Sentit Comunal: Món rural i cultura popular. Un breu relat
Per Steph, Lorenzo, Lucía i Claudio – Equip Organitzador de R&D al Sentit Comunal
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Ha passat un mes i estem llestis per compartir algunes reflexions escrites sobre la segona edició de Sentit Comunal, un projecte que desde Research and Degrowth co-coordinem amb Fundació Emprius, i que compta amb la col·laboració d’Ecologistes en Acció i Rebelión Científica. Cada edició aprofundeix en un aspecte específic del decreixement i de les pràctiques comunalistes, promovent espais d’organització, debat, connexió i cultiu de relacions al voltant d’aquestes idees. Ara que estem mirant enrere i recollint les idees que van sorgir durant aquesta segona trobada interna, volem compartir algunes reflexions.
Vam començar a treballar en aquest projecte fa un parell d’anys. La primera edició es va celebrar el gener de 2025, i vam explorar l’ampli títol del nostre projecte: Comunalismes i Decreixements. En aquesta segona edició de 2026, en canvi, ens vam centrar en un aspecte específic del decreixement i el comunalisme: el món rural i la cultura popular.
Sentit Comunal s’estructura en dues parts. El primer dia està dedicat a la creació de xarxes, l’enfortiment comunitari i el desenvolupament de debats entre certs col·lectius i organitzacions. El segon dia consta d’un congrés públic de més abast per difondre idees i arribar a un nombre de gent més ampli.
Divendres ens vam reunir a Cal Cases, a Santa Maria d’Oló. Cal Cases és una ecocomunitat intencional formada per 26 persones, majoritàriament provinents d’entorns urbans. Des del 2007 construeixen col·lectivament una manera de viure cooperativa i ecofeminista que tingui coherència entre valors i pràctiques quotidianes a través de les cures compartides, l’autogestió, l’autonomia i una profunda integració amb la natura i la vida comunitària.
La majoria de nosaltres vam arribar dijous a la nit, vam preparar l’espai i vam sopar —un sopar preparat per Cal Cases— on vam gaudir del vi portat per lis companyis de La Invierna, situat a Garganta la Olla (Extremadura). Ens vam despertar a Cal Cases divendres i ens vam reunir a l’espai comú per esmorzar: una versió més abundant del tradicional pa amb tomàquet, amb l’oli d’oliva aportat per lis companyis de Cal Cisteller, un ateneu rural autogestionat a l’Alt Penedès.
Vam donar la benvinguda a les últimes persones que van arribar i vam iniciar el programa amb una presentació de la trobada, establint un marc comú. Ens reunia una comprensió compartida dels problemes que afrontem i de les solucions que considerem necessàries per obrir camí cap a un decreixement comunalista.
En un món on l’imperatiu del creixement produeix guerres, crisis ecològiques, genocidi i pobresa, entenem el decreixement com l’única sortida política i científica. Per decreixement entenem una reducció selectiva, democràtica i redistributiva dels fluxos de matèria i energia que ens permeti viure millor amb menys, aturant la degradació actual de les condicions de vida i possibilitant-ne la regeneració.
Per a nosaltres, el decreixement s’aconsegueix millor a través del comunalisme. Per què el decreixement funcioni, no pot imposar-se des de dalt ni organitzar-se centralment per l’Estat; requereix, en canvi, estructures més localitzades però interconnectades de presa de decisions, producció i reproducció. Aquests àmbits no estarien gestionats de manera competitiva per l’acumulació de benefici ni per Estats orientats al creixement del PIB, sinó de manera comunal, mitjançant mètodes que en part cal inventar, però que en gran mesura poden recuperar-se d’un llegat històric predominantment no capitalista.
Precisament això és el que ha abordat aquesta edició de Sentit Comunal: el potencial existent en el món rural i en la cultura popular tradicional per inspirar una societat orientada al decreixement i al comunalisme. Sota el mite del progrés entès com a creixement econòmic, el món rural ha estat retratat com a endarrerit, arcaic, pobre, inútil i vulgar. Gran part dels sabers i de la cultura popular associats a la vida pagesa han estat menyspreats com a restes d’un passat dolorós suposadament superat per la modernitat o, en el millor dels casos, com un repositori de pràctiques folklòriques dignes de conservar-se només en la mesura en què puguin generar beneficis mitjançant processos de patrimonialització, turistificació i mercantilització.
A Sentit Comunal estem convençudis que hem de superar aquesta dicotomia estèril i perillosa. Necessitem una perspectiva radical que entreteixeixi els fils de diferents col·lectius i projectes al llarg de la península Ibèrica que ja han emprès un camí diferent, amb l’horitzó del decreixement comunalista.
En aquesta edició vam compartir diagnòstics de diferents territoris i vam debatre algunes de les qüestions que conformen la riquesa i la diversitat del nostre horitzó polític, però que a vegades generen els desacords més grans. Vam imaginar col·lectivament possibles formes d’enfortir aquesta mirada i, finalment, vam celebrar al voltant del foc aquells aspectes de la cultura popular tradicional que més profundament ens commouen i mobilitzen.
Per això, l’objectiu principal d’aquesta trobada interna va ser conèixer-nos i teixir vincles, abordar els reptes i debats que afecten les nostres comunitats i organitzacions, i pensar col·lectivament estratègies conjuntes per a la transformació comunalista i decreixentista dels nostres territoris.
Després d’una presentació per part nostra, vam iniciar una ronda de presentacions de les persones i col·lectius convidats. L’Álvaro, membre de l’equip organitzador, va facilitar una dinàmica inicial que ens va permetre començar a conversar i conèixer-nos.
Tot seguit vam passar a la primera sessió dinàmica: un diagnòstic grupal sobre diferents aspectes de la cultura popular tradicional. Vam parlar de tradicions orals i lingüístiques, artesania, tècniques agrícoles i ramaderes, estructures de governança com els consells oberts, gastronomia i comensalitat, arquitectura tradicional, celebracions populars, cants i danses.
La segona part del matí es va dedicar a un diàleg socràtic a partir d’un text proposat per la Lucía, membre de l’equip organitzador, titulat Tradición Rebelde, de Fruela Fernández. L’objectiu del diàleg socràtic va ser explorar el paper que poden exercir la cultura popular i els territoris rurals en una transformació cap al decreixement comunalista, a través d’un procés col·lectiu de teixir respostes que permetin formular noves preguntes en una conversa generativa. L’objectiu no era tant oferir solucions com qüestionar, aclarir i aprofundir la nostra comprensió col·lectiva d’idees i conceptes clau.
En efecte, en el diàleg socràtic va emergir una visió d’un decreixement comunalista rural on la diversitat no és un obstacle per crear un fort sentit de lloc i d’agència, sinó una condició a través de la qual es forja la comunitat mitjançant la solidaritat, i on la identitat és rizomàtica, composta per relacions interconnectades, humanes i no humanes, en constant canvi. El context rural, lluny de ser un espai d’endarreriment, va ser identificat com un territori on aquestes relacions poden i de fet tenen lloc, malgrat les contradiccions presents en les nostres famílies i comunitats, on els valors conservadors a vegades són encara difícils de desplaçar.
Després d’una paella i d’un passeig per la casa per conèixer el projecte de Cal Cases, vam dedicar la tarda a un fòrum obert facilitat per Maria i Alexandra sobre antiespecisme i valors rurals, així com a continuar debatent propostes estratègiques per seguir treballant juntes, tant a través de Sentit Comunal com dins del moviment més ampli pel decreixement comunalista.
En el fòrum obert, la qüestió de la interconnexió i l’ètica va ocupar un lloc central en un debat sobre les compatibilitats i incompatibilitats de l’antiespecisme amb la presència d’animals —per exemple en la ramaderia extensiva— com a part de l’horitzó comunalista decreixentista. Un cop més, vam començar reconeixent la complexitat del tema i, en lloc de buscar respostes definitives, les facilitadores ens van ajudar a visibilitzar i a generar empatia cap a diferents perspectives que a vegades coexisteixen i sovint xoquen, especialment en contextos rurals.
Finalment, després de sopar, ens vam reunir al voltant del foc per a un filandón, facilitat per la nostra convidada Bea, d’Oficios Vivos. Es tracta d’una pràctica tradicional en què un grup de veïns solia reunir-se a la nit, mentre feien treballs manuals (especialment filats) alhora que s’explicaven històries. A Sentido Comunal el vam reinterpretar, convidant els participants a compartir una paraula, un objecte, una història o una cançó vinculada a la cultura popular, en el nostre cas evocant valors comunalistes i/o decreixentistes, ja fos des de l’experiència directa, la transmissió oral o la investigació.
Construir un sentit temporal de camaraderia i comunitat a Cal Cases va ser potser el nostre assoliment més visible, reflectit en molts dels pensaments compartits durant la sessió final d’avaluació, després d’un dia molt llarg. Des dels primers moments de dijous al vespre, en què vam preparar el calendari comú per a l’endemà i on vam conèixer noves persones i vam retrobar cares conegudes de l’edició anterior, fins als darrers instants compartits al costat del foc, va destacar la sensació d’haver construït un valuós espai de cures, un element central per a la transformació cap al decreixement comunalista.
Res d’això hauria estat possible sense la càlida hospitalitat de Cal Cases, que van encarnar la definició d’hospitalitat de Gustavo Esteva i Madhu Prakash: una hospitalitat entesa com a obertura radical, generositat i confiança.
En el seu llibre Joyful Militancy, Montgomery i Bergman ho descriuen així:
La hospitalitat no consisteix únicament en rebre les persones convidades; implica la sensibilitat per confiar en la gent, una confiança basada en la capacitat intuïtiva d’afrontar el món juntes. Actuar d’aquesta manera també permet que la gent s’obri a l’Altre: no només ser tolerant, sinó ser capaç de tenir trobades amb generositat i una curiositat il·limitades. Trobar-te amb algú desconegut i estar obert a les diferències no és el mateix que la tolerància. La tolerància liberal considera els individus com a entitats atomitzades a les quals s’exigeix «aguantar-se» mútuament, amb l’Estat com a àrbitre universal. La hospitalitat no comença en individus amb drets, sinó en un món viu i sensible, compost de nocions comunes que han evolucionat per sostenir l’alegria i la convivencialitat. Ser hoste, ser acollida, ens permet trobar un món. Se’ns convida a un món. Per la mateixa raó, no són els individus els que confien com a tals; no hi ha un individu tancat en si mateix que «decideix» confiar, sinó més aviat conjunts de relacions en què la capacitat de confiar s’activa entre la gent.
L’endemà ens vam traslladar a Berga, on més de 300 persones van assistir al congrés públic. El programa es va organitzar en quatre blocs temàtics en què diferents persones van compartir experiències relacionades amb la cultura popular, el comunalisme i el decreixement. Atès que totes les sessions estan disponibles a YouTube, no les descriurem aquí en detall.
El primer bloc, facilitat pel Joan d’Emprius, va examinar la tradició d’autogovern comunitari a la península Ibèrica, on històricament han prevalgut sistemes de democràcia directa i participativa, com consells oberts, batzarres, assemblees i consells comunals, en contrast amb la política representativa. Joel Baró Mas es va centrar en els consells del Pallars Sobirà i Alba Rivas Fernández en els montes veïnals en mà comuna de Galícia.
El segon bloc, facilitat per la Lucía de R&D, va abordar formes tradicionals i comunals d’organitzar el treball, actualment marginades per les concepcions hegemòniques del progrés. D’una banda, es van presentar pràctiques com la cistelleria (Anna Sínia) i l’esmolar de dalla (Miguel Berbel); de l’altra, es van descriure tradicions de treball comunal com l’auzolan a Euskal Herria (Jasone Mitxeltorena) i la recuperació del tornallom al Penedès (Ateneu Rural Cal Cisteller).
Després dels dos primers blocs, ens vam traslladar al local dels Castellers per compartir una paella popular de verdures i bolets preparada per Casal Panxo i la cooperativa d’habitatge Cal Blanxart. Compartir el menjar en aquest ambient festiu va ser una altra manera d’incorporar expressions de cultura popular a la nostra trobada.
El tercer bloc, facilitat pel Kike d’Emprius, es va centrar en la transmissió de sabers pràctics vinculats a la cultura popular, com els oficis artesanals, destacant iniciatives que recuperen i actualitzen habilitats tradicionals, tot reflexionant sobre els reptes que afronten i el potencial que representen avui. Es van presentar projectes inspiradors dedicats a l’aprenentatge experiencial i a la transformació social, com l’Escola Orígens a la Garrotxa, Escuela de los Pueblos a Quecedo de Valdivielso i L’Atelier Paysan a França.
El quart bloc, facilitat per l’Álvaro de l’equip organitzador, va ser totalment pràctic: diferents tallers paral·lels van explorar formes no capitalistes de relacionar-se amb l’art, la celebració i el treball manual, qüestionant els models culturals consumistes i l’apropiació corporativa de la festa. Hi va haver danses populars amb Berguedana de Folklore Total, una introducció a la Patum amb el Museu Comarcal de Berga, un taller de cistelleria amb l’Anna Sínia i un altre d’esmolar dalla amb el Miguel Berbel. Algunis vam concloure el dia amb una petita celebració, acompanyada de música en viu i balls populars.
Ara és moment de descansar, fins que reprenguem l’organització de la propera edició de Sentit Comunal. Poc a poc estem teixint una comunitat que comparteix pràctiques, idees i estratègies vinculades als decreixements i als comunalismes. També hem anat sembrant llavors que aviat germinaran, com ara una revista en què algunis estem treballant i que esperem poder anunciar properament. Al llarg de l’any ens retrobarem en celebracions, protestes, escoles populars, festivals i trobades, fins que tornem a reunir-nos a la propera edició de Sentit Comunal, el gener de 2027.
Sentido Comunal: Mundo rural y cultura popular. Un breve relato
Ha pasado un mes y estamos listes para compartir algunas reflexiones escritas sobre la segunda edición de Sentido Comunal, un proyecto que desde Research and Degrowth co-coordinamos con Fundació Emprius, y con la colaboración con Ecologistas en Acción y Rebelión Científica. Cada edición profundiza en un aspecto específico del decrecimiento y de las prácticas comunalistas, promoviendo espacios de organización, debate, conexión y cultivo de relaciones en torno a estas ideas. Ahora que recogemos las ideas que surgieron durante este segundo encuentro interno, queremos mirar atrás y compartir algunas reflexiones.
Comenzamos a trabajar en este proyecto hace un par de años y celebramos la primera edición en enero de 2025, en la que exploramos el título amplio de nuestro proyecto: Comunalismos y Decrecimientos. En esta segunda edición de 2026, en cambio, nos centramos en un aspecto específico del decrecimiento y el comunalismo: el mundo rural y la cultura popular.
Sentido Comunal se estructura en dos partes. El primer día está dedicado a la creación de redes, al fortalecimiento comunitario y al desarrollo de debates entre un número limitado de colectivos y organizaciones. El segundo día se organiza un congreso público de mayor alcance para difundir ideas y llegar a un público más amplio.
El viernes nos reunimos en Cal Cases, en Santa Maria d’Oló. Cal Cases es una eco-comunidad intencional formada por 26 personas, en su mayoría procedentes de entornos urbanos, que desde 2007 vienen construyendo colectivamente una forma de vida cooperativa y ecofeminista que busca la coherencia entre valores y práctica cotidiana a través de los cuidados compartidos, la autogestión, la autonomía y una profunda integración con la naturaleza y la vida comunitaria.
La mayoría llegamos el jueves por la noche, preparamos el espacio y cenamos —una cena preparada por Cal Cases— donde disfrutamos del vino traído por nuestres compañeres de La Invierna, en Garganta la Olla (Extremadura). Nos despertamos en Cal Cases el viernes y nos reunimos en el espacio común para desayunar: una versión más abundante del tradicional pa amb tomàquet, con el aceite de oliva aportado por les compañeres de Cal Cisteller, un ateneo rural autogestionado del Penedès, en Cataluña.
Dimos la bienvenida a las últimas personas en llegar e iniciamos el programa con una presentación del encuentro, estableciendo un marco común. Nos reunía una comprensión compartida de los problemas que enfrentamos y de las soluciones que consideramos necesarias para abrir camino hacia un decrecimiento comunalista.
En un mundo donde el imperativo del crecimiento produce guerras, crisis ecológicas, genocidio y pobreza, entendemos el decrecimiento como la única salida política y científica. Por decrecimiento entendemos una reducción selectiva, democrática y redistributiva de los flujos de materia y energía que nos permita vivir mejor con menos, deteniendo la degradación actual de las condiciones de vida y posibilitando su regeneración.
Para nosotres, el decrecimiento se logra mejor a través del comunalismo. Para que el decrecimiento funcione, no puede imponerse desde arriba ni organizarse centralmente por el Estado; requiere, en cambio, estructuras más localizadas pero interconectadas de toma de decisiones, producción y reproducción. Estos ámbitos no estarían gestionados de forma competitiva para la acumulación de beneficio ni por Estados orientados al crecimiento del PIB, sino de manera comunal, mediante métodos que en parte deben inventarse, pero que en gran medida pueden recuperarse de un legado histórico predominantemente no capitalista.
Precisamente eso es lo que ha abordado esta edición de Sentido Comunal: el potencial existente en el mundo rural y en la cultura popular tradicional para inspirar una sociedad orientada al decrecimiento y al comunalismo. Bajo el mito del progreso entendido como crecimiento económico, el mundo rural ha sido retratado como atrasado, arcaico, pobre, inútil y vulgar. Gran parte de los saberes y de la cultura popular asociados a la vida campesina han sido despreciados como resquicios de un pasado penoso supuestamente superado por la modernidad o, en el mejor de los casos, como un repositorio de prácticas folclóricas dignas de conservar sólo en la medida en que puedan generar beneficios mediante procesos de patrimonialización, turistificación y mercantilización.
En Sentido Comunal estamos convencides de que debemos superar esta dicotomía estéril y peligrosa. Necesitamos una perspectiva radical que entreteja los hilos de distintos colectivos y proyectos a lo largo de la península ibérica que ya han emprendido un camino diferente, con el horizonte del decrecimiento comunalista.
En esta edición compartimos diagnósticos de distintos territorios y debatimos algunas de las cuestiones que conforman la riqueza y diversidad de nuestro horizonte político, pero que a veces generan los mayores desacuerdos. Imaginamos colectivamente posibles formas de fortalecer esta mirada y, finalmente, celebramos alrededor del fuego aquellos aspectos de la cultura popular tradicional que más profundamente nos conmueven y movilizan.
Por ello, el principal objetivo de este encuentro interno fue conocernos y tejer vínculos, abordar los retos y debates que afectan a nuestras comunidades y organizaciones, y pensar colectivamente estrategias conjuntas para la transformación comunalista y decrecentista de nuestros territorios.
Tras una presentación por nuestra parte, iniciamos una ronda de presentaciones de las personas y colectivos invitados. Álvaro, miembro del equipo organizador, facilitó una dinámica inicial que nos permitió empezar a conversar y conocernos.
Después pasamos a la primera sesión dinámica: un diagnóstico grupal sobre distintos aspectos de la cultura popular tradicional. Hablamos de tradiciones orales y lingüísticas, artesanía, técnicas agrícolas y ganaderas, estructuras de gobernanza como los concejos abiertos, gastronomía y comensalidad, arquitectura tradicional, celebraciones populares, cantos y danzas.
La segunda parte de la mañana estuvo dedicada a un diálogo socrático a partir de un texto propuesto por Lucía, miembro del equipo organizador, titulado Tradición Rebelde, de Fruela Fernández. El objetivo del diálogo socrático era explorar el papel que pueden desempeñar la cultura popular y los territorios rurales en una transformación hacia el decrecimiento comunalista, a través de un proceso colectivo de tejer respuestas que permitiera formular nuevas preguntas en una conversación generativa cuyo objetivo no era tanto ofrecer soluciones como cuestionar, aclarar y profundizar nuestra comprensión colectiva de ideas y conceptos clave.
En efecto, en el diálogo socrático emergió una visión de un decrecimiento comunalista rural donde la diversidad no es un obstáculo para crear un fuerte sentido de lugar y de agencia, sino una condición a través de la cual se forja la comunidad mediante la solidaridad, y donde la identidad es rizomática, compuesta por relaciones interconectadas, humanas y no humanas, en constante cambio. El contexto rural, lejos de ser un espacio de atraso, fue identificado como un territorio donde tales relaciones pueden y tienen lugar, a pesar de las contradicciones presentes en nuestras familias y comunidades, donde los valores conservadores a veces siguen siendo difíciles de desplazar.
Tras una paella y un paseo por la finca para conocer el proyecto de Cal Cases, dedicamos la tarde a un foro abierto facilitado por María y Alejandra sobre antiespecismo y valores rurales, así como a seguir discutiendo propuestas estratégicas para continuar trabajando juntes, tanto a través de Sentido Comunal como dentro del movimiento más amplio por el decrecimiento comunalista.
En el foro abierto, la cuestión de la interconexión y la ética ocupó un lugar central en un debate sobre las compatibilidades e incompatibilidades del antiespecismo con la presencia de animales, por ejemplo en la ganadería extensiva, como parte del horizonte comunalista decrecentista. Una vez más, comenzamos reconociendo la complejidad del tema y, en lugar de buscar respuestas definitivas, las facilitadoras nos ayudaron a visibilizar y a generar empatía hacia distintas perspectivas que a veces coexisten y a menudo chocan, especialmente en contextos rurales.
Finalmente, tras la cena, nos reunimos alrededor del fuego para un filandón, facilitado por nuestra invitada Bea, de Oficios Vivos. Se trata de una práctica tradicional en la que un grupo de vecinos se reunían por la noche, mientras se hacían trabajos manuales (especialmente hilado) al tiempo que se contaban historias. En Sentido Comunal lo reinterpretamos invitando a lxs participantes a compartir una palabra, un objeto, una historia o una canción vinculada a la cultura popular, en nuestro caso evocando valores comunalistas y/o decrecentistas, ya fuera desde la experiencia directa, la transmisión oral o la investigación.
Construir un sentido temporal de compañerismo y comunidad en Cal Cases fue quizá nuestro logro más visible, reflejado en muchos de los pensamientos compartidos durante la sesión final de evaluación al término de un día muy largo. Desde los primeros momentos del jueves por la noche, cuando preparamos el calendario común para el día siguiente, nos presentamos a nuevas personas y reencontramos caras conocidas de la edición anterior, hasta los últimos instantes compartidos junto al fuego, destacó la sensación de haber construido un valioso espacio de cuidados, un elemento central para la transformación hacia el decrecimiento comunalista.
Nada de esto habría sido posible sin la cálida hospitalidad de Cal Cases, encarnando la definición de hospitalidad de Gustavo Esteva y Madhu Prakash: una hospitalidad entendida como apertura radical, generosidad y confianza.
En su libro Joyful Militancy, Montgomery y bergman lo describen así:
La hospitalidad no consiste únicamente en recibir a l*s invitad*s, implica la sensibilidad para tener confianza en la gente, una confianza basada en la capacidad intuitiva de enfrentar el mundo junt*s. Actuar de esta manera también permite que la gente se abra al Otro: no solo ser tolerante, sino ser capaz de tener encuentros con generosidad y una curiosidad ilimitadas. Encontrarte con un extrañ* y estar abiert* a las diferencias no es lo mismo que la tolerancia. La tolerancia liberal considera a los individuos entidades atomizadas a las que se les exige «ponerse en el lugar» de l*s demás, con el Estado como árbitro universal. La hospitalidad no empieza en los individuos con derechos, sino en un mundo vivo y sensual, compuesto de nociones comunes que han evolucionado para sostener la alegría y la convivencialidad. Ser un huésped, ser recibid*, nos permite encontrar un mundo. Se nos invita a un mundo. Por la misma razón, no son los individuos los que están confiando como tales, es decir, no hay un individuo encerrado en sí mismo que «decide» confiar, sino más bien, conjuntos de relaciones en las que la capacidad de confiar se activa entre la gente.
Al día siguiente nos trasladamos a Berga, donde más de 300 personas asistieron al congreso público. El programa se organizó en cuatro bloques temáticos en los que distintas personas compartieron experiencias relacionadas con la cultura popular, el comunalismo y el decrecimiento. Dado que todas las sesiones están disponibles en YouTube, no las describiremos aquí en detalle.
El primer bloque, facilitado por Joan, de Emprius, examinó la tradición de autogobierno comunitario en la península ibérica, donde históricamente han prevalecido sistemas de democracia directa y participativa, como concejos, batzarres, asambleas y consejos comunales, frente a la política representativa. Joel Baró Mas se centró en los concejos del Pallars Sobirà y Alba Rivas Fernández en los montes vecinales en mano común de Galicia.
El segundo bloque, facilitado por Lucía, de R&D, abordó formas tradicionales y comunales de organizar el trabajo actualmente marginadas por las concepciones hegemónicas del progreso. Por un lado, se presentaron prácticas como la cestería (Anna Sínia) y el afilado de guadañas (Miguel Berbel); por otro, se describieron tradiciones de trabajo comunal como el auzolan en Euskal Herria (Jasone Mitxeltorena) y la recuperación del tornallom en el Penedès (Ateneu Rural Cal Cisteller).
Tras los dos primeros bloques, nos trasladamos al local de los Castellers para compartir una paella popular de verduras y setas preparada por Casal Panxo y la cooperativa de vivienda Cal Blanxart. Compartir la comida en este ambiente festivo fue otra forma de incorporar expresiones de cultura popular en nuestro encuentro.
El tercer bloque, facilitado por Kike, de Emprius, se centró en la transmisión de saberes prácticos vinculados a la cultura popular, como los oficios artesanales, destacando iniciativas que recuperan y actualizan habilidades tradicionales, reflexionando sobre los retos que enfrentan y el potencial que representan hoy. Se presentaron proyectos inspiradores dedicados al aprendizaje experiencial y la transformación social, como Escola Orígens en La Garrotxa, Escuela de los Pueblos en Quecedo de Valdivielso y L’Atelier Paysan en Francia.
El cuarto bloque, facilitado por Álvaro, de la organización, fue totalmente práctico: distintos talleres paralelos exploraron formas no capitalistas de relacionarse con el arte, la celebración y el trabajo manual, cuestionando los modelos culturales consumistas y la apropiación corporativa de la fiesta. Hubo danzas populares con Berguedana de Folklore Total, una introducción a La Patum con el Museu Comarcal de Berga, un taller de cestería con Anna Sínia y otro de afilado de guadañas con Miguel Berbel. Algunes concluimos el día con una pequeña celebración, acompañada de música en vivo y bailes populares.
Ahora es momento de descansar, hasta retomar la organización de la próxima edición de Sentido Comunal. Poco a poco, estamos tejiendo una comunidad que comparte prácticas, ideas y estrategias vinculadas a los decrecimientos y a los comunalismos. También hemos ido sembrando semillas que pronto germinarán, como una revista en la que algunes estamos trabajando y que esperamos poder anunciar próximamente. A lo largo del año nos cruzaremos en celebraciones, protestas, escuelas populares, festivales y encuentros, hasta volver a reunirnos en la próxima edición de Sentido Comunal, en enero de 2027.
Sentido Comunal: Rural World and Popular Culture. A brief account.
A month has passed, and we are ready to share some written reflections on the second edition of Sentido Comunal, a project we, as Research and Degrowth, co-lead with Fundació Emprius, and with the additional collaboration of Ecologistas en Acción and Rebelión Científica. Each edition delves into a specific aspect of degrowth and communalist practices, promoting spaces for organizing, debating, making connections, and cultivating relationships around these ideas. As we harvest the ideas that emerged during this second internal meeting, we want to look back on the event and share some reflections.
We started working on this project a couple years ago, and hosted the first edition in January 2025, in which we explored the broad title of our project, namely practices of Communalism and Degrowth. In this second 2026 edition, instead, we focused on a specific aspect of degrowth and communalism: the Rural World and Popular Culture.
Sentido Comunal is structured in two parts. The first day is dedicated to networking, community-building, and developing discussions among a limited number of collectives and organizations. The second day is devoted to organizing a large public congress to disseminate ideas and reach a wider audience.
On Friday, we met at Cal Cases, in Santa Maria d’Oló. Cal Cases is an intentional eco-community of 26 people, mostly from urban backgrounds, who since 2007 have been collectively building a cooperative and ecofeminist way of living that seeks coherence between values and everyday practice through shared care, self-management, autonomy, and a deep integration with nature and community life.
Most of us arrived on Thursday night, set up the space and had dinner, prepared for us by Cal Cases, where we enjoyed the wine brought by our comrades from La Invierna, in Garganta la Olla, Extremadura. We woke up in Cal Cases on Friday and gathered in the common area for breakfast: a more abundant take on the traditional pa amb tomàquet, with the olive oil provided by our friends from Cal Cisteller, a rural ateneu (self-managed community and cultural center) of Penedès, in Catalonia.
We welcomed the last arrivals and began our program with a presentation of the event, laying out a common ground. We came together with a shared understanding of the problems we face and the solutions we deem necessary to pave the way towards a Communalist Degrowth.
In a world where the growth imperative produces wars, ecological crises, genocide, and poverty, we understand Degrowth as the only political and scientific way out. By Degrowth, we mean a selective, democratic, and redistributive reduction of material and energy flows that allows us to live better with less, halting the current degradation of living conditions and enabling their regeneration.
For us, Degrowth is best achieved through communalism. For Degrowth to work, it cannot be imposed from above or centrally organized by the state; rather, it requires more localized yet interconnected structures for decision-making, production, and reproduction. These aspects would not be managed competitively for the accumulation of profit, nor by states pursuing GDP growth, but communally—through methods that must partly be invented, yet largely drawn from the legacy of the past, which has been predominantly non-capitalist.
This is precisely what this edition of Sentido Comunal has addressed: the existing potential in the rural world and traditional popular culture to inspire a degrowth-oriented and communalist society. Under the myth of progress understood as economic growth, the rural world has been portrayed as backward, archaic, poor, useless, and vulgar. Much of the knowledge and popular culture associated with peasant life has been dismissed either as remnants of a painful past supposedly overcome by modernity, or—at best—as a repository of folkloric practices worth preserving only insofar as they might generate benefits through processes of heritagization, touristification, and commodification.
At Sentido Comunal, we are convinced that we must move beyond this sterile and dangerous dichotomy. We need a radical perspective that weaves together the threads of different collectives and projects across the Iberian Peninsula that have already embarked on a different path, with the horizon of communalist degrowth.
In this edition of Sentido Comunal we shared diagnoses from different territories and debated some of the issues that make up the richness and diversity of our political horizon, but that sometimes can generate the greatest disagreements. We collectively imagined possible ways of strengthening this outlook, and finally, we celebrated around the fire the aspects of traditional popular culture that most deeply move and mobilize us.
For this reason, the main objective of this internal meeting was to get to know one another and build connections among each other, addressing the challenges and debates that affect our communities and organizations, and thinking collectively about joint strategies for the communalist and degrowth-oriented transformation of our territories.
After a presentation from our side, we delved into a round of introductions of the people and collectives we had invited to the meeting. Álvaro, a member of the organising team, facilitated an icebreaker that allowed us to mingle and start getting to know one another.
Then we moved on to our first dynamic session: a group diagnosis on different aspects of traditional popular culture. We discussed oral and linguistic traditions, artisanry, agriculture and farming techniques, the governance structure of open councils, gastronomy and commensality, traditional architecture, popular celebrations, songs and dances. The second part of the morning was dedicated to a socratic dialogue based on a text assigned by our organizing team member Lucía, titled Tradición Rebelde by Fruela Fernández.
The aim of the socratic dialogue was to explore the role that popular culture and rural territories can play in bringing about a Communalist Degrowth transformation, via a collective process of weaving answers together in order to formulate further questions in a generative conversation where the goal was not so much to deliver solutions but rather to question, clarify and deepen our collective understanding of key ideas and concepts.
Indeed, in the socratic dialogue our vision for a rural communalist degrowth emerged as one where diversity is not a barrier to creating a strong sense of place and of agency, but rather a condition through which community is forged via solidarity and where identity is ryzomatic, that is, made up of ever-changing human and non-human interconnected relations. The rural context, far from being a space of backwardness, was identified as a territory where such relations can and do take place, despite the contradictions present in our families and communities where conservative values can still be difficult to displace.
After a plate of paella and a walk around the house to introduce the Cal Cases project, we dedicated the afternoon to a facilitated open forum on antispeciesism and rural values by María and Alejandra, as well as further discussion around strategic proposals for continuing to work together—both through Sentido Comunal and through the broader movement for Communalist Degrowth.
During the open forum, the question of interconnectedness and ethics took centre-stage in a discussion about the compatibilities and incompatibilities of anti-specism with the presence and of animals (such as in extensive pastoralism) as part of the degrowth communalist horizon. Once again, we began by recognising the complexity of the issue and rather than seeking definitive answers, the facilitators who accompanied the process were able to render visible and help us empathize with different perspectives that sometimes co-exist and often clash, especially in rural contexts.
Finally, after dinner, we gathered around the fire for a filandón, facilitated by our guest Bea from Oficios Vivos. It is a traditional practice in which a group of neighbors used to gather at night to do manual work together (especially spinning) and tell stories. In Sentido Communal we reinterpreted it by inviting the participants to share a word, object, story, or song connected to popular culture, in our case evoking communalist and/or degrowth values, either encountered firsthand or via personal experience, oral transmission, or research.
Building a temporary sense of comradeship and community at Cal Cases was perhaps our most visible achievement, reflected in many of the thoughts shared during our final feedback session at the end of a very long day. From the first moments of coming together on Thursday evening, as we prepared our shared calendar for the coming day, introducing ourselves to new members of this edition and welcoming for a second time familiar faces from last year, to the final moments of sharing around the fire, what stood out was the sense of having built a precious space of care – a central element to the Communalist Degrowth transformation.
This would not have been possible had it not been for the warm hospitality of Cal Cases, embodying the definition of hospitality of Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakas: hospitality understood as radical openness, generosity, and trust in others.
In their book Joyful Militancy, Montgomery and Bergman describe it like this:
The notion of hospitality is not just about welcoming guests; it connotes a sensibility of trust based on people’s sense of their capacity to face the world together. Being held in this way also enables people to be open to strangers: not simply “tolerant” but capable of open-ended encounters, generosity, and curiosity. To encounter a stranger and be open to difference in this way is not at all the same as tolerance. Liberal tolerance treats individuals as atomized entities who are required to put up with each other, with the state as a universal arbiter. Hospitality starts not from rights-bearing individuals but from a sensuous and lively world, composed through common notions that have evolved to sustain joy or conviviality. To be “hosted” is to be allowed to encounter a world, to be invited into it. For the same reason, it is not individuals who are trusting; there is no self-enclosed individual who “chooses” to trust, but bundles of relationships in which the capacity for trust is activated and drawn out of people.
The following day we all moved to Berga, where more than 300 people attended the public congress. The program was organized into four thematic blocks during which practitioners shared experiences related to popular culture, communalism, and degrowth. As all sessions are available on YouTube, we will not describe them in detail here and instead provide links to each recording.
The first block, facilitated by Joan, from Emprius, examined the tradition of community self-government in the Iberian Peninsula, where systems of direct and participatory democracy such as concejos, batzarres, assemblies, and communal councils historically prevailed over representative politics. Joel Baró Mas focused on the communal councils of Pallars Sobirà, and Alba Rivas Fernández on the Galician montes vecinales en mano común (common lands held in collective ownership by local residents).
The second block, facilitated by Lucía, from R&D, addressed traditional and communal forms of organising work currently marginalized by hegemonic understandings of progress. On the one hand, it presented practices such as basket weaving (Anna Sínia) and scythe sharpening (Miguel Berbel); on the other, it described some communal labor traditions like auzolan in Euskal Herria (Jasone Mitxeltorena) and the revival of tornallom in the Penedès (Ateneu Rural Cal Cisteller).
After the first two blocks, we moved to the Catellers’ venue to share a popular vegetable and mushroom paella prepared by Casal Panxo and the Cal Blanxart housing cooperative. Sharing food in this festive atmosphere was yet another way of incorporating expressions of popular culture into our event.
The third block, facilitated by Kike, from Emprius, focused on the transmission of practical knowledge linked to popular culture, such as craftsmanship, by highlighting initiatives and projects that recover and update traditional skills, reflecting on the challenges they face as well as the current potential they represent. Presentations introduced inspiring projects dedicated to experiential learning and social transformation, including Escola Orígens in La Garrotxa, Escuela de los Pueblos in Quecedo de Valdivielso, and L’Atelier Paysan in France.
The fourth block, facilitated by Álvaro, from the organization, was fully practical and hands-on: different parallel workshops explored non-capitalist ways of engaging with art, celebration, and manual work, questioning consumerist cultural models and the corporate appropriation of festivity. These included popular dances with Berguedana de Folklore Total, an introduction to La Patum with the Museu Comarcal de Berga, a basketry workshop with Anna Sínia, and another on scythe sharpening with Miguel Berbel. Some of us concluded the day with a small celebration, accompanied by some live music, and popular dances.
Now, it’s time to rest, until we resume organizing next year’s edition of Sentido Comunal. Slowly but steadily, we are increasingly bringing together a community that shares practices, ideas, and strategies connected to degrowth and communalism. Together, we have also been planting seeds that will soon sprout, such as a magazine that some of us are working on, and that soon, we hope, we will be able to announce. Throughout the year, most of us will cross paths at celebrations, protests, popular schools, festivals, gatherings, until we all meet again at the next edition of Sentido Comunal, in January 2027.
Context
Wars, the rising costs of living, increasing inequality, and the global ecological emergency are increasingly threatening the well-being of Europeans. This crisis of life on earth is inadequately answered by existing green policies, which are limited by their obsession with technological innovation and GDP-centric measures of success. Degrowing our oversized economy is the only way to reduce its material footprint in favor of people and the planet. The question of labour is key in the way the polycrisis is addressed. The transformation of economic and industrial processes must begin with
those who power them: rank-and-file workers. At first sight, degrowth seems to be contrary to workers’ interests, i.e., their need for an economy that provides good quality jobs. However, the reality is more complex.
Nora Räthzel is professor emerita at the Universität Umeå, Sweden. Her research areas are: Environmental Labour Studies, Trade union’s environmental policies, transnational corporations from the standpoint of workers, and the way in which practices of resistance and subordination develop in these contexts. Publications include: Räthzel, N., Stevis, Dimitris (2025) The role of labour and nature within just transition strategies. The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals; Räthzel, N. (2023) Society – Labour – Nature: the Potential of Conflict, Critical sustainability sciences: intercultural and emancipatory perspectives; Räthzel, N., Stevis, Dimitris, Uzzell, David (2021) The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies; Räthzel, N.; Uzzell, David (2019) The future of work defines the future of humanity and all living species. International Journal of Labour Research; Räthzel, N. Diana Mulinari, Aina Tollefsen (2014) Transnational Corporations from the Standpoint of Workers. Palgrave.
next steps
With this document, our aim is to firmly place worker-led degrowth transitions on the political agenda.
Help us do so by sharing this summary within your network or by reaching out to us or the author to organize an event, an interview, or any other project.
citation
Rhatzel, N. (2026, February). Bread & roses: Workers as agents of degrowth [Policy brief n.6]. Research & Degrowth International.
contact us!
Policy Brief author: Nora Räthzel
E-mail: [email protected]
Publisher: Research & Degrowth International
E-mail: [email protected]
Further reading on Environmental Labour Studies
· Räthzel, N., Stevis, Dimitris (2025). The role of labour and nature within just transition strategies. The Elgar Companion to Decent Work and the Sustainable Development Goals
· Räthzel, N. (2023). Society – Labour – Nature: the Potential of Conflict, Critical sustainability sciences: intercultural and emancipatory perspectives.
· Räthzel, N., Stevis, Dimitris, Uzzell, David (2021). The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies
· Räthzel, N.; Uzzell, David (2019). The future of work defines the future of humanity and all living species. International Journal of Labour Research
· Räthzel, N. Diana Mulinari, Aina Tollefsen (2014). Transnational Corporations from the Standpoint of Workers. Palgrave.
Hacia una transición ecosocial justa en el Estado español: Nuevas herramientas institucionales para el poder popular
Hugo Abad Frías, Ana Díaz-Vidal, Federico Arcuri
El informe está redactado por el equipo de Research & Degrowth International como preparación para la primera sesión del Foro Social Más Allá del Crecimiento de febrero de 2026.
El documento toma como punto de partida los informes de políticas publicados por R&Di, desarrollados de manera colaborativa y auto-financiados a través de una iniciativa de crowdfunding.
Contexto y Objetivo
Este informe propone un paquete de políticas públicas diseñado para facilitar una transición justa hacia una economía post-crecimiento en España, basándose en el consenso científico que descarta el crecimiento verde como solución a la crisis ecosocial. Su objetivo es desvincular la satisfacción de las necesidades básicas del empleo asalariado dependiente del mercado, promoviendo un modelo económico centrado en el bienestar colectivo dentro de los límites planetarios.
El informe no refleja las visiones políticas y la opinión de todo el colectivo de R&Di.
Para citarnos
Abad Frias, H., Díaz-Vidal, A., & Arcuri, F. (2026, February). Hacia una transición ecosocial justa en el Estado Español: Nuevas herramientas institucionales para el poder popular [Policy brief n.7]. Research & Degrowth International. [Forthcoming]
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Making Money Public: A Simpler, Fairer Foundation for a Democratic Economy
Mario Martínez, Dinero Positivo
Few would deny that finance plays a decisive role in shaping a future where human life on Earth remains viable. Yet debates on economic transformation often overlook a crucial dimension: aligning credit and capital with social and ecological value is only possible if we change how money itself is created and who controls that process. It is fundamental for building a democratic economy that serves both people and planet.
Across the world, money creation follows a remarkably uniform logic. The only form of digital public money—central bank reserves—is created through debt, used exclusively by private banks, and managed indirectly through interest rates and asset purchases. Everyone else uses private bank deposits, which are liabilities of commercial institutions. It is a deeply entrenched model, one that binds the very existence of money to private balance sheets and perpetual debt expansion.
The issue of money creation is both technical and political, and for that reason it is often neglected. Yet without transforming the way money comes into being, reforms to finance will always remain partial and fragile. Today, public digital money exists, but only for banks. What we call “central bank money” is public in name but private in practice, since it circulates only among financial institutions. Households, businesses, and even many governments must rely on private credit to access the money they need to function, and this money rests on the assumption that banks can’t ever go bust.
This structure locks the public into dependence on private risk-taking. Deposit guarantees, bailouts, privileged access to central bank liquidity, and interest payments on reserves are all mechanisms designed to protect a financial system on which society depends for its means of exchange. The result is asymmetrical: profits are privatized, while risks are socialized.
There are proposals to expand state control over lending decisions—so-called “green finance” or credit guidance schemes—but these remain partial solutions when considering the true costs for this system. They leave untouched the core problem: money itself continues to be issued as private debt. Rather than multiplying state intervention in credit allocation, a more decentralized approach is to make money creation itself public, while allowing a plural and competitive ecosystem of credit institutions to thrive on top of it.
The simplest step, and one that could be implemented incrementally, would be to create a public, debt-free digital currency issued by a public authority and accessible to everyone, not just banks. In practical terms, every citizen and enterprise would be able to hold and use this public money through digital wallets provided directly by the state or via authorized intermediaries acting as such. It would function alongside existing private bank money, but without privileges or guarantees for the latter.
Such a non-reformist reform would immediately end many of the contradictions that plague the current architecture shifting power from the financial system to society. People’s money would no longer depend on bank solvency, eliminating the need for deposit insurance or taxpayer-funded rescues. The state would no longer have to subsidize banks through privileged access to interest bearing central bank reserves. Seigniorage—the profit from creating money—would accrue to the public, not to financial intermediaries, thus reducing the need and cost of public debt. Not only would we get a one-time huge income from changing from private money into public one, but also we would continue receiving the benefits of continued monetary expansion. Private institutions could still lend, take risks, and even fail, but without threatening the entire monetary system when they do.
This idea differs from the approach advocated by proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) even though they share a common goal: to shift the power of money creation from private banks to the public. MMT typically envisions new money entering circulation through public spending, for instance financing a job guarantee or an energy transition. By contrast, the approach outlined here proposes that new public money could enter circulation through citizens themselves, as a form of universal, debt-free income. This would democratize monetary power, allowing people to decide whether to spend or lend, while fiscal policy and taxation steer those choices toward socially and ecologically desirable activities. And there are many design options on the table, where the state could still receive newly created money to finance essential projects, but we could also favor that citizens could hold a share of monetary sovereignty in their own hands.
This is not an argument against public investment or collective priorities. On the contrary, by giving everyone access to safe, state-issued digital money, we create the conditions for more effective public policy. Once money creation is public, fiscal, regulatory and financial tools gain both resources and independence. Fiscal policy can define which sectors are most desirable by making them more profitable or affordable, while regulation can focus on outcomes—social justice, decarbonization, equality—rather than on maintaining a fragile financial stability.
A public digital currency would also make the financial system more resilient. Local and cooperative credit institutions could lend without depending on the infrastructure of large commercial banks. Because public money would be risk-free by design, the safety of the payment system would no longer depend on the solvency of private intermediaries. Financial crises would lose their hostage logic: no longer would societies be forced to “save the banks or lose everyone’s savings.”
Critically, this is not a call for centralization. A public monetary foundation actually enables more decentralization, because it separates the safe medium of exchange from the risky process of credit creation. It offers a platform on which plural credit systems—cooperative, municipal, community-based—can coexist and innovate. Public money does not decide who gets credit; it simply ensures that the basic means of payment is safe, fair, and public.
Turning to the European context, such a transition could evolve naturally from the ongoing debates about a digital euro. If designed appropriately, a European public digital currency could gradually open access to central bank reserves, step by step reducing the privileges and protections that commercial banks currently enjoy. Its mere existence would change the balance of power: in future crises, the public could rely on a parallel, public payment system, making it politically and economically feasible to let failing banks actually fail.
The political process to get there need not be utopian. A proposal to make money public can unite unusual allies—liberals, conservatives, enterprises, consumer associations, payment providers, and even parts of the tech industry—since all stand to benefit from a more open, stable, and competitive monetary infrastructure. The only consistent opposition would likely come from the incumbent banking lobby. In practice, Europe’s central bank could take the first step by implementing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) designed for universal access and genuine parity with bank money, while future reforms could expand its functions toward a fully public, debt-free currency.
Once money creation becomes a public utility, the elaborate machinery of guarantees and exceptions built to keep the current system from collapsing could be simplified. Monetary policy could return to its core purpose: ensuring that the flow of money serves collective well-being rather than private accumulation. Central banks would not become omnipotent planners, but rather public registers of money creation, expanding the supply when needed by transferring it directly to citizens or the public purse.
This reform may sound radical, yet it is remarkably practical. Many of the technical requirements are already being developed through existing digital currency projects. What is needed is not new technology, but new political imagination—the courage to treat money not as a by-product of private credit, but as a public common good.
In a time when societies struggle to agree even on modest reforms, the simplicity of this proposal is its greatest strength. A public, debt-free, universally accessible digital currency offers a shared foundation on which diverse movements—economic, social, ecological—can converge. From there, we can build the next steps toward a democratic economy that not only allocates credit more wisely, but ensures that the very money we use truly belongs to all of us.
The opinions expressed in the text do not necessarily reflect those of R&D, but are those of the authors.
Policy brief Author: Marula Tsagkari
Report authors: Tansy E. Hoskins & Morena Hanbury Lemos
Policy Brief
Citation:
- Tsagkari, M. (2025, November). Clothing the planet well within limits [Policy brief n.5]. Research & Degrowth International. https://degrowth.org/projects/policy-briefs/
- Hoskins, T. E., & Hanbury Lemons, M. (2026). Extraction fashion: Unequal exchange and degrowth [Report]. Research & Degrowth International; War on Want.
The policy brief was elaborated by Marula Tsagkari based on the report “Extraction Fashion” (see below) produced by War on Want and Research & Degrowth International.
The policy brief highlights the results of this investigation and calls on EU decision-makers to take action to transform the fashion industry. The brief proposes a degrowth approach to fashion, stressing the need for a radical reduction of material and energy consumption in clothing production and challenges the ideologies of constant novelty, overconsumption, and fast fashion.
Defashioning
- Dismantling the dominant global fashion system which is rooted in capitalist, extractivist, and colonial logics.
- Replacing it with diverse, localised, sustainable and care-based clothing practices.
Defashioning in practice: clothing libraries, clothing swaps, repair workshops, upcyling…
Policies to degrow fashion
Consumption
- Standardised labels for products
- Advertisement ban
- Fashion week ban
- Online shopping regulation
Production
- Fashion cap & share system
- Ban on planned obsolescence
- Government subsidies & tax breaks for local producers
Just transition
- Support trade unions for fashion industry workers
- Training programs for repair, redesign and reuse
- Public auditing of labour conditions
Marula Tsagkari is a political ecologist from Athens, Greece. She is currently a Margarita Salas postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB. Her work focuses on energy communities, energy self-sufficiency, technology, and values. Marula holds a Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona and MSc in Environmental Science Policy and Management from Central European University and the University of Lund. In 2022-2023 she was a postdoctoral researcher at TU-Delft.
Report
The study conducted by Research & Degrowth International and War on Want, authored by Tansy E. Hoskins and Morena Hanbury Lemos, found that fashion-related consumption in the EU in 2021 alone required:
- close to 230,000 square kilometers of land
- close to 190,000 kilotons of minerals and 46,000 kilotons of metals
- Over 4.5 million years of human labor in wage hours
The report reveals a stark geographical asymmetry: fashion for the EU is not produced locally, but rather through large-scale appropriation of land, resources, and labor largely from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, there are a number of national and international policy frameworks aiming to regulate the fashion industry and its impacts. However, these are often limited to voluntary commitment and self-reporting by corporations or consumer awareness strategies. These are insufficient. Strong regulation is required to incur a material and a mental shift away from clothing systems based on colonial extraction and exploitation.
The policy brief proposes the adoption of a degrowth lens to transform the fashion industry.
next steps
With the Policy Brief, our aim is to position the issue of degrowing the fashion industry firmly on the political agenda. Help us do so by sharing this summary within your network or by reaching out to us or the author to organize an event, an interview, or any other project.
Citations:
Tsagkari, M. (2025, November). Clothing the planet well within limits [Policy brief n.5]. Research & Degrowth International. https://degrowth.org/projects/policy-briefs/
Hoskins, T. E., &; Hanbury Lemons, M. (2026). Extraction fashion: Unequal exchange and degrowth [Report]. Research & Degrowth International; War on Want. https://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Fashion_Report_Web.pdf
contact us!
Policy Brief author: Marula Tsagkari
E-mail: [email protected]
Publisher: Research & Degrowth International
E-mail: [email protected]
further reading on degrowing fashion
· Hoskins, T. E., & Lemos, M. H. (2025). Extraction Fashion: unequalexchange and degrowth explored. Research & Degrowth International.
· Niessen, S. (2022). Defining defashion: A manifesto for degrowth. International Journal of Fashion Studies, 9(2), 439–444.
· Cosciemee et al. (2022). Unfit, Unfair, Unfashionable: Resizing Fashion for a Fair Consumption Space. Hot or Cool Institute
· Tomé, C. (2025,). Fashion Commons: A Cap-and-Share Model to Tackle the Fashion Industry’s Overproduction Crisis. Equal Right: Economic Justice Without Borders.
The report and the policy brief have been produced as a result of the crowdfunding launched in 2023. Thanks to all the kind donors for making this possible.
What makes cities thrive? From 'Creative Cities’ to Cultural Municipalism
“The space is free from the council, and the collective generates a little bit of income by working with movements to create posters for them, and then we keep some of them to sell.”
I’m at La Imprempta Col·lectiva, a leftist slow printing press in Can Batlló, Barcelona, receiving a tour from Carmela. The warehouse studio is lined with cluttered shelves and long washing lines of bold prints left to dry hang low – documenting protests, movements, calls to action from local and international resistance movements. Ancient printing machines are crammed between tables littered with ink pots. Members of the collective chat over beers and smoke roll-ups, plotting designs commissioned by local leftist groups. Their letterpress printing requires precision: one small mistake means re-starting from scratch.
Anyone can attend their Thursday afternoon sessions, where participants learn how to use the printing press and make prints for whichever leftist collective is working with them that week. Even I, with my broken Spanish and nonexistent Catalan, am welcomed with a hug and a beer.
Since I moved to Barcelona four months ago, I have been thinking about what makes cities thrive. After ten years in London, why does Barcelona feel so much more vibrant? For sure, it’s the walkability, the sunshine, and new city bias. But it’s also walking into a warehouse just three weeks after moving here, for free, and immediately connecting to something. Carmela explains the posters they’re creating for a trans-feminist collective organising a set of workshops soon. The world opens up easily.
Personal photos from my afternoon with Impremta Col·lectiva
London vs. Barcelona
In London, the walls are closing in. Skyrocketing rents, gentrification, sterile apartment blocks replacing community centres. To express my creativity, I resorted to taking an expensive painting course – 45 minutes away by bus.
In Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common, Justin O’Connor argues effective cultural infrastructure is invisible, subtly enhancing your city experience: like meandering past an independent bookshop or stopping by a little music venue with cheap pints where local bands play their first gig (2024). But when the cultural ecosystem falters, these small spaces disappear first.
The UK’s cultural scene is coughing up blood. Independent venues who made it through the pandemic had no financial reserves when the energy crisis hit. In my roaming around Barcelona, I can’t help but ask: how does a space like this – La Impremta Col·lectiva – exist? Barcelona is no stranger to gentrification, it makes London’s housing crisis seem like a walk in the park (and I don’t say this lightly). Yet this print shop embodies what makes cities good to live in: accessible arts and culture, connecting with new people, feeling part of something bigger. It is a space of enjoyment and resistance, a crossroads where movements, artists and the city converge.
How did I walk in here just weeks after moving?
La Impremta Col·lectiva operates rent-free in Can Batlló, a self-managed social and cultural space in an old textile factory. It is precisely Can Batlló’s relationship with the council, and the council’s provision of these buildings, that enables it to exist in this form. Across municipalist literature, it is cited as a key example of radical municipalism (Roth et al., 2023). The neighbourhood’s history of mobilisation, aligned with the anti-austerity 15M movement post-2008, saw the council hand over these buildings to the community for social use in 2011, exemplifying an alternative city-citizen-institution relationship that devolves power (Parés et al., 2017). It is not perfect by any means, with many spaces like Can Batlló navigating fraught relationships with a municipality threatening to defund the space. Radical spaces like L’Antiga Massana, a squat and community centre in the heart of the Raval neighbourhood, experience violent evictions because they are a political threat – beating hearts of the barrio and engines for leftist political mobilisation. But this grassroots fight for space is active and ongoing.
Crucially, La Impremta exemplifies a result of this ongoing fight, and the heart of Barcelona’s cultural vibrancy: from the festa majors to the community-run civic centres in every neighbourhood, resources and space have been reclaimed by the people creating a decommodified cultural ecosystem – resources and space which become a proof-of-concept and base to keep the fight alive.
Barcelona’s wave of municipalist organising post financial crisis was energised by a real alliance of inside-outside actors. In contrast, the UK’s response to austerity has been characterised as a “managed municipalism”, a weak, top-down approach driven by local councils rather than grassroots movements (Thompson, 2021; Banks & Oakley, 2024). Spain experienced the financial crisis more sharply than the UK: high levels of unemployment and poverty mobilising huge numbers of people onto the streets to demand change and building dual power outside of the state. The UK’s use of existing political structures has seen a series of failed attempts at decentralisation of power, with council land sold en masse to private developers, rather than handed over to the community.
I have worked in the cultural sector for years now, and I know cultural ecosystems hold serious potential to challenge capitalism from the ground up. Working at the city scale is key to catalysing this change. Cities like my hometown of Bristol, or Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester – each with strong socialist tendencies and vibrant cultural identities – are ripe for radical municipalist organising. Where a national-level degrowth strategy feels out of reach, an eco-socialist UK city feels within our grasp.
The Irony of ‘The Creative City’
In the UK, we only need to look as far back as the 1980s for policies which harnessed the potential of culture to transform the city. The Greater London Council, known as a ‘social democratic paris commune’ was ‘unimaginable without its cultural policies, alliances and supporters’ (Hatherly, 2020). Manchester’s post industrial revival was driven by a wave of pop culture, transforming post-industrial decline into a gritty cultural hub (New Books in Sociology, 2024). Watershed in Bristol, the cultural cinema and creative technology studio, where I currently work, was city council helped fund their purchase of an abandoned industrial shed, in the hopes a cultural organisation would breathe life back into the derelict, deindustrialised harbour. And it did: 40 years later, the harbourside is the cultural centre of the city.
Images of Bristol’s harbourside in 1926 & 2024
But the story continues. The 1998 Labour government embraced the success of popular culture as a powerful modernising force, branding it “The Creative Industries” (O’Connor, 2024). Seizing on the dot com boom, it wove together culture, technology and business strategy to tackle the rampant unemployment from deindustrialisation. This framing was picked up by UNESCO as a tool for modernisation, entwining cultural policy with economic development doctrines across the world (O’Connor, 2024). Here, culture became segmented from a (semi?) public good into a private consumer economy.
The concept of The Creative City was born, where councils hardened culture into a formal sector, to attract tourism, promote inward investment and shape urban identity. The main beneficiaries were not artists, communities or even businesses – but real estate developers. This so-called ‘investment’ in the arts served to mask a new phase of gentrification, financial restructuring driven by land speculation, as international investment flowed into cities looking for increased capital. Meanwhile, the digital commons was being enclosed, with platform monopolies like Netflix and Spotify seeking to control digital cultural production and consumption through Intellectual Property and algorithmic domination.
The irony is this process of political centralisation has poisoned the fertile soil that first made the cultural industries bloom. Banks & O’Connor argue it was in fact the UKs diverse geographical patchwork of cities and municipalities that first nurtured the vibrant cultural scene (2017). Manchester City Council, once a beacon of working-class creativity, sold off the city centre to developers, eroding the counterculture and diversity of its cultural services.
Since the global financial crisis, local funding for the arts has dropped by 43% (National Campaign for the Arts, 2020), leading to venue closures, funding cuts, and job losses. The result? A fragmented, London-centric, tech-driven cultural sector, where the most commercialised areas – advertising and digital design – are held up as models for community arts.
In the UK, if you want to pursue art as a means to live, you generally have to move to London and sell your soul to pay rent. My best friend’s mum went to art school in the 1980s with the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. They all lived in East London squats which no longer exist. The starving artists are actually starving. Unless you have existing capital, your choices are pretty much work for Spotify or face homelessness. The great creative minds of our time either don’t work in the arts or are content creators for oil companies.
But radical municipalism emerges from crisis, which is where we find ourselves (Roth et al, 2023). Indeed, Sandoval argues it is precisely the precariousness and frustrations of bad working conditions that motivates cultural workers to form new alliances of resistance (2018).
Culture: a feminising force?
The simultaneous centralisation of power in the UK and commodification of the arts can be read as a distinctly patriarchal politics: cementing hierarchy, universalism and rationalism. If our municipalist strategies mirror these narrow definitions in avenues towards participation, then it risks reproducing these masculine, western hierarchies of power.
There are different ways of knowing, understanding and being. The arts create space for those to be explored together, to be valued. The UCLG Women report Towards a Global Feminist Municipal Movement asks: “How can we create channels for effective and inclusive participation that incorporate the voices of women and diversity in the construction of public policies?” (2019, 9). I suggest one avenue is taking arts and culture seriously.
Roth and Baird argue that to feminise politics, we must ‘shatter the masculine patterns that reward behavior of competition, urgency, hierarchy and homogeneity, and emphasise the small, the relational, the everyday” (n/a). A feminist municipalist approach could see arts and culture as a tool to embrace the multiplicity of knowledge, actors and relations engaged in civic culture making, and therefore the everyday re-making of the city.
Consider the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), a competition that moves between cities to engage folks with the post-carbon transition. They partner with local municipalities to run competitions, where teams (anyone from artists, to scientists, to school children), submit designs for beautiful, useful, renewable energy infrastructure that responds to local needs. The competition is then judged by a panel of local people. This form of collaborative and creative placemaking engages broad swathes of city-dwellers to come together and imagine a future of civic renewable energy generation: fighting NIMBYISM, creating alliances between private, public and community institutions, and democratising urban planning. It takes advantage of existing urban identity to engage folks in issues they may not otherwise care about.
Two of LAGIs experiments: Beyond the Wave & Solar Orbs
Locating culture in municipalism
Despite this potential, radical municipalist and degrowth literature largely overlooks culture (Banks & Oakley, 2024; Foundational Economy Collective, 2018; Hansen, 2022; Janoo et al., 2021). Roth recently summarised the foundational necessities for “living well” that ought to be the focus of municipalist strategies – yet arts and culture were again absent (2023).
Reset Collective argues for the repositioning of arts and culture within the social foundations of a wellbeing economy (2022). They distinguish between ‘vital’ needs (food, shelter) and ‘enabling’ needs, such as education, health, and culture. Culture, they argue, is not a luxury, but integral to human development, creativity, and the capacity to make meaningful choices (Reset, 2022). The Foundational Economy Collective similarly have come to include ‘social infrastructure such as libraries’ are a crucial part of a foundational economy (Calafati et al. 2023).
Banks’ scathing assessment of Hickel and Kallis’ most popular works exposes how contemporary degrowth is still to develop any credible theory of cultural production (2022). Culture, in their pieces, is reduced to small forms of localised subsistence (Banks, 2022). Do we expect a degrown society to lack public broadcasting, quality journalism, or cultural film? Maybe some degrowthers see organised cultural production as disposable – but aren’t others hoping for a cultural change in how we value ourselves and the world?
And consider the process of transformation, does culture not have a role to play in the shaping of the new values that we so desperately need? In post-2008 Spain, a counter-hegemony against growth had emerged, and Prádanos emphasises the role of culture in not only documenting this transformation, but enabling it to travel further and root deeper. Using cultural theory, he observes how cities like Barcelona blended cultural creativity (film, TV, novels, art) with postgrowth practices (urban gardens, community economies) creating both discursive and practical experimentations challenging the growth hegemony. Indeed, O’Connors argument is that culture as a distinct ‘thing’ emerged as a counter, autonomous space against the economic-rational world, and it’s capture through the evolution of ‘creative industry’ is a depoliticising force (2024). Attending to cultural practices allows us to more deeply understand how counter-hegemonies emerge and sustain.
Beyond La Impremta, Barcelona hosts a vibrant network of alternative cultural spaces that operate at least partially outside capitalist structures on a varying scale of radicalism. The music venue cooperatives like Sala Vol, the communal fiestas at Can Masdeu and the public common partnerships of the Centres Cívics are all spaces which exemplify what Goodman and Bryant (2013) call ‘spaces of intention’, spaces which enable alternative economic geographies to emerge through practice.
It confounds me: even in the UK, we have existing infrastructure, networks and physical buildings, often rooted in local communities, where people voluntarily visit to encounter new ideas. Cultural vibrancy is why people want to live in cities – let us politicise it!
Towards Cultural Municipalist Strategy
To embed cultural strategy within degrowth, starting at the municipal scale makes the most sense. In the UK, local government and local arts were simultaneously strangled at the hands of neoliberalism – so they can be liberated simultaneously.
Creating more equitable and ecological models of cultural production at the city level promotes local economies, generates value that is better retained and shared locally, creating space for civic participation, critical thinking, and community strengthening. On the New Books in Sociology podcast, O’Connor asks: Why, for example, call a collection of live venues a ‘music industry’ when this network of community-based arts and cultural venues could be organised on a far more equitable and sustainable basis through community co-ops?’ (2024).
At the grassroots, the Alter-Cultures project has been mapping Alternative Cultural Places (ACPs) across Europe that operate “within a framework of cooperation”, “attentive to the sorts of futures which they will produce” (Parker et al., 2014a; Bobodilla et al., 2024). These ACPs are scattered and often precarious (operating in meanwhile spaces), but deeply rooted in community, using cultural programming to become hubs for local people with the revitalisation of their neighborhoods. In Barcelona, I posit that there is not just a scattering of single organisations, but actually some form of Alternative Cultural Sector that is thriving at least partially outside of the market.
In the UK, our cultural scene is one of the only things left and right can agree we’re proud of – let us use this! What could a post-growth cultural policy look like? How can we democratise culture and build more expansive models of participation? Whyman has considered how the Preston Model of Community Wealth Building could be adapted to the creative economy (2022), proposing how policy design for the creative sector needs can be more attentive to individual localities to build resilient cultural economies, and in my mind, happier cities.
Cultural municipalism is already being worked out in practice, from the ground up: through the public-common partnerships of Barcelona’s cultural civic centres, of the network of European alternative cultural places mobilising for neighbourhood transitions, in the organisations on the ground continuing to create cultural offerings for their communities despite the increasingly precarious conditions.
These are seeds for transforming urban spaces, for pluralist visions of eco-social transformation. I ask us to attend to them seriously. Word has it La Impremta Col·lectiva have just expanded their studio, so something must be working.
Author: Zoe Rasbash
This text is the adaptation of an essay written as an assignment for R&D’s Master in Political Ecology, Degrowth and Environmental Justice
The opinions expressed in the text do not necessarily reflect those of R&D, but are those of the authors.
References
Banks, M & K. Oakley (2023) ‘Cakes and Ale: the role of culture in the new municipalism’, Cultural Trends.
Banks, M. (2022) The Unanticipated Pleasures of the Future: Degrowth, Post-Growth and Popular Cultural Economies. New formations: a journal of culture, theory and politics. 107 (108), 12-29.
Banks, M., & O’Connor, J. (2017). Inside the whale (and how to get out of there): Looking back on two decades of creative industries research. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(6), 637–654.
Calafati, L. Fround, J., Haslam, C., Johal, S. and K. Williams (2023) When nothing works from cost of living to foundational liveability. Manchester: Manchester University Press
Foundational Economy Collective. (2018). Foundational Economy: The Infrastructure of Everyday Life. Manchester University Press.
Hansen, T. (2022). ‘The foundational economy and regional development.’ Regional Studies, 56(6), 1033–1104.
Hatherley, O. (2020). Red metropolis: Socialism and the government of London. Repeater Books.
Janoo, A., Bone Dodds, G., Frank, A., Hafele (Zoe), J., Leth, M., Turner, A., & Weatherhead, M. (2021). Wellbeing Economy Policy Design Guide. Wellbeing economy alliance (WEAll).
National Campaign for the Arts. (2020). New arts index published today | campaign for the arts, June 7th (online 2023)
New Books in Sociology (2024) Justin O’Connor, “Culture is not an Industry”. Podcast.
O’Connor, J. (2024) Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common. Manchester University Press.
Parés M, Ospina S, Subirats J, et al. (2017) Sants: seeking autonomous self-management from below. In: Pares M, Ospina S, Subirats J (eds) Social Innovation and Democratic Leadership: Communities and Social Change from Below. Cheltenham: Elgar, pp. 174–199.
Reset Collective (2022) Art, Culture and the Foundational Economy. University of South Australia.
Roth, L., B. Russel & M. Thompson (2023) ‘Politicising Proximity: Radical municipalism as strategy in crisis’. Urban Studies, 60(11)
Roth, R. & K. Baird (n/a) ‘Municipalism and the Feminization of Politics’, ROAR Magazine (roarmag.org), https://bit.ly/2eIrhbu.
Russell, B. (2019). Beyond the local trap: New municipalism and the rise of the fearless cities. Antipode, 51(3), 989–1010.
Sandoval, M. (2018). ‘From passionate labour to compassionate work: Cultural co-ops, do what you love and social change.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(2), pp. 113-129
Stefano Harney (2012) ‘Creative Industries Debate: Unfinished business: Labour, Management, and the Creative Industries’, in Mark Hayward (2012) Cultural Studies and Finance Capitalism, London: Routledge.
Thompson, M. (2021). ‘What’s so new about new municipalism?’ Progress in Human Geography, 45(2), 317–342.
UCLGWomen (2019) Towards a Global Feminist Municipal Movement. Durban.
Abstract
How many of us feel that our work contributes to ecological sustainability and social justice? As the planet heats up and inequalities deepen, our workforces remain employed to produce what is profitable, rather than what is needed. This mismatch results in a failure to allocate the requisite labour towards confronting the challenges of the 21st century. Worse, our societies continue to face chronic involuntary unemployment, while there is so much essential work that needs to be done. We describe an overlooked solution to both problems: a job guarantee designed to contribute to the reorganisation of our economies to meet human needs within planetary boundaries.
next steps
With this document, our aim is to position the job guarantee firmly on the political agenda.
Help us do so by sharing this summary within your network or by reaching out to us or the author to organize an event, an interview, or any other project.
Citation: Stevenson, C. (2025, October). Public works for a degrowth transformation: Jobs for all who want them [Policy brief n.3]. Research & Degrowth International. https://degrowth.org/blog/2025/10/24/public-works-for-a-degrowth-transformation/
contact us!
Policy Brief author: Charles Stevenson
E-mail: [email protected]
Publisher: Research & Degrowth International
E-mail: [email protected]
further reading on job guarantee
· Antonopoulos, R., 2024. Towards a European Job Guarantee. Report by the European Trade Union Institute.
· Tcherneva, P.R., 2020. The Case for a Job Guarantee. Cambridge: Polity Press.
· Center for Working-Class Politics, 2024. Poll: Federal Jobs Guarantee Is Popular Across Political Divides. Jacobin.
Content
Citation: Mastini, R. (2025, October). A green new deal beyond growth for the EU [Policy brief n.4]. Research & Degrowth International. https://degrowth.org/blog/2025/09/09/a-green-new-deal-beyond-growth-for-the-eu/
Europe today confronts three overlapping crises.
The first crisis is a crisis of democracy. Across Europe, people report a profound sense of distrust in political institutions — according to Eurobarometer, only 42 per cent of people trust the EU; only 34 trust their national government — and a sense of disenfranchisement in their economic lives. The institutions of the EU continue to prize the wisdom of technical managers over the needs of the communities that comprise its Union. The voices of front-line communities, bearing the brunt of rising inequalities and ecological breakdown, are rarely heard in Brussels.
The second crisis is economic. Inequality in Europe is at an all-time high: the top 10 percent of people own half of the continent’s wealth, while the bottom 40 control just 3 percent. The European project unfortunately has not been a story of all boats rising together. Instead, it is the share of workers living in poverty that is on the rise. In 2021, 95.4 million Europeans, more than one out of five, were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, with rates of homelessness increasing across the continent. This is a crisis by design. Policies of austerity, which severely constrain the public sector’s spending capacity, have been built into European treaties and reinforced in subsequent agreements. And austerity has starved Europe of resources for investment in public services, worker training, and public infrastructure.
The third is a crisis of ecology. Europeans are already experiencing symptoms of ecological breakdown: Summer 2022 was the hottest on record for Europe and, overall, 2022 was the second warmest year on record for the continent. Only 23% of species and 16% of habitats under the EU Nature Directives are in good health. And large parts of Europe could become uninhabitable due to climate change within our lifetimes. This crisis, too, is a product of political decisions. Decades of subsidized fossil fuel consumption — still amounting to 56 billion euros in 2022 — have undermined efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
These crises are bound together. Today the richest 10% of Europeans emit the same amount of carbon as the poorest half of the EU population combined. And this accounts only for the consumption side of things, and not production, where the wealthy, by virtue of their overconcentration of wealth, control most of fossil-intensive capital. Inequality is hence linked to the climate crisis. This concentration of economic power is also affecting the democratic functioning of the EU. The aggressive lobbying of companies active in carbon-intensive sectors — such as fossil fuels extraction, air transport, and agribusiness — to persuade European legislators to their cause has damaged the credibility of the institutions in the eyes of many citizens. It should not come as a surprise that young Europeans are increasingly resorting to direct actions and civil disobedience to have their voices heard.
New skin for an old deal
Against the backdrop of these crises, in 2020 the European Commission launched the European Green Deal (EGD) to make Europe the first carbon-neutral continent in the world. Commentators have hailed the EU’s Green Deal as a visionary policy, promising to unlock billions of euros in sustainable investments, implement fresh regulations to curb carbon emissions, ramp up Europe’s climate targets, and do more to protect biodiversity across the continent. But while the EC has made a clear step forward in its rhetorical commitment to a just transition for all, the limited funds allocated and the overreliance on markets undermines its credibility.
The EC states that the funding allocated to the EGD amounts to 1 trillion euros between now and 2030, i.e. 100 billion euros a year. Of these 100 billion, the EC expects to put 64 billion from the EU budget and let the Member States cover the difference. However, there are two problems with these figures. Firstly, 64 billion euros a year promised by the EC are not additional funds, but rather a reshuffle of already existing funds for environmental programs5. Secondly, the Member States will not be able to cover the remaining 36 billion euros due to the limitations on deficit spending enshrined in the Stability and Growth Pact. The wiggle room granted to the Member States is therefore very limited and to contribute to the EGD budget governments may be forced to finance the green transition with cuts on welfare spending. Clearly, a regressive proposal as it presents the green transition and social justice as a zero-sum game.
The EC also expects that public investments will attract private capital. The Sustainable Europe Investment Plan—the financial arm of the EGD—provides for the use of public funds and public guarantees issued by the European Investment Bank to crowd in larger flows of private finance to help fund commercially unprofitable projects like public transportation networks, green jobs retraining centers, or public parks. The EC aims at keeping public spending in check while using partnerships that leverage private money for ostensibly public benefit. The metaphor of leveraging private euros may sound sensible. It seems a tempting strategy to avoid increased public spending or taxing the rich, and hence protracted political fights. But public-private partnerships have a troubled history. In a special report, the European Court of Auditors affirmed the weaknesses of the public-private financing model emphasising that it generates outsized profits for private financiers: “The risk allocation between public and private partners was often inappropriate, incoherent and ineffective, while high remuneration rates (up to 14 %) on the private partner’s risk capital did not always reflect the risks borne”. Time and again private investors were good in ensuring their returns, typically at the cost of the public sector. And now the EC aims at socialising the risks of the green transition while privatising the gains.
The EGD provides, one might argue, a corporate welfare windfall of investment opportunities lubricated with tax breaks and subsidies; public-private partnerships; infrastructure outlays that will stimulate real estate development. Indeed, the EC’s choice of words is telling. Rather than associate with the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the EC neatly excised the word ‘new’ from her ‘green deal.’ And through this careful omission, a radical vision of economic, social, and environmental justice is transformed into a strategy that sustains the status quo. On the contrary, climate activists calling on their governments to adopt a Green New Deal (GND) were looking at Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was a series of social programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and labor regulations enacted in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Key features of the New Deal—such as public ownership of strategic utilities, social and labor reforms, and public employment programs— are central also to the GND narrative.
The GND prescribes the need for an active role of the State in the economy. In doing so, GND proponents intend to heed Keynes’ famous advice: “The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but rather to do those things which at present are not done at all.”. If we accept the thesis that the ecological crisis is a colossal failure of the free market, the first step is therefore to recognize the need for public interventions that go beyond the simple modification of prices. What we need is a new political economy, a major transformation such as that of the New Deal era, if not bigger. The State should have an essential role in coordinating and financing the green transition. Most of the infrastructures to be transformed (such as the railway network, the energy grid, waste management, and the water grid) are natural monopolies and a coordinated intervention on the part of public authorities can facilitate their decarbonization. Furthermore, most of the necessary green investments in infrastructures are not profitable in the short term, which makes them unattractive for a financialized private sector devoted to immediate profit.
It’s the end of growth as we know it
When presenting the EGD the President of the EC, Ursula von der Leyen, affirmed that this program is “Europe’s new growth strategy” . As different as the EGD is from a GND, many proponents of the latter would nonetheless agree that economic growth should be both a policy objective and the fiscally-responsible way of financing any ambitious green program: by boosting domestic manufacturing and working-class wages, a GND would lead countries onto the path of green growth. However, it is our contention here that pursuing GDP growth works against the objective of rapid decarbonization. The key point to grasp is that GDP growth entails increasing total energy demand and, in turn, the more energy we use, the more difficult it is to cover it with renewable sources. In essence, decarbonization with growth is like trying to run down an escalator that is accelerating upwards.
The scientific evidence on this is increasingly robust to the point that the Sixth Assessment Report published by the IPCC in 2022 describes the strategy of attempting to decouple GDP growth from GHG emissions as “insufficient”, with rates that “fall a long way short”, which makes green growth a “misleading”, and “misguided” strategy which “rests partly on faith”. For instance, available data shows that when the transfer of emissions to other countries is added to production-based emissions, the reduction in EU emissions between 1990 and 2022 is not 34% as claimed by the European Environmental Agency, but 20%. Similarly, while the domestic material consumption of the EU decreased by about 7% between 2000 and 2018, the material footprint (an indicator that incorporates natural resources embedded into imported goods) has been growing faster than GDP.
The issue of decarbonizing an economy as big as the EU currently presents challenges also with respect to other dimensions of the ecological crisis. For instance, climate change is not the only, or even the principal driver of biodiversity loss. What is destroying species today is habitat fragmentation and loss, overhunting and overexploitation, agricultural expansion, pollution, and industrial development. Solving the climate crisis through green technologies while maintaining high levels of energy consumption will accelerate extinctions due to the demands for space and minerals to drive the technologies. Solar and wind occupy much larger acreage than oil and gas, requiring networks of roads and utility corridors, transportation, and transmission capacity that doesn’t exist today. Wind and solar require 10 times more land per unit of power produced than coal- or natural gas-fired power plants, a figure that includes land torn up and habitat destroyed to drill out, pump, and transport fossil fuels.
The high-energy lifestyle enjoyed by most Europeans rests on the plundering of natural resources from the Global South and can aptly be described as an “imperial mode of living”. It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for EU’s energy transition are located in the global South. Parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will likely become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonization. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not farfetched to imagine that the scramble for the minerals needed for renewable energy might become similarly violent. If we do not take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies—buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, and hopefully not assassinating community leaders who stand in their way like their predecessors did.
But even if all environmental considerations were put aside, betting the financing of a grand infrastructural overhaul on continuous GDP growth would most likely be a deceptive strategy. The EU, just like most other OECD countries, faces strong headwinds (e.g. demography, inequality, globalization, private debts, etc.) that are likely to drift it towards a ‘secular stagnation’, a permanent condition of negligible or no economic growth. Underlying changes in the economy, such as slowing growth in the working-age population, have made episodes like the last 20 years of zero growth in countries like Italy or Japan, likely to happen elsewhere. That is, high-income countries are likely to find themselves facing persistent shortfalls of demand, which cannot be overcome even with near-zero interest rates (rates that by now and due to inflation are far from possible). Building consumer demand at a time when people are less able and motivated to spend becomes impossible.
If secular stagnation is the new normal, then what the EU needs is a GND that does not depend on GDP growth for its financing, nor that it pursues it as an objective. What Europeans need is a GND that puts social justice at its center and that aims at satisfying their basic needs while reducing the oversized ecological footprint of the EU economy. What we need is a ‘GND beyond growth’. In the following sections, I will describe two pivotal policy proposals for fostering such a program: a more progressive wealth tax system and a job guarantee.
Wealth taxation for a green welfare state
Europeans are not all equally responsible for the oversized ecological footprint of the EU economy. Given the scale of inequalities in the EU, it is crucial that mitigation policies are targeted accordingly. Wealth is by far the most important determinant of both inequality and environmental impacts. It does not matter how green you think you are; if you have surplus money, you either spend it or invest it for maximum profit – and in both cases there is a high ecological footprint. Today the richest 1% of European citizens have an average per capita carbon (consumption-based) footprint of 55 tons, the richest 10% of 22 tons, while the bottom 50% of the population just 7 tons. To prevent global heating from exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC recommends that by 2030 average per capita emissions should not exceed 2.5 tons per year. While it is conceivable that through efficiency improvements, a switch to renewable energy, and sufficiency measures the bottom 50% of Europeans who currently have an average per capita carbon footprint of 7 tons may be able to reduce it to 2.5, it is virtually impossible that the top 1% and 10% could meet such target starting from their current 55-tons and 22-tons footprints. The only way for shrinking their humongous carbon footprints is by reducing their wealth through higher taxation. Thomas Piketty made a valid proposal in this direction: taxing wealth as high as 90% for individuals owning more than 10,000 times the average individual wealth in the EU.
In evaluating which measures to take to curb emissions, it must be considered that in our society money determines a person’s autonomy in how to fulfill their essential needs (such as mobility, housing, nutrition, etc.). Those who find themselves in poverty cannot choose whether to live in the city center or commute from the suburbs, whether to eat organic or junk food, whether to live in a well-insulated house or not. They simply adapt to the cheapest option on the market, which is often not the least impactful. For example, many poor people are forced to live in the suburbs where rents are generally lower, but at the same time they lack essential services (schools, shops, medical facilities) and public transport connections. Consequently, the car becomes indispensable with an inevitable increase in a person’s carbon footprint. Striking is the fact that below a certain income threshold, the environmental footprint is not determined by wealth but rather by the level of poverty which leaves no choice. A family that lives in a well-insulated house and uses energy-efficient appliances and vehicles can generate up to three times less emissions than a family forced to use low-efficiency goods. The protests of the gilets jaunes should be read from this perspective. They wanted to tell us that fiscal measures to reduce the consumption of fuel and electricity turn into measures against the poor if they are not accompanied by more public services and welfare measures.
In the course of the twentieth century, many countries around the world have progressively established a welfare state system at protecting all citizens against ‘social risks’ such as ignorance, illness, old age. In the twenty-first century, the challenge is to com- bine the ‘social question’ with the rising ‘environmental question’ because social fragility and exposure to extreme weather events reinforce each other. Low-income households are more likely to live in areas with a high risk of hydrogeological instability or in neighborhoods with low water and air quality. The poor are also more exposed to extreme heat and cold as they may not be able to afford air conditioning or heating in their homes or because they work outdoor or in poorly insulated warehouses. And in the event of an environmental disaster, they suffer greater hardships because they are less likely than wealthy people to live in insured houses. This demonstrates that the severity of natural disasters cannot be measured only by physical criteria, but they are directly proportional to the degree of social fragility in which they occur. Therefore, as part of a GND beyond growth welfare measures need to be strengthened to buffer vulnerable social groups from the risks arising from climate change.
A just transition beyond growth
Proposals for a GND aim to overcome the historic disagreement between the protection of work and the environment. The proposed strategy is to promise benefits from ecological conversion to enough workers so as to bring together a winning political coalition. This is particularly important for gaining the consensus of the de-industrialized areas where far-right parties are getting increasing support. In fact, the production and installation of renewable energy plants, the retrofitting of buildings, the repairing of objects and appliances, and small-scale agroecology are activities that can create many jobs, which are difficult to outsource to other countries. But in addition to creating green jobs in the private sector, one of the flagship proposals of a GND beyond growth should be a job guarantee.
The job guarantee is a permanent program that supplies employment opportunities on demand for all who are ready and willing to work at a decent, living wage focusing on community needs not met by public services. The job guarantee gives public authorities the duty to fund the employment of anybody who wants a job but cannot find one in the private labor market. Whereas workfare requires recipients of benefits to accept any job that is offered to them to not lose their aid, the job guarantee is voluntary: people who cannot and/or do not want to work will still be able to apply for traditional benefits. Just like the central bank has the role of ‘lender of last resort’ to ensure financial stability, a job guarantee makes the government the ‘employer of last resort’ to ensure employment stability in periods of recession. Such a scheme would create an employment safety net, making sure that no worker remains unemployed for long periods of time.
The guaranteed jobs should focus on activities that are socially (e.g. community services and care work) and/or ecologically (e.g. afforestation and the building of renewable energy infra- structure) desirable but neglected by for-profit companies. It is effectively a subsidy of paid labor time to activities that the market does not consider to be valuable although the broader community does so. Lastly, the wage and benefits offered in guaranteed jobs serve as a floor throughout the economy. Since private sector workers always have the option of entering the program, private employers will be forced to provide pay, benefits, and conditions at least on a par with those of public jobs (for example in terms of working time). The EU could, therefore, use the job guarantee as a way of shortening the workweek.
The job guarantee would also be a useful strategy for reducing productivity. While low productivity may be a tough sell to economists, a job guarantee is meant to improve people’s lives and not to increase output. Since the objective of the program is to provide employment, these jobs should be more labor-intensive than private-sector employment. The goal of reducing productivity stems from the assumption that production output is a good proxy for a society’s use of energy and raw materials. Obviously, reducing productivity is not desirable in all fields of production. In any field where socially useful goods and services are produced sustainably, high productivity is a good thing. Additionally, high productivity may be desirable in any case where it reduces the time required to complete an onerous task without necessitating an increase in output.
Private sufficiency, public luxury
Since the 1990s repeated waves of privatization of education, healthcare, transportation, housing, even social security has been unleashed in the EU. Social goods are under attack for the sake of growth. This is a purposeful strategy. The idea is that by making public goods artificially scarce, people will have no choice but to purchase private alternatives— meaning they end up paying to acquire goods that they used to access for free. And what happens when you enclose a good that used to be accessed for free by people? GDP grows. GDP grows because money changes hands. GDP growth is, ultimately, an indicator of the collective welfare of capital. But over the past few decades we have all come to see it as a proxy for the welfare of the rest of us, and therefore pursue it with single-minded zeal.
What happens is that when you enclose public goods you create artificial scarcity. Hence, scarcity and growth create a self-reinforcing loop: to stimulate growth you need to enclose public goods, and for people to have the means to access privatized basic services GDP needs to grow. The artificial scarcity created by enclosures makes everyone live in need, and therefore work harder to stay afloat, which is essential if the economy is to keep growing. So the problem is not that Europeans do not produce enough, but that society does not share the abundance that is already being produced. But if scarcity is created for the sake of growth, then by reversing artificial scarcity we can render growth unnecessary. By expanding public services we can enable people to access the goods that they need to live well without needing high levels of income and therefore additional growth. People would be able to work less without any loss to their quality of life, and so producing less unnecessary stuff and generating less pressure on the biosphere. The economy would be smaller in terms of GDP and yet more abundant in terms of wellbeing.
The truth is that the interventions that matter when it comes to improving human welfare and reducing ecological pressure do not require high levels of GDP. For instance, the EU has 36% less income than the US and yet it beats it not only on life expectancy but on virtually every indicator of human welfare with also much lower levels of material footprint per capita. But there are even countries that are usually defined as ‘developing countries’ that manage to achieve high levels of human welfare with low GDP per capita. For example, Costa Rica surpasses several EU countries on many welfare indicators with a GDP per capita and material footprint per capita that is only a fraction of theirs.
What explains such remarkable results? The fact is that when it comes to delivering long, healthy, flourishing lives for all, what counts is investing in high-quality universal public services which are significantly more cost-efficient to run than their private counterparts. In the light of such considerations, a GND beyond growth should rest on the principle of ‘public abundance’ to render growth unnecessary and let EU decision-makers focus on pursuing what really matters: a good life for all Europeans within planetary boundaries.
But how can these principles be translated into actionable proposals for green, left and other progressive parties?
- Healthcare and education. Most European countries have universal healthcare and education systems, many of which rank as the best health systems in the world. Yet, private providers are increasingly encroaching on the health and edu- cation sectors given the budget cuts that public schools and hospitals are facing. This trend must be reversed with public providers being adequately financed. Be- sides, existing debts accrued for healthcare and education should be cancelled.
- Housing. Housing costs constitute a large portion of household expenses. Europeans often spend 30-50% of their wages on rent and buying a house has in many places become unaffordable to anyone who is not rich. It is important to recognize that large corporate landlords that control dozens or even thousands of homes represent the enclosure of a key resource that is fundamental for survival. One effective intervention would be to simply limit the number of rental units that any individual or firm can own and require the sale of surplus properties. The influx of housing into the market would drive prices down, making it more affordable for people to buy a residence, but also making it more affordable for city governments to buy units, expand the public housing stock and improve the quality of housing, which would be naturally integrated into the fabric of the city. Public rental units can then be available on an affordable basis, and any remaining private rental units would need to have rates low enough to compete with the public option.
- Transit. Public transit should be available for free or very cheap. Nearly 100 cities around the world go further and offer free public transit. In places where existing public transit infrastructure is inadequate, it should be developed to the point where people do not need cars on a regular basis. High-quality public transit is critical to reducing demand for cars and reducing emissions from transport.
- Food. A food justice program could ensure universal access to nutritious, regenerative, vegetarian food. The EU should fund the development of regenerative farms, as well as food gardens in urban and suburban areas, with produce sold at affordable prices through community hubs in every neighborhood that can double as cafeterias serving plants-based meals. These would be convenient and attractive places for anyone to shop and eat, providing high-quality foods covering all necessary nutritional needs, while facilitating conviviality and community engagement. Such a system would im- prove health outcomes and also help to dramatically reduce land use and the ecological impact of the food system.
- Energy and water. Energy and water should be run as public utilities, with a two-tier pricing system: a quota of energy and water should be made available for free to all households, adjusted for the number of residents, sufficient to meet basic needs. Additional use of energy and water beyond this quota can be charged at a progressive rate to disincentivize excess use — delivering yet further benefits for the environment. This approach tends to have strong popular support. The public energy system can be used to phase out fossil fuel use on a science-based schedule and prioritize a rapid transition to renewables, while rules governing the public water system can be used to prevent over-extraction by private firms and ensure a stable and equitably allocated supply of water during droughts.
Financing a GND beyond growth
The question on everybody’s mind at this point most likely is how to pay for a GND without growth, meaning for expanded public services and welfare measures in a non-growing economy? The traditional answer is that to pay for public expenditures you need GDP growth: increase economic activity then tax the revenues to fund public services. This assumption is so entrenched in the common imagination that it is completely taken for granted. It is leveraged by the political right to claim that public services are somehow given to us by rich people (those who pay the most taxes in absolute terms), so we should therefore be grateful to them and do whatever it takes to let them make more money. This idea is ecologically dangerous. We urgently need things like public transit and renewable energy to meet our climate goals. If we need more corporate growth to pay for public services, this will increase total energy demand and make decarbonization more difficult to achieve.
There is no reason, however, that public production needs to rely on funding from prior private production. Any government that has sufficient monetary sovereignty can mobilize public production directly, simply by issuing public finance to do it. As Keynes pointed out: “anything we can actually do, in terms of productive capacity, we can pay for.” And when it comes to productive capacity, the EU already has far more labour and resources than it needs to push for an energy transition and satisfy everyone’s needs. Deploying public finance simply shifts the use of this capacity from corporations to the public, where it can be used for democratically ratified social and ecological objectives, rather than for capital accumulation.
Governments are not like households. They do not have to balance their budgets, and, crucially, they do not have to tax or borrow before they can spend. Governments create the money they spend and can create as much of it as they want, the only limit being the labour and resources necessary to realize the activities this money will pay for. This is clear to anyone who has been paying attention since the global financial crisis of 2008. The ECB has created extraordinary amounts of money to prop up the banking system through Quantitative Easing. Something similar happened in response to the COVID-19 crisis: debt monetization became an essential fiscal tool for governments dealing with the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. As spending surged and tax revenues collapsed, governments around the world issued debt. The OECD estimated that total debt issuance by advanced economies came to $18 trillion in 2020. Overall, the central banks of the OECD group made purchases equivalent to more than half the net issuance of new debt in 2020. Hence, government deficits were financed by having one branch of government — the central bank — buying the debt issued by another branch of government — the treasury. In brief, the notion of budget constraints has been revealed as a myth.
This is not to say that EU countries can create and spend money without limit. There are limits, but they have nothing to do with budgets or deficits. The key limit is inflation: if you spend too much money on the economy, demand gets too high and risks driving excess inflation, especially if there are labour and resource limitations. Governments can use taxation to mitigate this risk. Hence, the purpose of taxation is not to fund government spending, but rather to reduce excess demand. As previously explained, we can do this in a progressive manner by taxing high-wealth individuals drastically more since their ecological footprint is out of scale compared to the rest of the population.
So, in short, the European Central Bank and other central banks in the EU would create money in order to expand the use-value economy (the things that people actually need to live well), and member states then use taxation to regulate the exchange-value economy, and to reduce excess private consumption (in order to keep the economy in balance with the living world). With this approach, the question of “Will the EU have enough GDP in a post-growth scenario to provide for thriving lives?” becomes less relevant. The EU can generate funding for public services and the job guarantee without thinking about GDP. GDP becomes an irrelevant indicator. Indeed, parts of the economy that are presently measured by GDP might shrink, but that is not a problem because in a post-growth economy GDP is not the primary arbiter of provisioning.
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On Palestine
A letter to friends and colleagues. Our statement and call to action in support of Palestine.
July 2025
Dear colleagues and friends:
We, the members of Research & Degrowth International (R&Di), write from a place of deep sorrow, moral urgency, and collective outrage. For 22 months now, we have been witnessing a live- streamed, systematic genocide of the Palestinian people. We have been watching in horror as international powers have actively supported the genocide and “business as usual” with Israel. They have prioritised trade, colonial agreements, and racist policies over human lives and ecological stability. We know that Israel (backed by the US, UK and most EU countries) is using Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons. With global superpowers and multi-national businesses not just supporting but profiting from these atrocities. As the political elite abandon even rhetorical commitments to sustainability, equality, and peace, it falls to civil society to urgently pursue the goals of environmental and social justice for humanity’s survival.
Our stance
As R&Di, we stand in unconditional solidarity with Palestine and with the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Because their freedom is bound up with the freedom and survival of all oppressed peoples. Because there can be no Degrowth future without freedom for Palestine. Because Degrowth is fundamentally a liberation struggle; liberation from the Growth paradigm which relies on a colonial system of extraction, exploitation and vast inequalities in order to function.
Historical background & context
What is happening now is not an isolated conflict—it is the continuation of 75 years of apartheid, colonization, and occupation perpetrated by the State of Israel. Israel today is not just a state; it is an illegal occupation backed up and legitimised by a wider network of global oppression. A network that includes arms dealers, banks, surveillance companies, media outlets, tech platforms, and the political establishments of so-called liberal democracies, which contribute to funding and enabling the current genocide. Although finding effective paths to oppose resistance is profoundly challenging, we must not shy away from this task, otherwise we are complicit. Boycotting, divesting and sanctioning companies that support the Israeli war machine is one way we can exercise our power.
The post-war European and US powers engineered the conditions for the Nakba and have purposefully conflated anti-semitism with opposition to expansionist forms of zionism. The conflation of anti-semitism with anti-zionism has become a strategy to gag anyone who opposes a racially pure Israeli state. In effect this has created a weaponization of Jewish historical suffering to legitimize Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. The use of the Shoah/Holocaust as political justification for ethnic cleansing is a perverse inversion of justice—exploiting the memory of one genocide to perpetrate another. We categorically condemn this manipulative politicization of the Jewish people’s historical and current suffering. We stand alongside the many Jewish people who are joining their voices against the genocide perpetrated by Israel in Palestine.
The destruction of Gaza is a systematic extermination of the Palestinian people for the future habitation by colonial settlers. It is a necessary condition to achieve the Zionist vision of ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It is being perpetrated by (internationally wanted) war criminals. The repeated bombings of densely populated areas, the destruction of hospitals, schools, and universities, the systematic killings of journalists and medics, the intentional production of mass starvation and the blockage of humanitarian aid, are irrefutable evidence of genocide.
We therefore condemn, in the strongest terms:
- Israel’s Colonial Project: An apartheid regime enforcing institutionalized segregation; unlawful imprisonment of Palestinians, including minors; systemic discrimination; and land expropriation.
- Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank: Relentless settlement expansion, destruction of Palestinian agrarian livelihoods, and state-sanctioned violence displacing entire communities.
- The Genocidal Assault on Gaza: The deliberate targeting of journalists, medical workers, and civilians—including children—and the complete decimation of civilian infrastructure.
- The fact that Western countries continue to arm, fund, and politically shield Israel amid such atrocities: The persistent failure to equally uphold the rights of Palestinians reveals a profound hypocrisy. Once again, the lives of racialized people are treated as expendable.
- Western countries refusal to sever economic, cultural, and sports ties with Israel: Even though Israel has one of the worst track records in upholding international law and human rights, Western countries continue their economic, and cultural cooperation with Israel.
The genocide is unfolding in the context of rising militarization and the resurgence of far-right nationalism, globally. Countries with fascist histories—such as Germany and Italy—are re-arming rapidly while edging closer to handing power to ultranationalist forces. The West’s role in this horror is not unprecedented: it echoes its support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and its violent suppression of anti-colonial struggles across the Global South, and the ongoing eradication of indigenous peoples and cultures.
The industrial military complex, which includes Israel’s weapons industry and its global arms networks, plays a central role in the destruction of land, water, and life. The continued growth of military industrial complex is accelerating the exceeding of planetary boundaries—fuelling the sixth mass extinction, driving climate collapse, and creating permanent cycles of ecocide. Israel’s security policy, frequently involving military aggressions against neighboring states, is a significant driver of regional instability and a major obstacle to lasting peace. While Israel frames these actions as preemptive or retaliatory, they perpetuate cycles of violence and deepen hostilities. Compounding this, Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear arsenal – developed outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and without full International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards– creates persistent insecurity and fuels a regional arms race.
Our call to colleagues
Standing with Palestine needs to involve action, using the privilege we have. As researchers, teachers, activists and practitioners of degrowth we must:
- use our individual and collective platforms to put pressure on governments to stop Israel’s genocide on Gaza with immediate effect and allow humanitarian aide to enter the region.
- educate ourselves, our students and people outside of the classroom on decoloniality and ecological economics and how these relate to the Palestinian people’s inherent rights to life, land and resources. The ecological transition to a postgrowth world is impossible without the liberation of the peoples under the yoke of colonialism and imperialism.
- bridge the gap between the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and western societies and cultures, a divide deliberately widened over centuries by Western elites to justify imperialism. Racist idealogies used to dehumanise, demonise and “other” those who are not white and in power are still deeply embedded in our economic, political, educational, and social systems. To change these unjust systems our institutions must decolonize knowledge frameworks and curricula: starting with prioritising marginalized, Indigenous, and non- western cultures, values and knowledge systems.
- put aside small ideological differences and work together as a movement to fight all forms of oppression including colonial, patriarchal and imperial oppression. These are intrinsically bound to the destruction of living systems, maintain extreme inequalities, and the primacy of the growth imperative.
- actively join the BDS and Palestine solidarity movement to condemn Israel in its destruction of Palestine. We must support activists on BDS and solidarity initiatives internationally and in our local contexts.
We stand in solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian people. We assert that the liberation of the Palestinian people must be self-determined and unconditionally supported, and it is not our place to judge the means to achieve it. Our enemies are united (zionists, imperialists, fascists) and they want us disunited in our support for the cause of Palestinian liberation. But Palestine is today the litmus test of our collective moral compass. We do not have the right to remain neutral or passive about it; instead we have the responsibility to use our privileged positions to support the Palestinian cause.
In solidarity for a Free Palestine!
Members of Research & Degrowth International
Authors: Filka Sekulova and Giacomo D’Alisa
Citation: D’Alisa, G.; Sekulova, F. (2025, September). Europe beyond growth: The proposal for a Universal Care Income [Policy brief n.2]. Research & Degrowth International. https://degrowth.org/blog/2025/06/17/uci-for-europe/
If European authorities want to put care at the centre, they urgently need to shift the focus of their policies away from extraction, industrial production, and consumption that is fuelling ecological and social breakdown and instead put emphasis on social and environmental care, regeneration, and reproduction. A Universal Care Income, we argue, is a main instrument to move in this direction, and can liberate Europe from the grips of a destructive path of a one-way future consisting only of growth.
The lockdowns we all experienced during Covid19 made us realize the importance of care activities and the need for a social system that puts life at the centre of its political concerns. On the other hand, the lockdowns revealed also how doing so is socially and economically unsustainable for a market system that is still obsessed with growth.
Beyond the EU Care Strategy
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was hard for anyone to disagree that care was essential. Commentators and many people welcomed the news in 2022 when the European Commission approved a resolution (COM 2022/440) to launch a Care Strategy for Europe (CSE). The strategy was drafted in a moment of intense debate about the importance of essential workers, the backbone of which were formal and informal carers. However, the CSE did not go far enough.
The CSE was the Commission’s response to the European Parliament’s initiatives motivated by the fact that the European Green Deal lacked a gender perspective and did not pay attention to care (EP 2019/2169). The CSE aims to facilitate access to care, improve the quality of care services and make care more affordable for all European citizens. Moreover, it aspires to improve the working conditions for formal care workers, and to foster an equal gender distribution of caring activities both in the spheres of market and at home to guarantee a fairer work-life balance among all carers. The Commission proposed a number of steps in fulfilling these objectives, in particular in relation to childcare and long-term elderly care.
The European Commission’s approval of the CSE opened a new policy path, as care has historically, largely been hidden and undervalued, creating persistent inequality against carers, the large majority of whom are women, and in particular women from marginalised communities. As the resolution states, 90 per cent of formal care workers are women, and 7.7 million women in Europe are so burdened with unpaid care work that it renders them unable to enter the job market. Researchers at the European Parliamentary Research Service have defined women’s earnings lost due to care work as the “unpaid care penalty” (Fernandes and Navarra, 2022), estimating it at approximately €242 billion per year. Women in Europe dedicate, on average, 2-3 more hours per day to care work than men (EP News, 2022), so up to an extra month and a half every year. Even with the difficulty of calculating exact figures, it is clear that men historically have accumulated ‘a caring debt’ that creates structural gender inequality.
However, the CSE does not offer a clear definition of care. Moreover, its narrow focus on care for children and the ageing European population, implies that only special groups in society need care during specific moments of their life. Thus, it misses the importance of many daily caring activities that sustain both people and the environment.
In this brief, we argue that it is time to both relaunch and reframe this debate and that the European parliamentarians’ call for a Care Deal for Europe (EP 2021/2253) is a great opportunity for institutionalising the right to care as a pillar of the European way of life. To do so, we propose the right to an unconditional income, which we call a Universal Care Income (UCI), that should be granted across Europe to everyone, to recognise all the care work, everyone performs and that sustains life. The UCI unveils and rewards the invisible levels of self, reciprocal, and mutual care that sustain society and ecosystems. It honours all those activities that societies and ecosystems require to be healthy and functioning, from childcare to communal forest management, from disability support to community gardens, from neighbourhood meals to seeds sharing.
It is our contention that a sustainable, equitable, and democratic Europe must be rebuilt on this shared care work. In this light, the proposed council recommendation (COM 2022/0299) on a guaranteed minimum income to raise everyone above the national poverty line is palliative. It has been shown that means-tested social policies (such as a minimum income) enhance social stigma and reproduce economic disparities. We argue that a universal, unconditional income based on recognising care as the essential element that guarantees the well-being of people, their communities and the environment is the most adequate response to Europeans’ multiple crises. It is also widely popular with the public and a winning political proposition. This is the political vision upon which a progressive European Care Deal for Europe can be built to go beyond the narrow approach of the existing care strategy. A UCI makes possible a paradigm shift away from a market-dominated Europe, to a Europe of the people, pursuing care and sufficiency for the well-being of all. A Europe therefore that can prosper without growth.
What do we mean by Care?
Care comprises all daily activities humans perform to ensure their well-being and reproduce a healthy socio-environmental context in which they live and thrive. This includes such diverse activities as looking after children, household chores, companionship to the elderly and the sick, and nourishing relationships to sustain healthy and flourishing social bonds. Care activities also manifest in preparing a common neighbourhood meal, tending to community gardens, cleaning coastal and mountain paths, participating in communal water management and preventive activities against forest fires. While a substantial amount of time goes to caring activities most of this work remains invisible, as only paid work is valued in market economies. Our societies, and many of us, often unconsciously embody patriarchal values that serve capital well and have learned to depreciate care work and shift it mainly to women. Current economic policies – and the market ideology that informs them – help obscure the time dedicated to care. This must change.
Having said that, we do not want to reproduce here a feel-good idea of caring that denies the difficult side of caring that involves drudgery. Caregiving often requires boring repetitive tasks, hard work and sacrifice as in the case of turning a bed-bound person with sores, clearing up hazardous waste in mountain paths or simply thinking again and again, day after day, what to cook for your family members. Giving and receiving care can often be difficult, sometimes even disgusting, and create stress, tension, and resentment. It can also strain relations as when children do not recognise the hard work of a mum absorbed in the daily chores and see it as a lack of love. Caring is a daily life practice that makes the carer as well as the receiver experience interdependence and vulnerability; it is not a painless pleasure free of obligation.
Our growth economies promise the illusion of a life without pain and effort as the apex of human emancipation and progress. The idea of liberation from drudgery remains the ideological backbone of economic growth. However, this fantasy is only available to the privileged few who can outsource the ongoing work, pain, and suffering required to maintain their lifestyles to racialised and impoverished others. The white, educated, rich, European men (and increasingly women) are liberated from the fatigues of life, but only by shifting the costs of their own life to other human and non-human beings that suffer the effects of the exploitation or contamination.
The lack of dignity attributed to care work is linked to the fact that it is women and racialized others that do most of this work. It is not a surprise then that it was radical feminist thinkers that first revealed the importance of care and developed economic theories focused on the reproduction of life, debates enriched and expanded by ecofeminism (Salleh, 2017). It is this feminism thinking that underlies the idea of a UCI, as we will explain further on.
Degrowth for Care
Many feminists have shown that serious engagement with care work is in tension with the formality and detachment that characterise the economic sphere and the growth-led mode of production (Picchio, 2011). Some feminists have highlighted this tension focusing particularly on reproductive care work. The care of a sick person for example follows an illness’s biological time, the care of a pasture the seasons’ cyclical time; the economy instead follows a linear notion of time, seeking to increase productivity and efficiency. Efficiency and productivity underpin hiring and employment, but mothers need to slow down productivity due to the care work newborns and young children, which have their own rhythms indifferent to those of the market economy. As a result people with no care duties are preferred to mothers when it comes to employment.
Time marks a fundamental distinction between (market-based) production and (non-market) social (re)production. In care, time is not allocated based on efficiency but follows the rhythms of human bodies and nature: the sick person must be attended to at the moment of need, the needs of a newborn must be met as they arise, the seed sowed during a specific season. In market activities, time is clocked and follows the logic of maximising profit. Market productivism is thus at odds with the time of care in that it is led by the ups and downs of market supply and demand and uprooted from the ecological times of human and ecosystem regeneration. Furthermore, the time for care work is relational and has a qualitative dimension that cannot be perfectly substituted, e.g. paid babysitting is not the same as parenthood. A paid babysitter working under the pressure of employers is not the same as a parent – and this marketization of care work has a social and a moral cost. It is problematic hence that care activities are increasingly commodified, submitted to the logic of economic growth rather than human choices. This is one more reason why a truly ‘caring Europe’ needs to abandon the obsession with growth.
Degrowth scholars and activists put care at the core of their proposals for transformation to enhance and improve the life conditions of formal and informal carers, re-balance the care burden across genders, and guarantee the ‘freedom to care’ (D’Alisa et al., 2015). A common trap into which multiple care-focused public policies such as the CSE can fall is valorising market arrangements and the freedom to enter the job market as superior to the freedom to care. Growth-driven economies seek solutions that privilege those caring processes that are marketised, industrialised, or even outsourced. Such approaches tend to undo social bonds and even increase overall energy demand. Studies show household care is less energy-intensive than the service care sector. Marketised care activities often involve more commuting (which is very energy intensive), such as when care workers commute to elderly care homes (Eicker and Keil, 2017; D’Alisa and Cattaneo, 2013).
In contrast, degrowth advocates for public policies promoting a ‘care infrastructure’ of proximity – non-commodified care processes, including self-organised mutual support. In this strand, forms of living and producing, such as cohousing and parental collectives that care for their children, form a crucial piece of a degrowth economy.
What policy frameworks such as the CSE also fail to recognise is the crucial role of community-based care services, like voluntary associations of animal care, food banks, collective litter picking on coastal and mountain paths, forest communal management or social solidarity health clinics. Public authorities must urgently guarantee that resources and spaces such as buildings, and public tool libraries are provided for mutual support and local self-organisations that promote care beyond nuclear family kinships. A society of care furthermore requires working time reduction so that people have the time and emotional resources for care and for caring in common.
Along with radical feminist writers (Federici, 2010), degrowth advocates see care and reproduction activities as a collective endeavour. They argue that the concept of caring extends beyond the household and includes many activities that pertain to maintaining the integrity of life such as communal forest management and biodiversity protection (AA. VV. 2019). In the context of the Global South, the work performed by subsistence communities like agro-pastoralists and artisanal fishers in maintenance work for their surrounding ecosystems is caring for the environment.
Why a Universal Care Income?
A Universal Care Income aims to visibilize and recognise the centrality of caring and reproductive work, honouring and giving material support to those who, whether they want to or not, make the material, psychological and emotional effort involved in the reproduction of life day after day. A Universal Care Income is an unconditional and differentiated monetary transfer that all adults living in Europe should receive every month – for example, an amount above the poverty line established as 60 per cent of the median income in a country, i.e. at least €1150 in Germany and €815 in Italy for an individual. This income should be universal and unconditional because the care work done to meet the material needs of human and non-human life is done by everyone and should be compensated by collectively produced wealth. And it should be differentiated because women have historically contributed more to our societies’ care work and should as a matter of principle receive proportionally more than their male peers.
This approach is rooted in the feminist campaign for a wage for domestic work in Italy in the 1970s, which became an international movement. It rejected the assumptions that care activities were ‘naturally’ feminine, and that they did not produce value for society. The women’s movement showed how the exploitation of predominantly male workers at the factory was linked to the exploitation of women ‘in the kitchen’ (so to speak). To ask for a wage for domestic work was to demand from the owners of capital to pay the cost of the hours and hours of unpaid work involved in reproducing the workers upon the work of which the capitalists then made profits.
Today the campaign for UCI goes beyond this early idea of wages for housework, promoting as it does the idea that care and reproductive work are not just in the realm of the household but involving carework in and for communities and ecosystems. Indeed, as argued in the previous section, there is an indissoluble relationship between human beings, communities, and the environment in which they live. What these spheres have in common is precisely the effort to care for human beings and their health, for urban commons, for agricultural land and forests, for the water cycle and climate, and for non-human life and the ecological systems that support it. Capital appropriates the care and reproductive work women and men do to sustain life on Earth, and this is what a UCI aims to redistribute back.
A Universal Care Income for Europe
We have argued above that the proposal of a Universal Care Income should be at the forefront of any European care strategy, reinforcing its principles and acting as the first attempt to challenge growth dependencies in Europe. We maintain that a Care Deal for Europe offers a good opportunity to do so.
The UCI proposal aims to reformulate the Universal Basic Income proposal on a materialist principle, according to which an unconditional income has to be recognised for the work done for caring for human and non-human beings and habitats. We argue that universal income should not be given merely as a safety guarantee to avoid poverty or compensate for unemployment, and should not only be given so that everyone can have the economic independence to participate meaningfully as a citizen in democracy (the two arguments typically marshalled in support of a UBI). It should be given because everyone does care work that contributes to our commonwealth.
As per the practical design and the definition of the level and distribution of a UCI, we suggest, first, to set up it at a minimum amount above the poverty line of each European country, and second, to avoid a top-down implementation by launching a larger-scale public debate concerning implementation questions. This debate should be launched in safe spaces for debate and discussion on various levels to respect the sensibilities and necessities of various peoples and localities. The actual design of UCI should be geographically and place-based, considering the multiple subjectivities and typologies of care work that exist in practice.
Box 1: On the Care Income in Italy
Italian women do reproductive chores and care for more than double the time men do. Fig 1 shows the introduction of a Basic Income, a Care Income and both policies in combination with a Working Time Reduction. The first important result concerns the female and male income levels ratio. It shows that Care Income, and Care Income plus Working Time Reduction, are the best policies to reduce the income gender gap in Italy. In particular, the Care Income plus Working Time Reduction policies increase the ratio to 0.90.
The core equity principle of a universal care income aims to give more to those who contribute more to caring; thus, even more interesting is the result shown in Fig. 2, i.e. a Care Income plus Working Time Reduction policy combination increases the gross income growth rate for unemployed and retired females substantially. Those better off with this combination policy are middle and low skilled women, who normally do more unpaid work overall
For the sake of illustration and as a thought experiment, we empirically estimate the impacts of a UCI in Italy, assuming that women are paid more to compensate for a historical and current gender care debt (Box 1). In this case, UCI can be mainly funded with a progressive increase in taxation for those in higher income brackets. The preliminary results show that those that benefit more from such a policy are those that deserve more as they do on average more care work: middle-aged low-skilled women.
In 2019 civil society launched a progressive proposal for a European Green New Deal. Its proponents included in their programme, which had many features of post-growth, a proposal for a care income. Since then, and in synergy with leading Global Women’s Strike network activists, the proponents of that policy have been promoting a care income worldwide. For the campaigners, putting the focus on care and reproductive work challenges the economic growth model and the care crises it has led to. There are different ideas on how to implement the UCI, and once it becomes part of the political agenda, there will be plenty of room to discuss the actual implementation in diverse localities. For example, some feminist movements in rural areas around the world demand as a care income access to land over cash payments (James and Lopez, 2021).
UCI: Objections and Responses
Here are our responses to six potential issues that the implementation of UCI could raise
Box 2: The B-Mincome pilot Barcelona and its relevance for a potential UCI application in Europe
B-Mincome aimed to test the efficiency and effectiveness of combining economic aid in the form of Municipal Inclusion Support (MIS, i.e. a guaranteed minimum income) with social policies (related to employment, social economy, community participation and housing) in Barcelona’s Eix Besòs area. The MIS was provided to 915 households, randomly selected from the users of municipal social services. The maximum amount a household could get was €1676 per month. The programme included modalities such as the obligation to participate in a range of social policies, or the introduction of means-testing, which reduced the monetary benefit whenever household earnings surpassed a set threshold.
The project is relevant to the question of a UCI in that women comprised the group majority, representing about 2/3 of all beneficiaries. Almost all of them had substantial care-work load, and up to 86 per cent of all participants had children under 18. Almost all participants enjoyed a greater sense of financial and material well-being as a result of receiving the B-MINCOME income and were better able to meet their household’s needs for food, clothing, household essentials, and services. Crucially, many women spent the income on improving their children’s lives, including tuition pay (eg attending semi-private schools), or enrollment in extracurricular activities. Others used the benefit to pay for care services and medications that were otherwise inaccessible to them (due to gaps in public provisioning, for example). For a minority of participants, employment was unlikely to become a realistic possibility or goal, due to poor health or extensive caring responsibilities, especially for single mothers. For these people, B-MINCOME provided a much-needed financial safety net.
The common profile of B-Mincome recipients manifests the higher rates of economic vulnerability among women, all driven by pervasive gender and racial discrimination. As a result of the income some women felt empowered within the family unit, and challenged abusive relationships and existing gender roles. It was mostly women who opted to join the community participation project modality (making 77 percent of all participants), even though the activity was open to all household members associated with the scheme. Through these activities’ women created new or expanded and rebuilt existing social networks. These spaces proved to be fundamental sources of solidarity in moments of social exclusion, gender violence or economic vulnerability. One notable example is the Dones Cosidores collective, established as a result of the project. This community initiative promotes the self-employment of women from various ethnic backgrounds in the field of sewing.
Is there a chance that the UCI could reward more rich women who do little care work than poor men who do lots of care work?
UCI is a policy that recognises the enormous care debt that the vast majority of men have towards women. It addresses women as a collective and not as individuals. Just as with the campaign for recognising the ecological debt owned by Northern countries to the South, the UCI should be framed as a type of reparation for historical injustice towards women. However, high-income women will not receive more than low-income men if the implementation of the UCI is associated with a progressive increase in income taxation, as is the case we presented in Box 1. In this example high-income Italian women will receive more, but they will also be paying much more in taxes than low-income men; low-income men will be better-off after the implementation of UCI.
Thus, to properly address the intersectionality of power and privileges, the UCI needs to be accompanied by other complementary policies such as progressive income taxation, the establishment of income ceilings, as well as working time reduction and job-guarantee schemes, as suggested in the broader degrowth literature.
Doesn’t the UCI reproduce gender binaries?
The UCI, as proposed in this brief, indeed differentiates between gender, in order to address a patriarchal legacy in which women do much more care work. Consequently, they have to be rewarded proportionally. However, the proponents have no intention of discriminating against individuals who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming. We maintain that to avoid reinforcing gender roles and stereotypes, UCI implementation needs to be place-based and democratically designed.
Doesn’t paying women more further cement their role as primary carers? Can’t men say, ‘you are being paid more, so do more’?
Indeed, some feminist writing suggests that a Universal Basic Income (UBI) could confine women to the household, especially when the gains of the marginal income obtained from the labour market are inferior to the monthly UBI benefit (Robeyns, 2010). Others, however, argue that such policy measures could grant women a baseline economic autonomy, fostering their position vis-à-vis the household and the capacity to negotiate the distribution of care-related responsibilities. A universal care income could also give women the time to develop the skills and training they need to earn a better living (Rodriguez, 2016). However, the outcome of such a huge redistributive policy that will change a series of social and economic incentives will not be linear, as it will also depend on a series of cultural traits that vary across geographies. We know from empirical research on pilot implementations, such as the one in Barcelona (see Box 2), that women who receive money are empowered, in most cases, at the family and societal level, and they feel economically safer to break with abusive relationships
How does UCI differ from Universal Basic Income? Isn’t it strategically unwise to start a new parallel campaign to that for a UBI that already has a certain momentum and split efforts in two?
Supporters of different political visions defend a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a political economy measure to tackle changes in industrial society that lead to increasing unemployment, poverty, etc. On the one hand, there is an Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, which in most cases supports UBI for instrumental reasons such as keeping poverty or inequalities within a manageable level, in effect seeing the UBI as way to guarantee the stability of capitalist society. On the other hand, there is the European social-republican tradition, which supports UBI because according to them to enjoy freedom and practice democracy effectively each individual must have adequate and secure material conditions. None of these narratives have as the core of their arguments the recognition of the care and reproduction work humans individually and collectively do for their personal, community well-being, and in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. This latter materialist approach that underpins our proposal for a UCI follows the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” and is very different from the liberal claims for a UBI. However, it reinforces the argument of social-republicans for material independence. It is not by chance that recently the latter have been more and more open to integrating radical feminists’ claims and criticisms in their research and campaigns. What UCI aspires to do is to make care and material needs core arguments of existing campaigns. One strand of the UBI universe for example which is particularly well aligned with the UCI is the Unconditional Autonomy Allowance (UAA) proposal (Liegey et al. 2013). Inspired by critical political theory, the UAA is indeed meant to redistribute paid and unpaid work while enhancing mutual aid, voluntary and social activity, community care, political activism, and democratic decision-making. And as our UCI proposal, it is to be funded by increasing progressive taxation.
Nonetheless, we should note that many evaluations of current UBI experiments are dominated by rather narrow, market-liberal orientations, focusing largely on the extent to which the measure enhances employability (Verho et al. 2021). From a critical political, feminist and care-based standpoint, and in a context of increasing “in-work poverty”, “bullshit jobs”, and decreasing job meaningfulness, the core achievement of a UBI/UCI shall not be measured by the level of improved employability but by goals such as mental and bodily health, access to education and basic services, including housing, and gender justice. In that respect, many short-term, UBI pilots score reasonably well, as shown in the example in Box 2 from Barcelona.
How do we know that a UCI will have positive social effects?
Just as the ‘wages for housework’ demand was never meant as a stand-alone policy for the movement in the 1970s, recent applications of the UBI demonstrate that cash transfers for women accompanied by policies that strengthen community ties and social bonding have resulted in the establishment of solidarity networks, work-related and in-family emancipation (see Box 2).
How will a UCI be financed? Will it not take public revenue out of other important public services? Wouldn’t it increase debt, especially in a context of degrowth that you advocate here?
In the framework of Care Deal for Europe, we propose an income paid using the long-term EU and Next Generation EU budgets. In general, potential sources for a UCI include progressive income and wealth taxation (including 100 per cent rates above excessively high incomes and wealth levels – what has been called maximum income or wealth institutions). Other possible avenues include taxes on resource extraction, taxing financial transactions, prohibiting tax havens, and tax breaks for large-scale corporations. This could be done more easily if the campaign for UCI was associated with the billionaire campaign to implement fairer taxation. Financed through a substantial change in taxation structure, UCI should not significantly affect public debt.
Giacomo D’Alisa is a political ecological economist whose interdisciplinary, action-oriented research advances sustainability and environmental governance. With over 70 publications, including journal articles, book chapters, and landmark works on degrowth, he has significantly influenced both academia and policy. As Research Director at ICTA-UAB, he explores societal metabolic shifts, environmental justice, and the tensions between growth and degrowth. He also directs the Master’s program in Political Ecology, Environmental Justice, and Degrowth, contributing to the field’s consolidation and transformation.
Filka Sekulova is a senior researcher based in the Department of Economic History, Institutions, Politics and World Economy at the University of Barcelona. Her work is placed at the intersection of (ecological) economics (PhD, MS, BS), psychology (BS), and social sciences, with focus on degrowth, tourism and urban nature, through the perspectives of justice, community organizing and subjective well-being. Her research furthermore explores the barriers and opportunities for post-growth scenarios and policies. Filka is a co-founder of the international think tank Research and Degrowth and a member of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice.