth
the climate crisis
degrowth in high income countries vs. low income countries
collective action and international solidarities
engaging with a pluriverse of alternatives to capitalist growth - and much more!
Transcript
Intro: We have to stop thinking in terms of growth and we don't have to beautify growth by calling it green, inclusive - growth is a problem. This idea of compound rating of growth is a problem. What degrowth signifies is that we have to liberate ourselves from this ideology and one way thinking of economic growth, and then consider the alternatives that right now they are not considered.
Safa: Welcome back to the Rethinking Development podcast. My name is Safa, and I'm your host. Thank you for joining me as we speak with and learn from practitioners of all career stages and organizational affiliations around the world. In our conversations, we aim to rethink ethical behavior and best practices through the lived experiences and personal reflections of different guests. Today I am joined by Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist and Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology in the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. Giorgos has worked on diverse topics over the years, including water policy, climate change, limits to growth and conflicts over resource use. His current work explores the hypothesis of sustainable degrowth as one solution to the dual economic and ecological crises. Giorgos is the author of the book "Limits" and "The Case For Degrowth". His research is motivated by a quest to cross conceptual divides between the social and the natural domains, with a particular focus on the political economic roots of environmental degradation, and its uneven distribution along lines of power, income and class. Giorgos, welcome and thank you so much for speaking with me today. Could you first begin by sharing a bit with us about how your interest in these issues first began? Or what were some of the experiences that motivated you to become an academic, an ecological economist and go down this career path?
Giorgos: As a young person, as a teenager, I didn't really know what I want to do. But in Greece, where I was studying, if you are male, and you're a good student, and you are not good enough to become a medical doctor, you are supposed to become an engineer or a scientist. And hopefully things have improved a little bit, but still, these kind of gender expectations, unfortunately, they are prevalent, and we have to change them. We have to change them not only for for women, but also for men like myself, that I ended up studying chemistry, I didn't really like it, I don't know why I studied it - but I studied it because I had to study science. because I was a good student, s I said, I did that at Imperial College. And then as I was finishing my degree, I realized something that was motivating me personally, and it had to do also with the background of my family. My mother was a one of the founding members of the Green Party and there was always a discussion about the environment, environmental problems at home. So when I was finishing chemistry, I said, Okay, how can I make a transition to something that feels closer to heart, and I started studying environmental engineering first, and then gradually, I moved to environmental policy. For my PhD, I did a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning. And this is where I felt that I came across the school of ecological economics, which, unlike what the name sounds, is not really economics, economics. It's more like an interdisciplinary approach into understanding the economy as a flow of materials and energy and resources. And I found out that this is my intellectual home, the place where what I read excites me the most, and the place where I felt I wanted to contribute with my own thought.
Safa: Yes. And so a lot of your work goes beyond these kind of divisions between fields. Could you share a bit about the importance of that in your approach or in your work, the importance and the value of working in that cross disciplinary way?
Giorgos: Yes, ecological economics is an interdisciplinary field from the very beginning. It was group of physicists, ecologists that came together with economists who were dissatisfied with the way their science was dealing with environmental issues, treating them just as an externality, something that is outside the market and has to come into it. Economists who thought that we need to understand the economy as an ecosystem and understand how the economy is part of the broader earth ecosystem. Together with ecologists and physicists that felt that yes, their tools can be useful, also, in understanding the economy and in understanding of course, the problems that economies are causing on the natural environment. So to understand these big issues of climate change, and what we have to do about it - not to understand just planetary dynamics of climate change, but understand also climate mitigation and climate adaptation. To understand issues like the ones I worked at the beginning - which have to do around droughts, water conflicts, and improving water management, and sustainable management of cities. To understand all these complex processes, it's very difficult to understand them just from one disciplinary perspective. So If you're just an economist, you know, you are just going to look for markets and externalities and mainstream economists. If you're a sociologist, you're just gonna study things with the tools and concepts of your discipline. But to understand these problems in a complete way, you have to bring these different disciplines and ways of seeing together. Now there are people like myself, that it is not that we were trained in one discipline, and then we came together with other people of other disciplines. But that our very training was a little bit outside of this disciplined type of trainings. As I said, I studied chemistry, engineering, then I did policy and planning, then I went to Berkeley for a Postdoc, and I studied a little bit of geography and Marxist thinking. And then I did also a Master's degree in economics - after I became a Professor - so I know a little bit of different things. That's why I call myself - and together with other people who have started calling ourselves as doing "undisciplinary research" - which means that we refuse to be bounded within one discipline. And we think also that in order to do research, we have to think out of the box of what is supposed for a researcher to do. So I like in my current work, to venture from working with people who do models, to just writing plain humanities texts, or criticizing a movie that captures a core idea with which I am engaging - like "limits" recently. So I like to do things and follow my heart in what I'm doing, rather than follow some kind of disciplined training. But I have to say that I'm privileged to do that, because I have a professorship that is without strings attached - here in Catalonia, other than being very good and publishing a lot, which is a kind of string. But at least it's not a string attached about 'what' I should be doing. So I have taken advantage of that. And I'm following big questions that I find important, rather than questions that a particular discipline thinks it's disciplinists should be talking about.
Safa: Yeah, absolutely. Very interesting. And so thinking about your research interests, of course, you've had very diverse set of different projects. But when it comes to your work on the relationship between societies and the environment, and the dynamic between the two, could you tell us a bit about the early days of your work around degrowth?
Giorgos: That focus I mean, it was something that built over over the years. But as an ecological economist, you are trained to think about limits to growth. So the Limits to Growth debate of the 1970s is foundational also for the school of ecological economics. So I was trained in that. But I have to say, im my PhD thesis I was studying urbanization and water management in the city of Athens, I'm Greek. And I was studying the city where I grew up, because there was a drought there. And there were a lot of conflicts around what should be done, whether the city should bring water from far away, or instead whether it should conserve water and try to reduce the demand of water in the city. I had more of a technical background, So I was interested to see how the city could reduce demand. There were quite some good studies, and I contributed to them that thought the city could reduce the demand and not expand more with new dams, etc. That's a debate that is not only in Athens, - as I found out in my research, it has played out, of course, notoriously in California, you find it in Boston, you find it in big developing world cities, you find it in London, it was a constant debate. And what I found there was that the while I was focused on the technicalities, or the economic feasibility of reducing demand, the big picture question was that there was a growth machine or what people call 'growth elites' in the city, that they were pushing at all costs for urbanization, urban growth, economic growth, and they were willing to bring water to irrigates let's say this growth - to fuel this growth, as some books have used this metaphor. So my focus kind of changed and I saw there that while we environmental scientists might be focusing on what can be done different, what are the technologies that can be done differently? How can we reduce consumption? How can we move to sustainable consumption or production - there is an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room is the drumbeat of the current economies, capitalist economies where we live is economic growth and everything moves to this drumbeat. And the rest is like a side considerations. So I felt that unless we try to understand this dynamic of economic growth, what is it that drives it? How does it drive all other decisions? And how can we create alternatives and escape from this one way road of economic growth? The rest of us just proposing patches here and there of water demand management or whatever else your field might be doing on the environment, here and there, it is missing the big picture. And I was lucky when I came to Barcelona for my first job as a permanent Professor in 2008, to find a group that they were already thinking in this direction of degrowth - it was the first international conference in Paris 2008, the second one we organized in Barcelona, so I surrounded myself with a great community of young scholars here in Barcelona and of international colleagues around the world, thinking along the same lines and from all sorts of different disciplinary angles, academic and non academic.
Safa: And so as you say, this elephant in the room - this focus on growth. In your book, you outline how this came to be. So the history of how economic growth came to be so hegemonic, how we got to that point. Could you maybe share a bit with us about your findings?
Giorgos: Yes, I haven't done original research so I am following and I'm synthesizing the work of very interesting scholarship that has come out recently, on this question on the history of growth. I'm thinking here of the work of Matthias Schmelzer on the history of growth concept in the OECD, a number of essai that turned into a book on the history of growth by Gareth Dale, and of course all their work on the history of the idea of development, for example, "Encountering Development" by Arturo Escobar, that was a formatic work for me and a fascinating book always to read and reread. And I'm trying to put the pieces together - and a lot of books that have been published on the history of GDP. So what is important there is that, of course, the discussion of a an increase in produce or increase in people has been around for a while and has been since capitalism let's say emerged - or since Adam Smith started writing. But a lot of these writings and these ideas or the government discussions were focused on increase of specific quantities and normally increases in a short to a long term, but not this idea of compound growth year after a year. And not this idea of the growth of something that is called "the economy", a system, a unified system that we understand as the economy or the national economy. This idea of the national economy, and the idea of this thing called the national economy having to grow at a compound rate, which means turning to infinity quite, quite fast, is an idea that appears in the 1930s to 40s. It's the period where we start talking about "the economy", because it's a period that we start measuring a thing called the economy with GDP. So it's the period that we construct something, as Timothy Mitchel called it: inventing this thing called the economy. And the idea that this thing called the economy has to grow year after year appears in the context of the Great Depression, takes off during the Second World War in the context of the World competition between the Allies, and the Allies want to amp up the production of the economy so as to pay for the war. And it really takes off as Matthias Schmelzer shows in his book, in the 1950s, in the context of the Cold War. And we have there a series of statements from the Soviet Union and backed from the OECD and the Western nations, where they promise humongous and momentous rates of growth that were unprecedented - and they actually do achieve them. So it is also a period where materially, to a large extent, thanks to the reconstruction after the huge destruction that was the Second World War, but also fueled by the cheap oil coming, grabbed if you want, from the Middle East - makes possible this fast growth of the economy for at least 20 or 30 years. And it's in this particular period, what Matthias Schmelzer calls "growthmanship" - politicians who appear and they promise growth and one tries to outgrow the other, it becomes dominant. So it's a relatively new, I would say, idea - it comes from the 1950s, it is not, as many people would think, something that is inscribed in human nature, or something that all civilizations aspire to. So you won't find previous civilizations being obsessed with their economies growing and much less growing year after year at a compound rate.
Safa: Absolutely, it's so important to pinpoint that this came out in a specific time in history. And so thinking about alternatives to this growth based development approach, can you share a bit with us about the key premise of degrowth and your understanding and your writing around it?
Giorgos: Degrowth is a critique - it is a critique to what I was saying, that this idea of 2 or 3% growth every year, which means that the whole economy is going to double in 24 years. So the whole economy, the global economy, with all it's crazy circulation right now, not only the value, of dollar value of euro value, but also of material resources, energy - that this thing is going to double in 24 years, it's gonna be four times bigger in 48 years, and eight times bigger in 24 years more. Because that's what compound growth at 3% every year means - 2% is a little bit slower, but still, it's a doubling every 35 years, you know. So we're talking about an unprecedented increase that we know that can't end well. And it's not it can't end well, only because the planet is finite, as we will hear from ecologists - but it can't end well because you can't be moving the whole world around the necessities of the economy to keep doubling every 24 years. You can't be creating new demands, new products, new goods and new investment outlets. Compound growth is the deadliest of the deadly contradictions of capital, as David Harvey, a political economist and geographer wrote. And it's true that the necessity of the capitalist system to grow at that rate is a self destructive. And it's self destructive, of course, in important ways ecologically. Climate change is one example of that, biodiversity loss, and many other environmental problems. So one is the critique - that we have to stop thinking in terms of growth, and we don't have to beautify growth by calling it green, inclusive. Growth is a problem, this idea of compound rating of growth is a problem. Now, what alternatives do you think? Given that we have economies - at least in our part of the world, in high income, higher income parts of the world, that they are geared to either grow or enter recession and be unstable and collapse, I think we are forced, as open minded economists, ecological economists or interdisciplinary economists, to think of how do we manage systems that can land smoothly or that can have "a prosperous way down", as ecologists Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum called it in the 1980s. So how do we manage the prosperous way down? How do we manage without growth, as Peter Victor, another ecological economist put the question? And this is where the issue of alternatives come. In our recent book, "The Case For Degrowth", we outline a number of alternatives that can be useful - work sharing universal care income, changing the taxation system with very high wealth taxes and carbon taxes, but also dividends, supporting lower income people, other people talk and think about changes in the monetary system. There are many flowers that can flourish there, once we start thinking about alternatives, I don't want to say that there is one alternative - and degrowth signifies one alternative. What degrowth signifies is that we have to liberate ourselves from this ideology and one way thinking of economic growth, and then consider the alternative that right now they are not considered.
Safa: As you say, there are many different flowers that can grow out of this. And often on the podcast, we talk about the importance of political will to make policy changes, can you maybe share your thoughts about the necessity for political will in order to implement degrowth policies?
Giorgos: There is a necessity for collective action and the political will, I think, reflects and follows a collective action - in the best case of scenarios. But in the worst case of scenarios, you can have a political elites that do not respond to the demands of the collective. But right now, I would have to admit that the collective will, the collective forms of organization for pushing forward this type of political changes is not there yet. It's something that has to be built, and I think it will be built slowly, but necessarily, by the type of situations in which we are pushing ourselves. The climate disaster, climate breakdown and the economic breakdown that is coming sooner or later. I mean, it is here, but it's gonna become even more intense. So the question is like, what political solutions and experimentations and trial and errors are going to emerge within this context? One clear trajectory in front of us is authoritarian solutions and trying to maintain benefits for the few - the few that continue to profit from the current situation and can continue to profit even after a climate disaster. And it's not just the profit, it's their power and privileges to continue to control even under conditions of general breakdown. The other option that I would like to think around is one that goes around the concept of commons, of degrowth, of a prosperous way down, of prosperity without growth, which is a collective will that translates into a political will that tries to create the infrastructures and the processes for maintaining well-being by output and resource use and energy use degrowth to a level that is sustainable with planetary boundaries. So yes, the type of policies that we talked about, like policies that won't put expansion first, but they would put social well-being and ecological well-being first, and then adjust the economy to that. The political will is necessary, but I think first comes political organizing to create this first.
Safa: Yes, the role of social movements as well. In your research, you also talk about like the different levels in terms of behavioral changes, institutional changes, using technology and the dynamic between those in order for meaningful social change to happen. Could you share with us about the dynamic between these different areas and of course, other areas as well, in terms of the process of actually making change happen?
Giorgos: We talk about three levels of articulation. So we talk about changes at the personal level, changes at the communal level and changes at the political level. But we emphasize the articulation of the three levels, rather than to think of the three levels separately. So the personal level is each one of us developing the awareness that we have to live differently and start living differently. Living simply, as we say, so that others in other parts of the world may simply live. Reducing our consumption and production patterns in ways that they're conducive to the limits of the planet. But you have to have the privilege to do that. Because if you live day in day out, you don't have even the option to choose how you live or what you consume - you are pushed to work in particular way. And then if you don't have the infrastructures and the general social support mechanisms to live differently, all this is just nice talk. So the second level is how do you organize at the community level with others, that they want also to live differently and understand that we have to change? How do you organize to start creating these parallel economies and parallel infrastructures of support? For example, how do you take care of your children collectively? How do you organize in cooperatives to bring food from nearby places rather than from the other side of the world? How do you develop forms of mutual aid, that they were very important now during the COVID crisis times? Neighborhood scale levels of association. Now, this, again, is not sufficient in two ways. First of all, that not everything can be provided at the community level. So we need a higher state level where, for example, big energy infrastructure is rolled out or a big public health system is supported. But also we need the political level of articulation. Because if the political system goes in a different direction than these community initiatives or personal changes, then they will just be suppressed or remain marginal. So the question is like how this personal collective change materializes into political change? And the model we see there of articulating that is the hypothesis we make in our work - that as people live day in and day out, and perform in different types of economies, parallel to capitalist economies, alternative economies, at the community level, in one way or the other, they will organize to protect these community economies, and they will organize to see them generalized at the political level. So then the question is how can this grassroots movements that we see around cooperatives, cooperative economies, the commons, sharing economies, how does it organize differently in different places into a political force that makes something bigger out of these different initiatives happening right now? In our book, we look at the case of the city of Barcelona as one possible example, to think forward along these dimension, with all its limitations, of course.
Safa: And as you say, you know, different forms of collective organizing and action in different locations. And there was this misunderstanding maybe by some people about degrowth, where you had to clarify that - to quote what you had written, you had written that: "degrowth implies charting alternatives to growth based development in low income countries. But this is not the same as saying that degrowth is the rise of incomes of poor people in low income countries." So maybe you could speak to that clarification in case you know, maybe some listeners might benefit from hearing that in terms of how it's realized differently in high income countries or low income countries.
Giorgos: I'm careful how I tread this line, because I know your audience is into development practice. And I have to say that I'm not, I'm not involved in that - I haven't lived in a developing world country. It is now my experience, it is not my world, and it's not something that I like to profess about from far away. Because I don't like the idea of the expert from the West that knows about what Africa should do or what Latin America should do. I think we have to listen to the ideas coming out of these places and see what we can learn - because we have caused a lot of disasters already by pretending that we did things there, but mostly securing that resources can keep flowing cheaply here. Our argument as degrowth is like we have to sort our house - and by our house, I put in air quotes, by "our house" I mean, Europe or North America - which is where those of us who write about degrowth are based. We have to sort our house because this is where colonialism and extraction and extraction based development, funneling resources unequally from the rest of the world started, you know? And it's our responsibility to start putting a mess to the mess we have created, in terms of the climate breakdown and in terms of other problems. So that's one thing I have to say. The second thing I have to say is that degrowth in high income countries is the only way that we can have social justice and environmental justice in the sense that if our part of the world keeps growing at 2 or 3% per year, I don't see any physical scenario that doesn't involve climate breakdown. And we know very well who's going to suffer first and foremost from a climate breakdown. Not that our part of the world is not going to suffer - but parts of the world that have less infrastructures to protect themselves and less economies that can protect from climate calamities are going to suffer even more. So degrowth is a must in this sense, for development, the rest of the world. Now what I can say about the parts of the world that I don't know, were incomes are low, what I can say is that yes, material needs there remain to be met, energy needs remain to be met. And this will definitely mean increasing the - you might call it ecological footprint resources and energy infrastructures, better infrastructures for certain things, better energy provision, etc. So this is definitely part of what development will look like. But I don't want to use the word growth and couch this development in terms of GDP, because this would defeat the very purpose of what we are saying, that this whole model and ideology of GDP growth here is wrong. So if it has been wrong here, why would we now keep it and exporting and keep using it, when we talk about other places of the world? What I would like to see is more room for people that speak in their language, and I mean, in their language, language language, but I mean, not seeing their own intellectual language. In other parts of the world they also speak about alternatives to capitalist mode of growth and development. And there are autochthonous alternatives in Africa and Latin America, in Southeast Asia, that I would like to see space for them. I would like to see space, also in development thinking and practice for these autochthonous alternatives, of different forms and different paths to well-being, rather than one that assumes that our model of industrialization, of GDP based growth is the one that should be exported at that there are air quotes, again, 'obstacles' in other parts of the world.
Safa: Absolutely, I think that will resonate so much with our listeners as well. And so you mentioned the climate crisis, and maybe the prevalence of kind of short sighted thinking or short term solutions, short term policy visions, versus the need for more meaningful systemic long-term change. Can you speak to us about your understanding between these kind of two different visions, especially related to the climate crisis that we're in globally?
Giorgos: I think the current epidemic crisis COVID, like, I think as a metaphor, not as an example, but as a metaphor can very well show this distinction between the short term and the long term thinking. So the short term thinking was that there was a trade off between putting people first and putting the economy first. So should we have a lockdown and save people in lives? Or are we damaging people in the long term, supposedly, by locking down the economy, and then having economic and secondary health crisis that they're gonna impact later? So there was a supposed trade off between the economy and people. And that's how also, the climate debate has been framed, ever since the 1980s. So the so called Nobel Prize in Economics, which is not really a Nobel Prize, but anyways, William Nordhaus that got the Nobel, he was famous for a paper he had written in the 90s, which was "To Slow or Not To Slow?". He was basically saying, should we slow the economy to save the climate, or should we let the economy go, because there are trade offs, and if we let the economy slow down, there's gonna be bigger impacts on climate, etc. That's how it has been framed. And that was how COVID was framed. And within one year, we know that it was a completely the wrong framing, because the countries that acted fast and imposed strict and decisive lockdowns when they could have done it, and also did better economically. So they didn't have to go through a series of disasters, a series of opening the economy and closing it down again. And more or less, they managed to have a healthy functioning of the economy much faster than the rest, who supposedly put the economy first, and they tried to water down the lock downs, so that there can be some economic activity. It happened within a year - so we have lived it, and we've seen it, and I think it would be good to take the lesson for climate change and the big picture, which is playing out in more years. The faster and the more decisive we act to slow down the parts of the economy that are causing climate change, the better it will be also for whatever might be calling the economy in the long run, there is no trade off there between slowing down the economy and climate change, there is no trade off whatsoever, we have to really slow down the economy now, so that there can continue to be an economy 50 or 70 years after. Otherwise, there will be nothing. There will be like a series of small disasters and some economic life here and there, you know.
Safa: Yeah, very important. So since you published degrowth, you've shared your writing and your thoughts about it, what have been the reactions you've gotten from colleagues or others around the world in terms of maybe how it's being translated into action, and what it's leading to in terms of actually being implemented.
Giorgos: The idea has been around for a while. So I mean, I'm not the first one to publish. I publish my first book on degrowth in 2018. And now I have the new one, which is a shorter version and a little bit more manifesto-ish or minifesto-ish - The Case for Degrowth - and a bigger textbook kind of book that I wrote, Degrowth, was in 2018. When I came in Barcelona in 2008, there was already a grassroots movement on degrowth here in Barcelona, of Catalon activists. So the discussion has been going on for a while. What I see now is increasing interest within the Anglo-speaking world where the debate was not so strong, it was more strong in the Mediterranean, Europe, in France, where it all started, Serge Latouche is the name to look for there. He wrote extensively about degrowth in the early 2000s, many books in French, unfortunately, not translated, but excellent books. And for your audience, interestingly, Serge Latouche was a development practitioner. So his first job was as a development advisor of the French government working in Africa in development programs. And he got disillusioned by what he observed there, he became an anthropologist studying development critically, becoming part of the post-development school, and working in Africa and Southeast Asia. And then coming back home in Europe. He tied his critiques of development with the ecological debates around limits to growth. And he was the first one to write about what we call today degrowth - called décroissance in French. So that's interesting to show that there is a link between what concerns your audience here, and what I'm writing about. The reception has been a lot of intense debates from people who do not want to accept that, they say that it's impossible to think anything that doesn't involve a rise of incomes for everyone, that people in the global north will not accept any reduction in their incomes, given how much they have suffered from depression in the last years, which is true. And we are not calling for thinking about how to reduce incomes, but actually how to do without growth - it is where we put the challenge. So there had been a lot of debates, which I think is part of what we're doing. And there's been a lot of opening up of grassroots alternatives, people in cities or grassroots commoners, who are attracted to the idea of degrowth and they find it interesting, young people in Green Parties that they are more and more mobilized around the idea of degrowth. So I think the discourse, and I'm not talking about my books now - my books are like, let's say the formalization of that at an academic level. But I think the ideas are there, and they are spreading. And they are becoming part of the common sense of many people.
Safa: Thinking about one of the manifestations of kind of the violence of our current global economic systems is the conflicts over resource use. And you know, from the more development sector perspective, this often leads to humanitarian emergencies. And you know, it has such a violent impact on different communities. Could you speak to this reality in terms of conflicts over resource use for decades now, and how that's something that also is relevant when thinking about rethinking how we approach economies.
Giorgos: I co-ordinated, actually, a big European project, which was precisely on climate change and water conflict in the MENA region, in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region. What you find there is that I think there is a kind of reductionistic, deterministic discourse, which says, like: oh, we're gonna have climate change, this is going to cause droughts and water scarcity, and then people are going to get into conflict. And what our research showed is that this is like too much of a simplistic picture. First of all, we know that very often when there is water scarcity, depending on the institutional and social conditions, you might end up with more water cooperation rather than more water conflict. Then in many cases, it's the opposite way. It's that water conflict is what is causing water scarcity, with powerful actors enclosing water and keeping weaker actors out of it and constructing a condition of scarcity. And then we also found out that it's really difficult to disentangle the environmental or climate factor, sometimes, from the social or economic factors that increase vulnerability, or they lead to conflict in their own ways. That sometimes, arguments about climate can be used to displace attention from the political and social factors that are truly causing conflict. And actually, there are also factors where we can intervene immediately. For example, one issue we had the problem with in our research program, and we argued it's very important to look at, is that there is a whole securitization of the discourse around environmental conflict. There is a lot of discourse about how we have to think of climate change as a national security issue, that invokes images of militaries, of hardening borders. This is precisely what we have to avoid if we think of climate change. We need to think about solidarities. We need to think about mutual aid across borders. So we were saying that a much better way of thinking around these issues - rather than national security or the development studies alternative which is human security, which has also a very individualistic kind of decentralizing responsibility to people and communities themselves, we try to articulate a discourse around the old but still valid the notions of social security and civil security - collective forms of security, collective forms of providing infrastructure that protects from climate change, that supports people in case of calamities, that supports people with a low cost in case of health calamities like the one we are living right now. So we think the emphasis on this discourse, rather than being on climate change as a source of conflict, and disasters should be on how do we build the social and civil security infrastructure that we need for an age of climate and health breakdown, that it's within our doors? Rather than beat the drums of war, in the name of climate change.
Safa: And kind of in relation to that, you know, sometimes we see greenwashing or this co-opting of the language used in terms of sustainable development. Can you maybe share your thoughts about this co-option of these words, but without a proper understanding of the the ideas and the analysis and the systemic issues at play?
Giorgos: It's an intentional misuse, you know, -now the the new term is ‘net zero emissions’. So you know, you hear everyone is building airports, and they say net zero emissions, fossil fuels are saying they're gonna keep extracting oil and coal, but it's gonna be net zero emissions. I don't know what this new craziness, you know? It’s some craziness that started a little bit from the reports of the IPCC that said, like, you know, we might stay within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. If somehow in the next 20 years, we start developing these technologies that they still don't exist, and we don't know how much land they're gonna occupy, some people say three times the size of India to start absorbing carbon from the atmosphere with trees and with other projects, that they all remain a fantasy right now. I mean, it's good to study them as researchers and as engineers, but there's nothing concrete there. And people have already now started talking about net zero carbon emissions, that somehow they are gonna keep emitting but somehow they are gonna do something with this carbon - I don't know with trees are storing it under the ground, with technologies that are not there. So that's one example of what you call greenwashing. But I don't think it's just a matter of ignorance - it is a matter of like, how can we keep doing what we're doing, and pretend that we're not doing it anymore. Sustainable Development, I mean, had a more promising story in the sense it brought many people together, there were progressive movements and people that put their bets there. It was another era, it was the 1990s, when we still thought we could stop things, but it was 30 years before now, so there was time still to stop carbon emissions and stop biodiversity loss. So there was some hope that big actors could be put on the table and convinced to do otherwise. The lesson is that they are not, you know. They were there just to find new fancy terms and keep doing what they're doing and call it sustain. And there is a series of terms after that, that keep doing the same, you know, now we hear about circularity, these are not bad ideas. I mean, sustainability is a good idea, you know, the circular economy is also a good idea, taken up to a limit, you know, seen within its limits. The problem is not the idea, the problem is that they are used as a silver bullet, as panaceas, then everyone agrees on them. So everyone is on board, and then nothing happens. That's where the problem is.
Safa: Yeah, all these buzzwords and that distinction you made about it is being intentionally used in this way, it's so important to make, so thank you for that. Thinking about the interplay between academic institutions, with development agencies with governments, with community organizations, kind of the knowledge mobilization - what have been your experiences around the partnerships or the exchanges?
Giorgos: Yeah, I mean, what we've done here in Barcelona - it is because our message is quite radical, so degrowth is not something you can easily work out with the ministry, let's say, but we have worked a lot with civil society organizations. A lot of groups that they are involved in actual extractive conflicts around the world, there is the Environmental Justice Map. If you haven't checked it, check it out. It's a map our group in Barcelona has prepared under Joan Martinez Alier and his colleagues that maps different civil society organizations reporting on the conflicts against the extractive economy that they are involved with around the world. We have worked with cooperatives, with NGOs here in Barcelona, sharing our knowledge, and we have tried to use this knowledge, building from the grassroots, to slowly make openings also in the policy sphere and Green Parties has been our allies there. We've worked closely with the European Green Party, which held a big conference in Brussels in the European Parliament, the Post Growth Conference, the first Conference in the premises of the Parliament, with involvement of Ministers of nation states in Europe, with the involvement of Commissioned Officers, who are the Executives of the European Union, discussing what post-growth economics might mean. So we make these small openings in the political sphere. And then we make a lot of small openings in one on one relationships. So there are many policymakers that come to us from big international organizations or governments, and they tell us that, you know what I'm desperate too, I can see that it's not going anywhere. And I really am attracted to the ideas you talk about, how do I make these ideas palatable to my colleagues and to my environment, my context? And we work with people, slowly but steadily, to create the spaces for these conversations to take place within bigger organizations.
Safa: That's great, very important in terms of being in conversation and having these important exchanges. Thinking about the importance of international solidarities and this collective work to work collectively to kind of build new economies of care, relationships with care, moving away from the practices of exploitation, the systems of exploitation that have dominated, could you maybe share your thoughts on the importance of these international solidarities and working together across borders internationally, globally?
Giorgos: Yeah, I think it's impossible for any country or a city or any town to break from the mold of the current capitalist system on its own. So it's not a change that can start from a single country or a single city, it has to be something that works in concerted action among regions are among more than one or a group of countries, as they are trying to adapt to a new normal as it is being called now, which is that the old normal has died and we try to see what is going to be the new conditions that arrive. And in that sense, it's really important to keep maintaining the international perspective and international solidarity, rather than closing down on borders, which is impossible in an era of climate crisis, to think closing down on your own border. The work on Environmental Justice Atlas, which is a collaboration with movements and groups of people involved in conflicts against extractive industries around the world, it is a tangible process of solidarity, knowledge of solidarity, of making visible the different struggles that are taking place around the world, and then also trying to weave the connections - that conflict against a particular mining corporation in Latin America, that there is a very similar conflict in Indonesia, for example, and there are connections to be made there between the people involved in these conflicts. And there are also knowledges to be exchanged, and mutual support to be built in trying to create alternatives to the 'development', again, in air quotes, offered by these corporations in specific localities.
Safa: Yes, if you think about, you know, those who would be listening in terms of the audience of practitioners, rather than researchers, is there anything you'd like to share in terms of inviting them to think more about degrowth, how they can really reflect on, come to understand, use and contribute to this degrowth movement.
Giorgos: I know that the contexts are very harsh and hard, the places where they work. And I really have a respect for people who go out of their comfort zone, and are really motivated to help people in other parts of the world and go there to help with their knowledge and share their knowledge, and also, in many instances, put their bodies and their selves in danger. So I have a lot of respect for people who are involved in development practice. I would say, and I think most of them know that - I'm not saying anything new, but to be open to the alternatives that might emerge from the local level, from the level of observation. And for me, as someone working on degrowth, its like, I want to hear back from them. I want to hear from people involved in development practice to tell me how what we're talking about in degrowth, how does it speak to their own contexts? And what alternatives to development do they observe? Or do they think could be fertilized and could flourish in places where they work? There is a big job to be done to continue the work of the post-development schools about thinking alternatives to development around the world. There is a work done now by Ashish Kothari around the idea of Pluriverse, to think about what are the pluriverse of alternatives that exist around the world. And I think development practitioners can be both conveyors of what is this pluriverse and where it's taking place - to visibilize it, and to value it, and also to be people who contribute to the discourse and make us aware of how we can make this translation between what we were talking about degrowth at a more academic and a little bit more Western context, how it can translate to the different contexts they operate in.
Safa: So a big invitation to the listeners to maybe get in touch with you or share their thoughts. And just as a final question, where are you in terms of your research focus, your interests, where you're putting your focus and your time and your energy right now and the work you're doing currently?
Giorgos: As I said, I'm undisciplinary, so I have many different passions. So I work with my students to think a little bit about what the green new deal could mean without growth, we try to model different paths of carbon emissions without assuming growth as a desirable and given situation. And I am working on a longer book to try to think critically around the idea of folk eco-modernism, the idea that salvation to the current ecological breakdown is in technology. So yeah, these are some of the variable things I'm working on.
Safa: Very interesting. So you know, it's been wonderful to speak with you. I really appreciate your reflections and your time. Thank you.
Giorgos: No, I think we have a very nice conversation and we finished it on a good note.
Safa: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you also to our listeners for tuning in and supporting the podcast. I invite you to join in on the conversation by going to our website, hitting the send us a voice message button and sharing some of your thoughts with us. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your preferred podcast player, rate and review past episodes and share our conversations with your friends. You can also keep up to date with our latest episodes and offerings by signing up for our newsletter on our website and following us on social media. On our website, you can also find a donation link where you can choose either a one time donation or reoccurring monthly donation option to help us cover our production costs. Thank you again for tuning in. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all next time. Until then, take care.
