Giacomo D'Alisa

University of Coimbra | UC · Centre for Social Studies

In 2008, the Italian Government issued a decree according to which obstructions or protests in the vicinity of landfills or incinerators became a penal felony. This was the outcome of a long process that began fifteen years before when regional waste treatment facilities became unable to cope with the waste accumulated in the region of Campania. Th...

Degrowth is a challenge to the growth imaginary. It is a reflexive by-product of the European thoughts and socio-ecological struggles. However, it bridges with and search inspiration from sister movements that across the world struggle against the developmentalist regime and argue in favour of decolonial paths. In degrowth scholarship, the debate i...

In this chapter, we offer an overview of the scholarship at the interface of commons regimes and social movements and unveil the agenda of the Barcelona School around this topic. The frontiers of theory and research on the governance of commons have notably evolved in the last decade. At the forefront of such evolution is the study of environmental...

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...

This editorial introduces the Special Section “Commons and Social Movements”, which centers on how social movements and commons initiatives shape each other. The Section responds to the recent momentum gained by the “commons movement” in Europe and across the world, as well as the consolidation of a critical scholarship that expands the frontiers o...

Analysing a sample of 3,033 environmental conflicts around the globe, we compared conflicts reporting no human health impacts to those reporting health impacts linked to toxic pollution. Our study suggests four main findings. First, health impacts are a key concern for working-class communities. Second, the long-term effects of toxic pollution unde...

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...

The recent phenomenon of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) is associated with what has been described as a global agrarian transition. New forms of land exploitation and concentration have led to profound socio-environmental transformations of rural production systems in Latin America, South-East Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. Scholars have point...

Entre les années 1980 et les années les plus récentes, la Campanie a servi de territoire pour des opérations de traitement low cost des déchets pour l’essentiel d’origine industrielle. Les enquêtes diligentées ont mis en évidence, à propos de ces opérations, un écheveau complexe de relations entre des groupes de la criminalité organisée locales, de...

Buy it for 8 euro here (discout code FAL20): https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509535620 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...

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...

The Italian region of Campania and its capital Naples have epitomized waste management failure in Europe since 2008 when international media covered extensively the waste crisis occurring there. In response to the crisis, the Italian national government took an authoritarian turn in waste policies and criminalized citizens’ grievances and mobilizat...

This paper addresses a gap in degrowth scholarship: the lack of a theory of the state. Those who write about degrowth advocate radical policy and social change, but have no model to explain how, why and under what conditions such change could come about and what role the state would play in it. This is because they have no theory of what the state...

This paper investigates the introduction of unit-pricing (UP) schemes in waste management with regard to grassroots initiatives promoting bottom-up participatory processes in local communities, addressing several issues concerning environmental justice and degrowth. As waste service charges and fees increase in proportion of waste generated in pres...

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...

Political ecology has, in the past decade, emerged as an increasingly accepted framework for studying issues of health and disease and has thus given rise to a distinct sub-field: the political ecologies of health and disease (PEHD). More recently, scholars have suggested more specific avenues through which the sub-field can be further developed an...

The study presented in this paper explores and examines the role of grassroots environmental organisations in promoting schemes aimed at reducing the impact of waste production at a local level. Focusing on the Spanish municipality of Esporles, in the Balearic island of Mallorca, the authors investigate how participatory forums can increase involve...

Political ecologists have developed scathing analyses of capitalism’s tendency for enclosure and dispossession of the commons. In this context commons are analyzed as a force to resist neo-liberalism, a main site of conflict over dispossession, and a source of alternatives to capitalism. In this paper we elaborate a view of the commons as the mater...

Environmental crimes, if they are perceived as victimless, have not received the appropriate governmental response and have been frequently ranked low on the law enforcement priority list, punished with lenient or no administrative sanctions. This has contributed to an underestimation of the immediate consequences of environmental crimes, which can...

The ‘Land of Fires’ indicates an area in Campania, in the south of Italy, where, systematically, since the end of the 1980s, toxic wastes have been illegally burned and buried. Organized mafia-like crime plays a significant role in the illegal management of waste in this area; however, organized mafia-like criminals are not the only players. Althou...

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...

In the current economic crisis of industrialized society, social movements face two types of challenges: firstly, they are confronting institutions that are less capable of and have no propensity for mediating new socioeconomic demands; secondly, they are experiencing difficulties in building strong and lasting bonds of solidarity and cooperation a...

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...

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A region in the Italian South, Campania comprises five provinces: Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, Salerno, and Naples, with a total population of almost 6 million people. While the prosecutors hoped to stop the flourishing of the waste trade, the main result of the shutdown was an unfortunate interruption in urban waste collection. In 1994, having re...

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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...

The present work contributes to bringing visibility to the part of social work that is referred to as unpaid work. This part of social work remains outside the market, but it is necessary to structure and maintain households, human relationships and communities and providing sustenance and care. It represents a flow of hidden subsidies to the econo...

The article discusses the garbage struggles for environmental justice in Campania, Italy. Garbage struggles of Naples have not yet entered into the global narrative on environmental justice and the fight for ecological democracy. One should never put too much faith in technology, though. Campania is a region in the southern part of Italy, one of th...

The spreading of the concept of sustainable development asks for a the definition of a sound common ground of the growing number of implementations. Here I propose a synopsis of the criticisms of the major methodological approaches to sustainability and point out the need, according to the ecocentric approaches, of a paradigm shift, from a linear t...

El presente trabajo como autobiografía de un conflicto propone un posible método para representar las cualidades relevantes sobre la experiencia vivida como activista en una coordinadora contra la privatización del sistema hídrico integrado en Nápoles, Caserta y sus provincias. Esta contribución, alberga la esperanza de poner en práctica un proceso...