ICTA-UAB to Become Global Hub of Degrowth and Environmental Justice Theories

.The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) will organize the third edition of the Summer School on Degrowth and Environmental Justice from July 4th- 15th. This theory rejects economic growth and advocates the downscaling of production.

.The summer school will gather thirty high-level international researchers in the field of Degrowth and Environmental Justice

For the third year running, the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) will become an international reference center on Degrowth and Environmental Justice.  For ten days, some thirty high-level researchers, academics and activists from twenty different countries will attend the Summer School on Degrowth and Environmental Justice. The aim is to deepen the methods and practices of this economic theory that advocates the downscaling of production and consumption as the only way to increase human well-being and enhance ecological conditions and equity on the planet.

The Summer School on Degrowth and Environmental Justice is organized in collaboration with Research & Degrowth and will take place in the ICTA-UAB building, on the UAB Campus, and in Barcelona (Spain) and Cerbère (France), from July 4th-15th, 2016.



The school will provide the opportunity to address new proposals and alternatives to degrowth, and face some difficult questions. Attendants will discuss which small steps communities, local governments and other levels of societal organization can undertake once they embrace a degrowth frame, what the role is for social movements and ground-level democracy and how the diversity of degrowth sources, strategies and actors can be integrated into a single proposal.

The initiatives that take place in an urban context, where most people in the global North live, will be explored through collaboration with the city council in Barcelona, and focus will be put on effective collective practices and radically democratic solutions for organizing social relationships and serving material needs. The summer school will bring together leading scholars in the field of degrowth and environmental justice such as Joan Martínez Alier, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the UAB and ICTA-UAB researcher; Giorgos Kallis, ICREA researcher at ICTA-UAB and Ulrich Brand, Economist and Political Scientist at the University of Vienna.

The first week of the course will take place at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), where the theoretical foundations of environmental justice and degrowth will be firstly laid out. The second week of the course will take place in Cerbère, in association with Can Decreix, a project of Research & Degrowth dedicated to putting degrowth into practice here and now (http://www.degrowth.org/can-decreix).

Information:

http://summerschool.degrowth.net/