A Post Growth Deal

Informations projet

REAL

N° de convention de subvention: 101071647

DOI

10.3030/101071647

Date de signature de la CE 19 Janvier 2023

Date de début 1 Mai 2023

Date de fin 30 Avril 2029

Financé au titre de

• European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 9 994 960,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 9 994 960,00

Coordonné par

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REAL (A Post Growth Deal)

Période du rapport: 2024-11-01 au 2026-04-30

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

The global economy is driving dangerous climate breakdown and overshooting multiple planetary boundaries.At the same time,large portions of the human population remain unable to meet basic needs.We ask:How can we achieve rapid emissions reductions and bring resource use back to sustainable levels while ending poverty and ensuring good lives for all?Our project(www.realpostgrowth.eu)fills a social science gap between the empirical and quantitative imperative to remain within planetary boundaries and the configurations of policies,politics&provisioning systems enabling societies to change course while prioritising wellbeing.Core research bridges post-growth trajectories with real-world feasibility.Focus areas include inter-and intra-national inequalities,trade relations&unequal exchange,labour,existing examples of post-growth,and economic democracy.Objectives:1Propose just&equitable pathways to reduce material&energy use within planetary boundaries.2Provide a toolkit of policies to maintain&improve wellbeing in a post-growth context achieving North-South convergence.3Develop pathways&policies for democratising provisioning systems.4Assess models of political organising to mobilise post-growth deals.5Bridge the gap between theory and implementation through dialogues&decision-making from international to local level.Stakes are high.We live in a poly-crisis with climate&social breakdown looming.Thinking outside the box(continuous exponential growth is a must),REAL offers ways for European societies to prosper without growth and remain solidary to the rest of the world

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

Team Kallis:focussed on two main research lines,a study of political eco-social transformations and a study of real-existing degrowth territories and practices.In ecosocial transformations,research focused on conceptual development to establish a theoretical framework for classifying and analysing strategies and dynamics of change and on empirical research design to study social and political movements that test or enrich the framework.The team synthesised elements from the theories of the commons,Erik Olin-Wright's real utopias framework and the world-systems theory perspective.A main achievement is a new framework for ecosocial transformations with two thematic papers,one on movement,unions and party alliances and the other on class organizing.Empirically,researchers started fieldwork with municipalist movements in Catalonia,environmental direct action activists in France,land back movements in California and Indonesia,anti-extractivist movements in Turkey and party movements in Latin America,testing aspects of the incipient framework.In real-existing degrowth,a main achievement was the publication of a first paper on reclaiming tradition in post growth transformations(case studies from traditional institutions in the Iberian peninsula) and the development of a diagnostic framework for studying real existing degrowth.Team Hickel:focused on three main tasks,a research line on unequal exchange to understand how growth and capital accumulation in the global North depends on net-appropriation of resources from the global South and how the South can achieve liberation and pursue paths toward economic sovereignty and national development using multi-regional input-output models;a research line building post-growth climate mitigation scenarios in collaboration with Steinberger to develop a comprehensive framework for post-growth scenario modelling and a new IAM compatible with post-growth objectives for IPCC review to explore reduction of energy and material use in the core,convergence with the global South and access to decent-living standards;and a research line on post-growth policies involving a coherent policy framework tested in a state-of-the-art ecological macroeconomic model.Team Steinberger:is contributing to multiple tasks:research on conceptualising and estimating drivers of well-being(Tamberg PhD)3 papers submitted;research on estimating international labour footprints,their sectoral and geographic distribution,inequality in labour footprints and international sectoral productivity differences(Nag PhD)2 papers under review;three strands exploring economic democracy around provisioning systems,sociology and culture,climate mitigation planning and synthetic modelling;research into the geopolitics of postgrowth;and a large part of the team focused on building a postgrowth IAM led by Fisch,Millward and Oswald in collaboration with Slamersak and Sanchez from Barcelona,with significant progress

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

Team Kallis:still in its design and development phase,one early result with potential impact is the development of a diagnostic framework to analyse growth dependencies at the municipal level.The team is collaborating with the city of Girona to test the model and advise decision makers on post growth policies.As part of this collaboration,a toolkit is being developed for studying,identifying and strategizing(on how to break from)growth dependencies,which could be used by other 'post-growth cities' around Europe.A core component consists of participation and engagement processes where activists,citizens and policy makers are helped through facilitated focus groups to make their own sense of growth dependencies and identify leverage points through which change beyond growth dependence could be catalyzed.Team Hickel:still in a development phase with researchers’ first set of papers under review or forthcoming,with breakthroughs achieved or soon to be published.One,a paper in Nature Communications titled “Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy” advances the state of the art by assessing South-North flows of embodied labour according to sectors,skill levels and wages,establishing that unequal exchange occurs even when correcting for sector and skill level;two,a paper forthcoming in Global Food Security provides the first-ever assessment of value-capture dynamics in the global agri-food system;three,a paper forthcoming in Nature Climate Change,a collaboration between Hickel and Steinberger,provides the first comprehensive framework for post-growth climate mitigation scenario modelling.Team Steinberger:the results of the PhDs of Tamberg and Nag,with 2–3 submitted papers each,provide groundbreaking insights into the causal framework and measurement of determinants of well-being(Tamberg) and unequal exchange labour dynamics(Nag),significantly changing understanding of their fields and representing major conceptual and empirical advances with academic and policy implications.Tamberg’s work clarifies interlinkages of personal,social and economic determinants of well-being and demonstrates the crucial role of prioritising need satisfaction over economic growth.Nag’s work demonstrates international dependence patterns of labour footprints and the potential of South-South development should the global North drain on global South productive capacity be lifted.On economic democracy,the team developed the first discussion focusing on provisioning systems in Sustainability:Science,Practice and Policy.Finally,PhD Nag led a REAL project-wide effort contributing to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty’s “Roadmap to eradicating poverty without growth,”with concise summaries of policies and research,to be published as a standalone report in autumn 2025,going beyond state of the art in comprehensiveness and dividing policies into those applicable by high-income vs low and middle income countries.