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This year, the second annual Global Degrowth Day will again take place on the first Saturday of June. On 6th June 2020, public events will be held all over the world in order to share alternatives to a growth-based society. We want to show: a good life for all is possible!
Check out the information flyer!
Yaşar University Center for Mediterranean Studies is pleased to announce the “1st Annual Conference on Mediterranean Studies: Renewable Energy and the Environment: Social, Political and Economic Dimensions”, 4-5 June 2020. You can find detailed information about the conference through this link: https://cms.yasar.edu.tr/720-2/
As energy politics remains a contested issue in the Mediterranean Basin, what political ecologies and future environments are emerging in the region? Can cooperation over renewable energies offer potential solutions? What are climate change and justice scenarios for different countries in the Basin? The first annual multidisciplinary conference on Mediterranean Studies is organized to encourage critical reflection around the encounters of overlapping energy and environment crisis in the Mediterranean Basin from economical, political and social perspectives.
We look forward to welcoming you at the conference. You can contact cms@yasar.edu.tr for further information.
Workshop
It’s the (bio)economy, stupid!
The future of growth and the promise of the bioeconomy
7th – 8th October 2020, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany Call for Abstracts
The dominant narrative of the ongoing debates on the bioeconomy paints the picture of a future economy based on renewable energies and biological resources that will both deliver ‘green’ economic growth and enable modern societies to phase out fossil fuels and build a sustainable future. But are these promises of a ‘bio-based’ renewed cycle of accumulation and growth warranted? Can growth-based economies really be made sustainable and globally just based on bioeconomic materials and resources? Does the bioeconomy enable a defossilization of economic activity and a decoupling of environmental throughput and GDP? Or would the transformation of modern societies toward post- fossil, bio-based economic activities involve an overcoming of unlimited economic growth? Finally, what can critical debates about the bioeconomy and discussions on sustainable growth, green growth and degrowth learn from each other?
While fossil-fuelled economies run on a constantly accelerating linear throughput of extracted fossil resources, bio-based economies rely on materials whose availability is subject to biophysical limits and cyclical regenerative processes that cannot be expanded and accelerated at will. It is uncertain whether the accumulation of ever-increasing amounts of energy and goods can continue in an economy based on renewable resources. Any break with the logics of accumulation, extraction and expansion is likely to entail new distributional conflicts, but it may also be a starting point for a fundamental transformation of modern societies: The social organization of work and care activities, consumption patterns and people’s mindsets might change, or it might become clear that they need to change. In a similar vein, political actors and strategies often claim that the bioeconomy will bring far-reaching change – the EU’s bioeconomy strategy anticipates ‘rapid, concerted and sustained changes in lifestyle and resource use that cut across all levels of society and the economy’. At the same time, the concrete actions of key players in politics, science and industry seem to assume that the bioeconomy will allow them to continue with business as usual and avoid a turn away from the growth paradigm.
The aim of our workshop is to discuss the relationships between the bioeconomy and economic growth from a multidisciplinary and global perspective. We want to foster an exchange between debates on the ecological and social implications of the bioeconomy and critical debates on sustainable growth, green growth and degrowth. We thus invite empirical and/or conceptual contributions focusing on the broad range of issues and debates in research, including but not limited to the following questions:
We welcome contributions from different academic fields such as sociology, political ecology and economy, human and critical geography, social ecology, history, philosophy, economics etc. Contributions may be based on theoretical analyses, case studies, empirical investigations, comparative or in-depth studies.
If you are interested in contributing to the workshop we invite you to submit an abstract of max. 500 words to flumen@uni-jena.de until April 3, 2020. Draft papers will be due until September 18, 2020. Workshop discussions will be based on the draft papers, aiming to develop them further for a possible publication.
The workshop is organized by the Junior Research Group Mentalities in Flux (flumen) at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the program “Bioeconomy as Societal Change” (www.flumen.uni-jena.de).
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