About
61
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Introduction
I am a lecturer in ecological economics & political ecology at the University of Barcelona. My main research interest is to understand the relationship between the environment and the economy. Until recently I was deputy coordinator of the ERC project EnvJustice (led by Prof. Joan Martinez-Alier). I have published 20 articles in highly ranked journals in socio-environmental sciences, 15 book chapters, edited 5 special issues and 2 successful books. My last book is "The case for degrowth" (2020).
Additional affiliations
September 2007 - present
Position
- Researcher
Description
- ICTA UAB is a prestigious interdisciplinary centre of environmental research ranked 8th in environmental studies by the Center for World University Rankings and awarded as a unit of research excellence by the Spanish Ministry of Economy.
Publications
Publications (61)
Degrowth is the literal translation of 'décroissance', a French word meaning reduction. Launched by activists in 2001 as a challenge to growth, it became a missile word that sparks a contentious debate on the diagnosis and prognosis of our society. 'Degrowth' became an interpretative frame for a new (and old) social movement where numerous streams...
Recent scholarship on the materiality of cities has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive and failing to account for political economy. We argue that through the conceptualization of urban metabolisms advanced by ecological economists and industrial ecologists, materialist and critical perspectives can be mutually...
This article proposes that the 'Green Economy' is not an adequate response to the unsustainability and inequity created by 'development' (a western cultural construct), and puts forward alternative socio-environmental futures to (and not of) development. 'Sustainable development' is an oxymoron. Therefore, instead of the 'post-2015 development agen...
We call for coupling degrowth with urban studies and planning agendas as an academically salient and politically urgent endeavour. Our aim is threefold: to explore ways for 'operationalising' degrowth concepts into urban and regional everyday spatial practices; to sketch pathways for taking degrowth conceptually and methodologically beyond localise...
This chapter lays out both the critique of the oxymoron sustainable development as well as the potential and nuances of a post-development agenda. Post-development is generally meant as an era or approach in which development would no longer be the central organizing principle of social life.
We highlight the contribution by Joan Martinez Alier wit...
What steps are needed to make life better and more convivial? The Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020) has presented a short diagnosis of the current crises and sketches of a possible and desirable future. It has been a necessary work of theoretical synthesis, but preserving a viable world also requires passion. It is thus urgent to show what peopl...
It is almost impossible to disagree with a proposal seeking to slow things down to minimize harm to the planet. However, the question is where. The manifesto in The Case for Degrowth acknowledges the challenge of asking distinct populations to lower their economic growth and well-being. They suggest alliances, echoing the commons, and highlight anc...
The debates on the sustainability of development have a long history. Although the Brundtland Report popularized "sustainable development", this slippery concept sidelined previous critiques of development and has been compatible with a wide range of conflicting agendas. A notable example of this contradiction is the uncritical promotion of capital...
The social and environmental failure of successive Western development models imposed on the global South has led local communities to pursue alternatives to development. Such alternatives seek radical societal transformations that require the production of new knowledge, practices, technologies, and institutions that are effective to achieve more...
What steps are needed to make life better and more convivial? The Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020) has presented a short diagnosis of the current crises and sketches of a possible and desirable future. It has been a necessary work of theoretical synthesis, but preserving a viable world also requires passion. It is thus urgent to show what peopl...
Despite renewed efforts to combat climate change, it remains uncertain how economies will achieve emission reduction by 2050. Among different decarbonisation strategies, knowledge about the potential role and contributions of social movements to curbing carbon emissions has been limited. This study aims to shed light on the diverse contributions of...
Following Illich’s (1974) notion of convivial tools and the distinction he makes between “self-propelled transit” and “motorized transport” of mobility, we apply the emerging paradigm of degrowth to urban mobility. Based on the degrowth literature and Illich’s work, we derive principles and criteria for the mobility of a degrowth society that inclu...
For a sustainable post-Covid-19 recovery strategy, humanity faces two major challenges: 1. Just prosperity: The creation of a resilient and fair economy that delivers prosperity for all; 2. Public and planetary health: protect human health, together with the reduction of environmental impacts below thresholds of planetary boundaries including green...
The metabolism of contemporary industrialized societies, that is their energy and material flows, leads to the overconsumption and waste of natural resources, two factors often disregarded in the global ecological equation. In this perspective article, we examine the amount of natural resources that is increasingly being consumed and wasted by huma...
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Covid-19 has lain bare the fragility of existing economic systems. Any decline in market activity threatens systemic collapse. But it doesn’t have to be this way. To be more resilient to future crises –pandemic, climatic, financial, or political – w...
'Environmental Justice: Key Issues' is the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of the most dynamic fields in environmental politics scholarship.
The rapidly growing body of research in this area has brought about a proliferation of approaches; as such, the breadth and depth of the field can...
Recent research and policies recognize the importance of environmental defenders for global sustainability and emphasize their need for protection against violence and repression. However, effective support may benefit from a more systematic understanding of the underlying environmental conflicts, as well as from better knowledge on the factors tha...
This article advances the case for caring and commoning as engines for getting through the COVID-19 pandemic and for moving toward more equitable and sustainable futures. Building on two processes of collaborative intellectual work among degrowth activists, it diagnoses relations between growth and crisis; identifies policies to move through and be...
Waste is increasingly viewed as a resource rather than an externality. However, new waste management regimes must be introduced in order for value to be created, enhanced and captured. We refer to these regimes as modes of valorization, and they establish the conditions that allow waste to become a commodity frontier. The production of waste-based...
The term ‘ décroissance’ (degrowth) signifies a process of political and social transformation that reduces a society's material and energy use while improving the quality of life. Degrowth calls for decolonizing imaginaries and institutions from – in Ursula Le Guin's words – ‘a one-way future consisting only of growth’. Recent scholarship has focu...
Environmental destructions, overconsumption and overdevelopment are felt by an increasing number of people. Voices for 'prosperity without growth' have strengthened and environmental conflicts are on the rise worldwide. This introduction to the special issue explores the possibility of an alliance between post-growth and ecological distribution con...
FOR BUYING THE BOOK at a discounted rate, please get directly in touch with our publisher AUF at info@authorsupfront.com
"Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary" is a stimulating collection of over 100 essays on transformative alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity...
El decrecimiento se resiste a una de nición simple. Como la libertad o la justicia,
el decrecimiento expresa una aspiración que no puede ser encerrada en una
frase. El decrecimiento es un marco en el que coinciden diferentes líneas de
pensamiento, imaginarios o propuestas para actuar. Esta versatilidad es una de
sus principales fortalezas.
El decre...
The article Ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability: an overview and conceptual framework, written by Arnim Scheidel, Leah Temper, Federico Demaria and Joan Martínez‑Alier was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 13 December 2017 without open access.
Environmental justice activism is to this age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial age - one of the most influential social movements of its time. Yet, despite its consistent progress since the 1970s, environmental justice protests seem to get lost in the morass of information on broader environmental issues.
In contrast, labour confl...
Can ecological distribution conflicts turn into forces for sustainability? This overview paper addresses in a systematic conceptual manner the question of why, through whom, how, and when conflicts over the use of the environment may take an active role in shaping transitions toward sustainability. It presents a conceptual framework that schematica...
The environmental movement may be “the most comprehensive and influential movement of our time” (Castells 1997: 67), representing for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period. Yet while strike statistics have been collected for many countries since the late nineteenth century (van der Velden 2007),1 until t...
"Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary" is a stimulating collection of over 100 essays on transformative alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values.
In the post-development imagination, 'development' would no long...
A dialogue on current global crises, their structural roots, and the radical alternatives that show us ways out.
This chapter draws on results of the project entitled EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade) focused on the analysis of ecological distribution conflicts across the world. We include comparative data on India and Latin America (and also for some variables on Africa and Europe) exploring the links between increases in the...
There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal "Great Transformation" of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planeta...
This article lays out both a critique of the oxymoron ‘sustainable development’, and the potential and nuances of a Post-Development agenda. We present ecological swaraj from India and Degrowth from Europe as two examples of alternatives to development. This gives a hint of the forthcoming book, provisionally titled The Post-Development Dictionary,...
Firstly, we present some environmental conflicts gathered in 2016 in the EJAtlas, selecting a few that have implied deaths of environmental defenders around the world including India and South America. Such conflicts arise from changing trends in the social metabolism. Secondly, we compare India and South America in terms of internal metabolism and...
The industrial economy works in practice by shifting costs to poor people, to future generations, and to other species. Could an industrial economy work otherwise? K. W. Kapp wrote in 1950 that capitalism is an economy of unpaid costs, but the socio-environmental impacts are not due to capitalism as such, they would not be different in another syst...
Degrowth calls for the abolishment of economic growth as a social objective and signifies a desired direction where societies will use less natural resources and organize to live very differently than today. This article traces the origins of degrowth from theorists of the 1970s, to the French activist movement of décroissance in the 2000s, to the...
Capital looks at waste management as a new emergent global market, where a rentier position can be acquired and profits realized. Indeed, capitalists consider waste management as one among several economic spaces to be occupied for the expansion of the scale and scope of capital accumulation (Harvey, 2003). However, the commodification, the marketi...
As the world moves towards a deal on sustainable development and perhaps a deal on climate, there is a need to understand and promote fundamentally transformative approaches to well-being rather than 'green economy' kind of short-term solutions; many such approaches exist around the world.
Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism. It is a project advocating the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability. This overview of degrowth offers a comprehensive coverag...
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide a...
This paper explains the methods for counting the energy and material flows in the economy, and gives the main results of the Material Flows for the economy of India between 1961 and 2008 as researched by Simron Singh et al (2012). Drawing on work done in the EJOLT project, some illustrations are given of the links between the changing social metabo...
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide a...
Within the context of the ecological crisis and technocratic drift of western nations whose overarching goal is economic growth, a plea for degrowth is emerging. In this essay, the concept of degrowth is adopted as an interpretative frame to describe a variety of forms of grassroots activism, mainly across crisis-ridden Europe. Particular attention...
There has been an increased role for the private sector in the various stages of waste management in cities. Delhi has been at the forefront of this shift and this has brought out conflicts over collection and disposal. This article argues that the informal sector should be meaningfully incorporated into an efficient and equitable waste management...
Projects
Project (1)
The project will expand the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), a worldwide inventory of ecological distribution conflicts. The initiative will analyze the alliance between the Global Environmental Justice Movement and the Degrowth movement in Europe.
Is there a Global Movement for Environmental Justice helping to push society and economy towards environmental sustainability? The project “ENVJUSTICE” led by ICTA-UAB researcher Joan Martinez Alier will try to prove there is through research on the many facets of this Global Movement for Environmental Justice. The project will be possible thanks to an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) awarded to Joan Martinez Alier with a fund of nearly €2 million. This is the most prestigious grant awarded by ERC, and it is designed to allow outstanding research leaders of any nationality and age to pursue groundbreaking, high-risk projects in Europe.
ENVJUSTICE will carry out three main tasks. First, the team will add and analyze cases in a groundbreaking Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) (www.ejatlas.org), a worldwide inventory of ecological distribution conflicts compiled at the ICTA-UAB, still with uneven coverage. Researchers will update and expand the EJAtlas which was launched in March 2014 as part of the EJOLT project (www.ejolt.org). It will grow thematically and geographically, becoming a unique instrument to conduct comparative, statistical political ecology. The field of political ecology studies “ecological distribution conflicts” ultimately caused by the increase in social metabolism. The links between such socio-environmental conflicts and changes in the social metabolism will be explored. “Even a non-growing industrial economy would require new supplies of fossil fuels and other materials from the commodity extraction frontiers because energy is not recycled and materials are recycled only in part”, says Martinez Alier who adds that the economy is not circular, but entropic “there are therefore many resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts, at different scales, such as greenhouse gases”.
Research based on the EJAtlas will analyze the resistance movements born from such conflicts and the networks they form across borders in a Global Environmental Justice Movement. The project will try to provide answers to questions such as: Who are the social actors and victims in such conflicts, the forms of mobilization, the variables explaining the rates of “success” in creating new alternatives? In this regard, ENVJUSTICE will work together with the project Acknowl-EJ led by Dr Leah Temper (2016-19) at ICTA-UAB and funded by the ISSC (www.worldsocialscience.org/activities/transformations/acknowl-ej/).
Second, it shall expand the scope and deepen the analysis of the Vocabulary of the Movement for Environmental Justice, from its beginning in the United States in 1982 (with terms like environmental racism, popular epidemiology, sacrifice zones) to its deployment in many countries with new crosscutting concepts. In Paris in 2015 (at the 21st COP on Climate Change) there were claims for “Climate Justice”. This is only one of many terms in the vocabulary of environmental justice. The project will investigate how different claims are expressed in Europe, India, China, Africa, Latin America, related to mining and fossil fuel extraction conflicts, biomass and water, waste disposal and transport conflicts.
Third, it shall analyze (following in the steps of Sicco Mansholt and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen) the elements for a possible alliance between the Global Environmental Justice movement and the smaller Degrowth (Décroissance, Post-Wachstum, “Prosperity without Growth”) movement in Europe.
ENVJUSTICE reinforces the Ecological Economics and Political Ecology group at ICTA-UAB, the so called "Barcelona school".
