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The Historical Roots of a Feminist ‘Degrowth’: Maria Mies’s and Marilyn Waring’s Critiques of Growth

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... However, ecofeminist thinking, such as feminist criticism of the environmental movement, have been mostly ignored when creating the canon of the environmental movement in the United States (Sturgeon 1997). A similar disregard of earlier ecofeminist thinking is also evident in the fi eld of degrowth (Gregoratti and Raphael 2019). ...
... Catia Gregoratti and Riya Raphael (2019) show how the (eco)feminist tradition has remained hidden in degrowth thinking. They highlight the work of Maria Mies and Marilyn Waring, whose relevance to degrowth is obvious but rarely referred to in introductions to degrowth. ...
Article
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Socio-ecological crises pose numerous problems for the continuity of human communities and more-than-human beings. First, previous thinkers have shown how capitalism is married to continuous economic growth, which has led to overproduction and overconsumption. Second, ecofeminists point out that not everyone is responsible for these crises. Furthermore, dualist and hierarchical mindsets perpetuate the exploitation of women, minorities, and more-than-human beings. Bridging these two debates is important to dismantling gendered economic exploitation on the one hand and the capitalist growth economy on the other. This text briefly introduces the history of ecofeminism and the ecofeminist political economy. It also identifies themes in ecofeminist degrowth thinking by analysing the works of Ariel Salleh and Stefania Barca. It is important to highlight ecofeminist thinking so that current degrowth debates do not ignore the institutionalised exploitation of women, minorities, and other species in economic activity.
... This means that, while sub-currents in degrowth explicitly focused on class and gender, no sub-current focused on race or anti-racism. Subsequently, this article aims to complement other work that expands alternative perspectives on degrowth such as feminism (e.g., FaDA Writing Collective, 2023; Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019), militarism (e.g., Liegey, 2022;Tipping Point North South, 2023), and class (e.g., Leonardi, 2019). ...
... Indeed, one finds an active interest among degrowthers in building alliances across national, class, ethnic, gender, and linguistic divides. In regard to related "non-degrowth" movements, we see interactions with feminism (Abazeri, 2022;Dengler & Seebacher, 2019;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019;Picchio, 2015), Buen Vivir and Indigenous traditions (Gudynas, 2015;Kothari et al., 2014;Perkins, 2017;Thomson, 2011;Ziai, 2015), Gandhian economics (Corazza & Victus, 2015), Ubuntu (Hoeft, 2018;Ramose, 2015;Ziai, 2015), Cooperation Jackson (Kallis, 2019a;Schmelzer et al., 2022), and MOVE, as well as the Red Nation/Red Deal (Tyberg, 2020). ...
... Amid growing appreciation of the generative force of these essential strands, numerous scholars have raised questions about why feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist voices are under-or misrepresented in so many characterizations of degrowth (e.g. Andreucci & Engel-Di Mauro, 2019; Dengler & Seebacher, 2019;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019;Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019;Richter, 2022;Schulken et al., 2022). ...
... Gender and political economic systems(Andreucci et al., 2019; Akbulut, 2021;Barca et al., 2019;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019) • Programs and policies (basic income, wages for housework, green new deals, UN)(Katada, 2012;Paulson & Paulson-Smith, 2021;Piccardi & Barca, 2022;Schulz, 2017;Zelleke, 2021) • Social reproduction, labor, and invisible economy(Barca, 2019; Bauhardt, 2014; Dengler & Strunk 2018; Salleh, 2017; Saave-Harnack, Dengler & Muraca, 2019; Saave & Muraca, 2021) • Societal transformations, climate justice, and utopias (Aulenbacher & Riegraf, 2018; Andreucci & Engel-Di Mauro, 2019; Akbulut, 2021; Barca, Chertkovskaya & Paulsson, 2019; Khanna, 2021; Pérez-Orozco & Mason- ...
... Amid growing appreciation of the generative force of these essential strands, numerous scholars have raised questions about why feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist voices are under-or misrepresented in so many characterizations of degrowth (e.g. Andreucci & Engel-Di Mauro, 2019; Dengler & Seebacher, 2019;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019;Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019;Richter, 2022;Schulken et al., 2022). ...
... Gender and political economic systems(Andreucci et al., 2019; Akbulut, 2021;Barca et al., 2019;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019) • Programs and policies (basic income, wages for housework, green new deals, UN)(Katada, 2012;Paulson & Paulson-Smith, 2021;Piccardi & Barca, 2022;Schulz, 2017;Zelleke, 2021) • Social reproduction, labor, and invisible economy(Barca, 2019; Bauhardt, 2014; Dengler & Strunk 2018; Salleh, 2017; Saave-Harnack, Dengler & Muraca, 2019; Saave & Muraca, 2021) • Societal transformations, climate justice, and utopias (Aulenbacher & Riegraf, 2018; Andreucci & Engel-Di Mauro, 2019; Akbulut, 2021; Barca, Chertkovskaya & Paulsson, 2019; Khanna, 2021; Pérez-Orozco & Mason- ...
Article
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Feminist analyses of the historical dynamics of gender systems are fundamental to the work of challenging growth-driven political economies, and of designing more equitable and balanced ecosocial systems. Feminist theories and methods that acknowledge and support diverse voices, knowledges, and practices are vital resources for building on heterodox degrowth movements. In dialogue with postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous, and anti-racist efforts, intersectional feminisms have been unlearning and disrupting conventional politics of knowing and action in ways that help forge more inclusive understandings and applications necessary for degrowth futures.
... I contend that degrowth scholarship is susceptible to a similar reproach: feminism and/or ecofeminism (eco/feminism thereafter) are sometimes named as sources of degrowth, but rarely are they claimed. Though the close ties between degrowth and eco/feminism have been acknowledged by scholars in both disciplines (Nicolas, 2018;D'Alisa & Cattaneo, 2013;Barca, 2019a;Latouche, 2016) degrowth has also been criticised for not thoroughly engaging with it (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019;Bauhardt, 2014;Löw, 2015;Harcourt & Nelson, 2015). This is in spite of efforts to recognise specific contributions to the degrowth literature and analysis -notably Marilyn Waring's critique of GDP, Silvia Federici's history of capitalism and the exploitation of women, Gibson-Graham, Antonella Picchio and Mary Mellor's feminist economics (Kallis et al., 2020;Kallis, 2018;Hickel, 2020;D'Alisa et al., 2014;Demaria et al., 2013). ...
... "While only partly taken into account or cited in the current international or German degrowth literature, these works prefigured central arguments and could add not only historical, but also conceptual depth to current degrowth discussions" (2017, p. 185) Homogenising the origins of degrowth risks losing out on the wealth of eco/feminist analysis that otherwise extend and fortify the very pillars degrowth has named as its foundations (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019;Perkins, 2010;Latouche, 2016). More than a lost opportunity, the process of 'naming but not claiming' further compacts the issue by perpetuating the 'GDL' story of degrowth. ...
Research
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“Sustainable Masculinities and Degrowth: Pathways to Feminist Post-Growth Societies” views the climate crisis through a degrowth lens, but centers the role (hegemonic) masculinity has played in creating and sustaining the growth paradigm. Though much has already been said about the origins of economic growth, and much written about the oppressive nature of patriarchal systems with respect to women and the environment, efforts to integrate the two with the study of masculinities and the effects these processes have had on men are few and far between. This paper breaks new ground and extends an invitation to degrowth to challenge (its own) hegemonic masculinity.
... Advancing this, research with decolonial visions is intersecting with feminisms and degrowth (Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019;Dengler and Seebacher, 2019;Gregoratti and Raphael, 2019), offering analytical prisms to re-problematise silences and erasures which signal exclusionary practices (Wilson, 2015;Patel, 2020). Feminist political ecology also coheres in searching creatively for pathways to justice outside a global race-tothe-bottom humanity that weaponises extractivism for private accumulation (Wichterich, 2015;Bidegain and Nayar, 2012). ...
Chapter
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... Academic writing in the field of degrowth is another relevant theoretical springboard for contextualizing Mongolian self-determination, especially in terms of recognizing the fundamental role of autonomy (Castoriadis, 1991), sufficiency within biophysical limits (in and across generations) (Hickel, 2021), and care (understood as the central axis of societal flourishing) (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019), and radical political transformation overall. Degrowth literature is clear that the continued pursuit of growth as a core societal agenda in the North will be based on rising levels of extractivism which has clear postcolonial logics (Hickel, 2021). ...
... Additionally, they have nowhere near the required speed or scope to cope with the climate crisis (Keyßer and Lenzen 2021). 2 For example, degrowth was prominently discussed with 1,350 on-site and 4,848 remotely registered participants at the Beyond Growth Conference, which took place in the European Parliament in May 2023. 3 The 5th International Degrowth Conference, which took place in 2016 in Budapest, was the birthplace of the international scholar activist network Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA), which is an important culmination point for feminist degrowth discussions. 4 For example, some authors dig for the roots of degrowth scholarship in materialist ecofeminisms (Pérez Orozco and Mason-Deese 2022), feminist economics (Gregoratti and Raphael 2019), and other strands of thought at the intersection of feminisms and the environment (Dengler and Strunk 2022). Other authors focus on questions of the patriarchal roots of the growth paradigm and offer notions such as "ecological masculinities" (Hultman and Pulé 2018) or "caring masculinities" (Scholz and Heilmann 2019) as ways of transforming subjectivities. ...
Article
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This paper explores how debates on wages for housework in the 1970s contribute to current discourses on redefining, redistributing, and revaluing care. More specifically, this paper asks: How does a rereading of the international Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign contribute to feminist degrowth debates on commoning care and a care income? In trying to answer this question, I revisit original literature and interpretations of WfH and show that, as a Marxist feminist political perspective, the aim of the campaign ventured beyond the monetization of care. Subsequently, I elaborate on the now divergent ideas of Selma James and Silvia Federici, two of the campaign's main founders, of how to re-actualize the transformative aim of the campaign. Their two proposals, namely, a care income and reproductive commons, are introduced, brought into conversation with each other, and critically discussed against the background of Nancy Fraser's distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies of transformation. Exploring the fertile tension between a care income and commoning care, I draw preliminary conclusions on what feminist degrowth can learn from WfH regarding a social-ecological transformation to a more socially just and ecologically sound economic system.
... Degrowth is an increasingly comprehensive alternative to the capitalist system, especially through the contributions of feminist, decolonial and anticapitalist thinkers (Akbulut, 2021;Dengler & Seebacher, 2019;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019;Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019). Given its centrality, the degrowth literature has engaged extensively with the subject of food systems, the interconnected processes and relations involving food production, consumption, sharing, distribution, disposal and governance (Vermeulen et al., 2012, p. 197). ...
... It is particularly important to overcome this deficiency, considering women are the worst affected by the housing crisis in Spain due to intersecting oppressions (Amnistía Internacional España, 2017) and are therefore often at the forefront of housing struggles (Obra Social Barcelona, 2018;Rivera Blanco et al., 2021). Feminism, in particular feminist economics and ecofeminism, constitutes one of the foundational tenets of Degrowth theory (Demaria et al., 2013;Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019). Feminist critiques of women's exploitation and the unequal sexual division of reproductive/productive work under capitalism, for example, feed naturally into Degrowth's anti-capitalist agenda (Demaria et al., 2013) and offer pathways to radically more equal forms of living (Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance, 2020). ...
Article
This article contributes to the nascent literature on housing for Degrowth. It recognises that housing plays a pivotal role in the creation and perpetuation of socio-ecological injustices, and therefore must be a core strategic element of a transition towards a Degrowth society. I argue for a deeper integration of bottom-up, scalable strategies and class politics in Degrowth housing proposals in order to create the widespread and emancipatory social transformation called for by the Degrowth agenda. The militant research for this paper was rooted in a case study of the Sindicat d’Habitatge de Vallcarca (Vallcarca Housing Union; SHV), which is part of Barcelona’s multifaceted grassroots movement for housing justice. The analysis first explores the synergies between Degrowth and the SHV using a Degrowth framework, and then looks beyond this framework, asking what both movements can learn from each other’s theoretical and strategic approaches. It highlights the SHV’s grassroots, class-based politics of solidarity and social inclusivity, and explores how the SHV could benefit from engaging with the ecological and intersectional politics of Degrowth. The article raises the importance of building connections between post-growth theories and radical housing struggles on a broader scale, in order to tackle top-down and growth-based ‘sustainable housing’ initiatives and create genuinely transformational and emancipatory housing alternatives.
... More recently, degrowth have forged alliances with radical and eco-feminist scholars and activists. However, Gregoratti and Raphael (2019) have convincingly argued that unfortunately feminists such as Maria Mies and Marilyn Waring among many others have been passed unnoticed in degrowth scholarship for too long. As their analitical critic of growth dated back to the 80ies. ...
Chapter
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 is open on how to implement a degrowth society. We try to suggest a specific path towards degrowth, particularly, inspired to Georges Bataille’s thought about dépense and (what he called) the “general economy”. A degrowth society, according to this key, cannot rely on the generalization of an individual effort of restraint. If we aim at escaping from the growth society, it is necessary to give back the managing of surplus at the collectivity. It is necessary to re-build a form of totality, defusing the particularization (individualization) at the basis of the bad infinity of growth. For this aim, we suggest “to use” existing institutions and state agencies, and to mobilize popular power to transform them, adopting Gramsci’s intellectual tools for thinking how a transition could evolve, overcoming a division between grassroots and policy, or bottom-up and top-down action.
... Critiques from, for example, decolonial, ecosocialist and feminist perspectives have pointed some of these out and have put forward paths for acting upon them (e.g. Andreucci and Engel-Di Mauro 2019, Dengler and Seebacher 2019, Gregoratti andRaphael 2019, Nirmal andRocheleau 2019). In this volume, we embrace the multiplicity of degrowth, which, as the readers will notice, means that contributing authors will sometimes take different stances on degrowth's diverse manifestations. ...
... As Kallis, Demaria and D' Alisa write in the Introduction of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era: 'growth is unjust (…) because it is subsidized and sustained by invisible reproductive work in the household' , they are attributing to feminist economics the insight that the majority of this work has been, and is still being done, by women (Gregoratti, and Raphael, 2019). Together, they can therefore also be called the domain of the caring economy (Warren, 1988;Mies, 1997;Himmelwet, 1995) 26 ...
Technical Report
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This report is the result of a two-year exploration of the post-growth movement, merging planetary health thinking, feminist economics and fieldwork from Dutch healthcare and caring commoning practices. In our new publication, we show that the ideology of ‘growth as good’ – and the growth-focused system it upholds – is the lead cause of rising inequalities and ecological destruction. We explore what it means to move beyond growth, towards a vision for a society that is centered around care, autonomy and sufficiency. Throughout the report, we ask the question: If a growth-centered economic system is making us and the planet sick, what can we do to transform it? We introduce the reader to the key features of the degrowth narrative and explore what we can learn from the growing movement of self-organizing caring citizen collectives – or commons – that display various facets of degrowth. We show that degrowth envisions a world that is already in the making in places where these commoning practices are flourishing. Commons Network. https://www.commonsnetwork.org/news/new-report-out-now-building-a-caring-world-beyond-growth/ Living Well on a Finite Planet: Building a Caring World Beyond Growth was written by Winne van Woerden, who works as Lead Researcher Degrowth and Caring Economy at Commons Network in Amsterdam and Thomas de Groot, co-director at Commons Network. Contributing authors: Dr. Remco van der Pas, Senior Research Fellow Global Health at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp and Sophie Bloemen, co-director at Commons Network.
... Despite the rather obvious contributions to degrowth by Mies, von Werlhof, and other scholars from the Bielefeld School, their work was largely ignored in the early all-male history of degrowth. Feminist accounts have long been a blind spot that has only recently been slowly recuperated (Gregoratti and Raphael 2019;Saave-Harnack et al. 2019). Because of this neglect, the degrowth discourse oftentimes lacks attention to how everyday practices perpetuating growth are gendered and racialized. ...
Chapter
The aim of the chapter is to give a critical overview of how work and labour have been conceptualized within the heterogeneous degrowth discourses. While degrowth has articulated a sophisticated critique of capitalist growth not only from an environmental perspective but also with respect to its structural function for welfare democracies, (re)thinking and framing work/labour in an envisioned degrowth society remains one of the biggest challenges within the degrowth discourses. After a detailed overview of the different perspectives on work/labour in the degrowth scholarship, the chapter focuses on the specific contribution of materialist ecofeminism. It concludes by indicating possible cross-fertilizations and alliances between degrowth and materialist ecofeminism with respect to social-ecological reproduction and the rethinking of labour/work.
... The degrowth discourse has been criticized for treating gender issues as an add-on rather than as a fundamental dimension of transformation (Bauhardt 2014;Perkins 2019). The relevance of an intersectional feminist degrowth approach has been acknowledged by many, and initial contributions combining degrowth and feminist scholarship have already been made (Akbulut 2016;Hoffmann 2017;Dengler and Strunk 2018;Gregoratti and Raphael 2019;Ruder and Sanniti 2019). FaDA was founded at the 2016 degrowth conference in Budapest, and convergences between degrowth scholarship and feminist theorizing have been pointed out. ...
Article
This paper addresses the question of how to organize care in degrowth societies that call for social and ecological sustainability, as well as gender and environmental justice, without prioritizing one over the other. By building on degrowth scholarship, feminist economics, the commons, and decolonial feminisms, we rebut the strategy of shifting yet more unpaid care work to the monetized economy, thereby reinforcing the separation structure in economics. A feminist degrowth imaginary implies destabilizing prevalent dichotomies and overcoming the (inherent hierarchization in the) boundary between the monetized economy and the invisibilized economy of socio-ecological provisioning. The paper proposes an incremental, emancipatory decommodification and a commonization of care in a sphere beyond the public/private divide, namely the sphere of communitarian and transformative caring commons, as they persist at the margins of capitalism and are (re-)created by social movements around the world.
... Despite the rather obvious contributions to degrowth by Mies, von Werlhof, and other scholars from the Bielefeld School, their work was largely ignored in the early all-male history of degrowth. Feminist accounts have long been a blind spot that has only recently been slowly recuperated (Gregoratti and Raphael 2019;Saave-Harnack et al. 2019). Because of this neglect, the degrowth discourse oftentimes lacks attention to how everyday practices perpetuating growth are gendered and racialized. ...
Book
In this comprehensive Handbook, scholars from across the globe explore the relationships between workers and nature in the context of the environmental crises. They provide an invaluable overview of a fast-growing research field that bridges the social and natural sciences. Chapters provide detailed perspectives of environmental labour studies, environmental struggles of workers, indigenous peoples, farmers and commoners in the Global South and North. The relations within and between organisations that hinder or promote environmental strategies are analysed, including the relations between workers and environmental organisations, NGOs, feminist and community movements.
... We appreciate Robbins' opening up of the question of how degrowth arguments can be informed by 'committed ecological feminism' and can dismantle the nexus between patriarchy, capitalism and ecological degradation (Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019). We see feminist thinking around the concept of care as a way to reset the growth imaginary and to inform radical change, thus contributing to the degrowth vision to build societies based on caring relations, wellbeing, and equity rather than growth. ...
... Another very welcome outcome has been the forging of an ongoing critical dialogue between feminist and degrowth scholarship and activism. Feminists have been taking issue with both the omission of ecofeminist work within the intellectual heritage claimed by degrowthers and also the blindspots in degrowthers' conception of the broader sphere of social reproduction (Gregoratti and Raphael 2019). into the long-criticized Eurocentrism of the term by locating it next to ideas of the good life, which originate in the Global South and often predate degrowth. ...
Article
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Degrowth has become a forceful conceptual framework and a political mobilizer for imagining and enacting alternative ways of articulating society, the economy, and nature. While it is most straightforwardly understood as material downscaling, degrowth denotes a far more encompassing transformation: a break with the ideology of growth, the repoliticization of the economy, and a reorientation of economic relations along different principles. This essay reviews the trajectory of degrowth thinking and activism and delineates the points of tension therein. In doing so, it focuses on the (im)possibility of sustainable socialist growth, the broader processes of capital accumulation beyond their outcome, the question of work and emancipation, and the scale and agency of degrowth politics.
Chapter
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In this chapter, we share the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) for degrowth, building from the debates on “caring communities for radical change” at the 8th International Degrowth Conference in August 2021. We discuss how FPE links to the principles of degrowth as an academic and activist movement and why it is necessary to take feminist political ecology perspectives on care and caring communities in resisting, questioning, and counteracting the structural racial, gender, and wider social inequalities that uphold and are perpetuated by growth-dependent economic systems. As we critically reflect on the experiences of paid versus unpaid, collectivised versus feminised care work, we argue that care is crucial to social and ecological reproduction in order to build just, sustainable and convivial societies.
Article
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In this paper, we use a political ecology lens to look at how COVID-19 adds to a set of existing uncertainties and challenges faced by vulnerable people in the marginal environments of coastal India. Over the last few decades, local people have been systematically dispossessed from resource commons in the name of industrial, urban and infrastructure development or conservation efforts, leading to livelihood loss. We build on our current research in the TAPESTRY (https://tapestry-project.org/) project in coastal Kutch and Mumbai to demonstrate how the pandemic has laid bare structural inequalities and unequal access to public goods and natural resources. The impacts of COVID-19 have intersected with ongoing food, water and climate crises in these marginal environments, threatening already fragile livelihoods, and compounding uncertainties and vulnerabilities. Extreme weather events such as cyclones, droughts, heatwaves and floods in the last couple of decades have also compounded the problems faced in these regions, affecting seasonal migration patterns. We demonstrate how responses from “above” have been inadequate, failing to address problems, or arriving too late. Authoritarian leaders have used the pandemic to “other” and victimise certain groups and polarise society along religious lines. Lockdowns and covid restrictions have been used to surreptitiously complete environmentally destructive infrastructure projects, while avoiding resistance and opposition from affected local communities, who have also been subject to increased surveillance and restrictions on movement. While state responses have often been unpredictable and inadequate, there has been an outburst of local forms of mutual aid, solidarity, and civic action. There are also many examples of resilience at the local level, especially amongst communities that have largely relied on subsistence production. Despite the acute suffering, COVID-19 has also prompted civic groups, activists, and local communities to reflect on the possibilities for reimagining transformative pathways towards just and sustainable futures.
Article
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This article explores the significance of Jineolojî, an emancipatory praxis elaborated by the Kurdish Women’s Movement, for contemporary degrowth and pluriverse politics. Considering Jineolojî as the most original dimension of the Democratic Confederalist model of government in Northern and Eastern Syria (compared to other revolutionary projects), the article contributes to recent debates around the central place of “depatriarchization” in pluriverse debates. In the first part, we highlight a renewed interest in matriarchy, which has emerged at the intersection of ecofeminist with post-development and degrowth thought, noting how this resonates with the rediscovery of Mesopotamia’s matristic culture, which has been key to Democratic Confederalism and its radical critique of capitalist modernity and the nation State. We also highlight the inherent contradictions of the matristic model and formulate the question whether, and under what conditions, it bears potential for emancipatory political ecologies. The second part briefly describes the article’s sources and method, namely militant ethnography carried out with the Kurdish Women’s Movement, both in Rojava and in the European diaspora, cross-referenced with an analysis of some key texts of Jineolojî. The third part investigates the process by which the matristic perspective is being currently performed in Rojava through Jineolojî: a pedagogy for women’s self-defense, the autonomous re-appropriation of communalist and ecological praxis, and men’s liberation from hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that Jineolojî does not configure as a model of society to be recovered from a pre-patriarchal age, but as an original tool for liberating social potential towards gender, decolonial and ecological revolutions.
Book
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This journal, Debates in Post-Development & Degrowth: Volume 1, published in collaboration with Tvergastein, emerges from the conversations, thinking, and course papers of the Spring 2021 course Debates in Post-Development & Degrowth at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway. The University of Oslo (UiO) and, particularly, SUM – as we will discuss below – continues to sit at an important juncture between rejecting and embracing the ideology of “sustainable development” and “green growth.” This journal seeks to discuss this history, struggle, and (lack of) debate. The enthusiasm of students, eager participation, and their critical engagement with the course material inspired the making of this journal, which provided students with a publication outlet to air their thoughts, concerns, provocations – and, overall, join this rapidly evolving conversation. Here, we offer exciting new papers and engagements that have undergone editorial and literal peer review by staff and students. The journal’s intention is to not only widen engagements in the post-development conversation, but also expand the political thought and practice at SUM, which includes academic debates concerning the problems of development, resistance, so-called “energy transition” and, most of all, the propagation of the green growth myth.
Article
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Against the backdrop of the ecological and climate emergencies and several other deep crises, advocates of degrowth call for democratic transitions towards societies that can thrive beyond economic growth within ecological boundaries while being socially equitable. In recent years, scholarship has emerged that brings together the emerging degrowth paradigm with insights from political economy. Yet much contemporary political economy continues to ignore the environment and, by implication, the ecological downsides of economic growth. The present contribution criticizes this state of affairs and highlights the promises of a synthesis of contemporary critical political economy and the growth-critical tradition in ecological economics. It hints at how concepts of one particular strand of critical political economy, namely regulation theory, may be of use in analyses of (trajectories to) the postgrowth era.
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