It's not the data that's weird, it's not the analysis that's weird, it's the results. People do not like this result. They think it is very strange that one can get more and more social progress with less and less energy use. This goes against what people are expecting and so there's sort of an allergic reaction to this. It's not only an ecological crisis that we face but a profound social crisis that's characterized by very high levels of inequality that we face as well. And so addressing this double crisis is the objective of our project but also this should be the objective of progressive social movements to understand the ecological and social dimensions together. Conservative analysts now or liberal analysts are saying, yeah, okay, this post-growth or de-growth makes sense but politically it's a non-starter and it's such a huge change that we can't imagine it happening in the current liberal democracies where you can just get like marginal changes and this with a lot of sweat and then they are reversed. And it's true. I mean this critique is very true. So we want to work with it. Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our societies or in other words their resource use and pollution emissions and how to reduce them in a socially just, systemic and context specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities and today we have a very, very special episode that will explore how to escape from the growth economy and ensure social welfare and planetary sustainability for all. Most of the people listening and watching to this podcast already are aware about the ecological crisis, the societal and the injustice crisis that we're facing right now and how perpetual and infinite economic growth driven by GDP as the only indicator is one of the systemic causes behind all of that. Numerous scholars have proposed post-growth, donut economics and a number of our visions for a desirable, just and ecological restorative future. However, it is sometimes unclear how to make this possible, how to make this desirable future a reality. To explore how to develop a post-growth future, I have the pleasure to talk with not one but three fantastic guests and I call them the trinity of degrowth or post-growth. Today with us we have Julia Sandberger, professor of ecological economics from University de Lausanne, George Scalis, professor of ecological economics and political ecology at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and finally Jason Hickel, professor at the Social and Cultural Anthropology Department at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona as well. Together they were awarded an ERC, so European Research Council, Synergy Research and Action Projects, entitled Post-Growth Deal, also between parentheses real. So many of us are extremely excited and curious about this project. However, we cannot find too much of it online and that's why we have this podcast episode today so that you can tell us a bit more about it. Let's let's leave it to there with all that being said. Julia, Jorgos, Jason, thanks so much and welcome back or welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks very much. Great. So you have this project, but before we dive in this project, I would like perhaps because there is the interdisciplinary element into it or transdisciplinary element to it, the Synergy Grant. I would like perhaps for you to share with us how you arrived to Post-Growth because none of us were born in this or started with Post-Growth as our academic endeavor. And you all come from different academic and research backgrounds. You are interdisciplinary researchers as well. So Julia, you were a physicist back in the day, then industrial ecologist and now ecological economist, and you mix a number of them. Jorgos, you were an environmental engineer and you turned a political ecologist and ecological economist. And Jason, your economic anthropologist turned ecological economist as well. So perhaps I would like to take a couple of minutes from each one of you to to tell what were some key turning points in your research career that told you, OK, Post-Growth might be an important element to explore. And I would need to reach it with other disciplines and not only the ones I was trained by. So perhaps, Julia, we can start with you and then we can move with your colleagues. Thanks, I stayed and I think that this is why I was really cringing and feeling quite unworthy when you mentioned this horrible expression of the post-growth trinity, because I came to this topic quite late, I think I was doing industrial ecology and ecological economics. I was looking at where you could see decoupling or not decoupling or efficiency or rebound or those kinds of things. And I was not at all convinced about the necessity of deep growth or post-growth. I wasn't I wouldn't say they were that I was against it. I just was very not convinced of the necessity. I would put it that way. And I sort of had to convince myself through my own research and through the research of colleagues to the fact that this decoupling, this green growth is not happening in reality. If you do see it, it's very partial and not fast enough. And that we need radical changes quite rapidly in order to put things to put ourselves on a safer trajectory. And so that's when I became really myself convinced and started paying a lot more attention to the work of people like Yorgos and Jason that I should have been paying attention to all along, perhaps. And and others as well. I mean, there's lots of really great researchers in this domain, like, you know, Mattia Schmelzer and all kinds of other people. So thanks. Yorgos, perhaps you would like to how was your journey between becoming an environmental engineering thing? You were working on water back in the day. And then perhaps you asked, what if we don't continue building more pipes or what was the the journey there? It's too much water and I got drunk. I got bored of water, you know, if you work on the same topic over and over, I was telling some of the other day, you know, at the end. Not I mean, not to brag, but, you know, if you work 10, 12 years on a very narrow topic, at some point, you listen to everything that can be said about, you've thought about it. And then you're just becoming updated to the latest controversy, what has changed, you know, privatization, municipalization. But the basic the basic ideas are there. And then I felt you feel you start feeling stuck while with post growth or the growth is not the same because it's about everything. So you can never you can never know enough about it. You know, you can you can read and read and read from politics to to models to I mean, it includes everything. No, the transition, I mean, came to me in the sense that when I arrived in Barcelona in 2008 to work with John Martinez earlier and his group that they were standing environmental conflicts around the world. One of the main figures of ecological economics, John Martinez earlier, he wrote one of the first books, the first meeting of the Society of Ecological Economics to place in Barcelona, 87, I think or something like that. I got trained here in a summer school in 1999. I was just an environmental scientist, as you said. And then I did I came for for a different reason into a summer school here. And I was introduced to ecological economics and I really liked it. And then I turned my PhD around ecological economics. So I was coming as a junior professor in where I wanted to be. And around at the time that I came a little bit later, I think there was the first international conference on degrowth taking place in Paris. And most most of the students here and John went there. I didn't know what it was. And I don't know why I was bored of going to Paris. So so I didn't go. I think I was the only person who didn't go. I was working in empty corridors for a while. And then everyone came back super excited. And it's like I was very good, you know, etc. And then somehow I started reading about it. What was this conference on degrowth? What is the growth? And it resonated with many ideas that I had. I mean, my postdoc at Berkeley was with Richard Norgard, who was a critic of the idea of development, of unilinear development, of the idea, economists understand development. And I was also trained in political ecology, which is that's a very broadly speaking. It's a Marxist and Foucaultian critic of capitalism. So these were my two lines of training, but what I lacked, especially from political ecology and the whole Marxist critique, which I think is very incisive, but it was lacking a little bit of effort to form relate the alternative, to link to groups that demand different things. And that was what one could find in Barcelona that there was much more engagement with social movements, with indigenous groups, with mobilizations here in Catalonia. And then when this whole thing started being formulated around the concept of growth, the concept of degrowth, the critique to economic growth, that is I think fundamental for ecological economics, I jumped on the train. So of course, there has been numerous degrowth and ecological economic conferences since then. We're gonna get back to the Beyond Growth Conference as well a bit later on. How about you, Jason? What was your journey in navigating these troubling waters? Well, for me, I came at it from world system research, which is what I was doing in my trier life. I was based at LSE before and I had just finished a book. I was writing a book on global inequality and neocolonial structures in the world economy. And I finished it and I gave it, I gave the manuscript to a colleague and he said, you should probably talk a little bit about the ecological crisis since this is a big deal. And you should have some kind of reference to it now. So I started looking a little bit at flows of materials and emissions and energy and so on. Then I realized, wow, you can't tell the story of global inequality in the world system without paying attention to these, so like physical material flows. And I realized that the way that the world economy operates is that growth in the global north depends on this massive extraction of materials and energy and embodied labor from the global south, which is deeply deleterious to their capacity to advance national development objectives and also offshore is all the ecological damages and social damages associated with northern growth. And so this became fascinating for me and I really wanted to understand it more and I discovered post-growth as a result of this basically. I started reading work by people in the field and then I met Yorgos by chance in London who sat me down at a cafe in Russell Square. And he was like, look, you know. D-Gro's part one, yeah, let's start. He was like, look, there are these ideas, you have to pay attention to them. So, and I was like, I don't know if I'm totally convinced. But then I started reading and I thought, wow, this is a fascinating field that is really like, I mean, really captivating and exciting. And I felt like it contributes something with a political economy kind of analysis. And that's more or less what I've been doing. So I've always come at the question of D-Gro's from a kind of, let's call it a kind of anti-colonial perspective, I suppose. And that remains really interesting to me. Yeah, and I think that's what I enjoy very much with this field is that it comes with layers of understanding. And even if I come from one particular, let's say, tradition of research, measuring flows and stocks and stuff like that, I realize that I need to relearn everything every time I discuss with another scholar in this field, which is so enriching. And perhaps we can use just another question to discuss about the diagnosis before we dive in into the project. And in your case, Jason, I think you just mentioned it. You say that, well, of course, there is an intricate relationship between the relationship between inequality and ecological destruction and how these are masked or caused by capitalism or new ways of colonialism. You talk a lot about resource plundering. You talk a lot about whose growth is it really or who is developing who. Yeah, these are, of course, in your book, The Less is More. Do you want perhaps to elaborate a bit further about how these relationship between the two, so ecological and societal streams are deeply rooted in the past and we are somehow in an interwoven system that does not allow to do one without the other. So even green-goes will continue and push towards more inequality. Could you clarify a bit these elements? Yeah, that's 500 years of history we're talking about. I guess very briefly we could just say, look, I mean, it's kind of apparent to all and very well established that the industrial rise of the core economies in the world system depended on a huge appropriation of resources and labor from the global south, right? For most of the first several hundred years of capitalism and then there was, of course, this incredible moment in the 20th century when global south countries fought and successfully managed to achieve independence from colonial power and they began organizing their economies around human developments, objectives locally for the first time ensuring access to universal services and nutritious food and decent wages, et cetera, et cetera. And this triggered this crisis in the world system, right? Where it became more difficult for capital in the core to achieve the rates of expansion and return that they had enjoyed for so long under the colonial period because suddenly resources in the global south are being mobilized around human needs rather than around servicing capital accumulation in the core. And so they responded with a series of interventions, I mean, including coups and invasions but also structural investment programs which sought to cheapen labor and resources in the global south and reorganize production once again around servicing Northern accumulation. This time primarily through global commodity chains where producers in the global south would be generating technological goods and textiles and so on in sweatshops for very, very low prices. That's more or less the economy we live in today, which is, I mean, there's an incredible paradox and we have to pay attention to it, which is that the world economy is extremely productive, right? I mean, more productive than anyone 50 or 100 years ago could ever have imagined. And yet nonetheless, huge portions of the human population live in deprivation, right? And most of that deprivation, of course, is in the global south in the periphery of the world system. But even in the core economies in the US and the UK, et cetera, even in the European Union, there's extraordinary levels of deprivation. People can't make basic ends meet, they can't afford healthcare and housing, et cetera, et cetera. What's going on here, right? It seems to be a paradox. And the reason, of course, is simply that under capitalism, the objective of production is to maximize and accumulate profits, not to meet human needs, right? And so the result is, of course, a system that massively overuses resources and yet still fails to meet human needs and this is deeply paradoxical. I think it's incredibly important to point out the fact that it's not only an ecological crisis that we face, but a profound social crisis that's characterized by very high levels of inequality that we face as well. And so addressing this double crisis is the objective of our project, but also this should be the objective of progressive social movements to understand the ecological and social dimensions together. And of course, when we heard Ursula von der Leyen at the conference talking about this new, well, not new Green Deal, but all of this, we can imagine signing treaties with Argentina on new supply chains of critical materials and all of that. We can, of course, imagine about future reconfigurations of neocolonialism and all of this. So yeah, I'll bookmark this. We can come back to it in a future reference in the conversation. Julia, you mentioned just before that you're at the beginning, you started looking at the relationship or kind of the decoupling, whether it existed or not. I remember, I think it was in 2014. I saw a conference, I was in a conference with you and you presented something about the HDI and material footprint. I think it was a scatterplot of the countries. And over there, you kind of saw that, well, there's not a strict relationship. The more footprint, the more you will provide services or the more footprint, the more resource-efficient you'll be or more GDP will be more resource-efficient. So you kind of started to debunk or question these core assumptions that we had five years beforehand, right? And I'm wondering, I also remember in our previous discussion that this was heavily dismissed back in the day, that this was not well-accepted, although you had hard data. Can you perhaps share a bit this diagnosis? What were some of the steps and what you concluded back in the day when comparing ecological components and social components? Yeah, so it was probably, the data is probably not on the material footprint because I think that data became available internationally later. And I think Anka Shapartsik actually did some work on that. So I was looking at things like carbon footprints, so carbon with trade-corrected carbon with data from Glenn Peters. And I was looking at energy use, just like plain old energy use. And what was kind of interesting is like that topic was not purely original. So one of the things I did is I was reading these old global energy development reports that I think it was the United Nations Development Program had put together on energy and development that were super interesting. And I found this plot that showed that this relation between human development and energy was changing over time. And I was like, well, that's weird. And nobody's ever talked about that. It was just this one plot and it wasn't published in peer review. And I don't remember the guy's first name, which was Carlos, which is unfortunate. And I was like, okay, well, let's check that. And when I checked it, I found that it was true for basically any indicator of social progress you might want to find. And so I was basically putting together what this picture of both international and change over time. And the data was pretty simple. The analysis was pretty simple. I don't have a very complicated brain. And it kept getting rejected. I think the paper got rejected six times and nothing changed over the course of it getting rejected, except it just got a bit more complicated because they're like, oh, you're doing population weighting of your data. And we don't do that. What if that changes? I'm like, I have to do with population weighting and without population weighting. Anyways, nothing really changed. But finally it did get published in ecological economics, thank God. And it was just sort of my first wake up call of like, okay, it's not the data that's weird. It's not the analysis that weird is the result. People do not like this result. They think it is very strange that one can get more and more social progress with less and less energy use. This goes against what people are expecting. And so there's sort of an allergic reaction to this. But for me, that made me think, okay, it's worth digging more and understanding what would be possible if we took this reality seriously. Because the other thing I thought was super strange and interesting was when you talk about this result to people, their reactions are, if they get it, their reactions are super weird.  It's like, it's not because it's possible to do better with lower resource use that we're actually going in that direction. Like there's massive inequality. There's massive deprivation. There's massive overconsumption. And we're going towards this expansionist machine that Jason was talking about in terms of the capitalist world economy. And just because a better future is possible does not, in the data corner somewhere, does not mean that that's what we're actually doing. Like, why are you even thinking that? And that was another thing that made me realize that people are not understanding underlying power relations and they're not understanding what it takes for a good future to be realized. It's not just the possibility, like that we exist in an option space where we automatically seek out the best way forward. I think people think that maybe because of the economics education indoctrination that we're supposed to be in an optimizing system or something, I don't understand it. But it made me understand both of these things that there were different pathways that weren't being explored, but also that people didn't realize what it would take for the, to really get system transformation to make those pathways realizable. And that sort of set me on my current track. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, me, a very naive engineer would also think this is a logical step. Like we have a theory, we have a solution. There we go. Someone just didn't read enough or didn't do the right policy so far and we're gonna do it. And in a couple of years, things gonna solve themselves naturally. But of course, we're gonna come into the, well, the orchestration and how the current growth machine does not enable future alternatives. And I think over there, that's transitioned smoothly to you, Giorgos, with, well, your questioning of political and democratic aspects of flows and stocks. So in political ecology, traditionally, we don't look at numbers per se, but we try to question the numbers saying, who gets access to those flows? Why do they get access to these flows? Where are these flows? And so you ask a number of other questions in order to politicize, let's say, some of the more industrial ecology approach, which is just measuring stocks and flows, right? Was that some of the ways that you understood that, well, water per se is highly political and the flows and stocks as well behind it? And who produces the numbers and the metrics and what do the metrics count and why? So, I mean, when I was starting water, that was clear.  But of course, it's not like that because the way drought is understood, it comes with a very particular understanding within which it doesn't question the increase of demand. It naturalizes the problem as being just a matter of weather. I mean, there are all sorts of things and all sorts of decisions that are taken and what do you define as an anomaly that then counts as a drought? That actually they're very political decisions and which scientists tend to think they're apolitical. I mean, this happens also in conversations today about planetary boundaries, but also more relevant to us when we talk about the growth GDP. It's an obvious indicator that has assumed power for the reasons it has, that we can analyze historically, politically, economically. And it is a measure that it's taken for granted what it means, but there have been huge simplifying conventions behind it that there were nothing but innocent or neutral. They had distributive consequences.  You don't count the work conducted at home mostly by women. You don't count the loss of forests and cleaner, et cetera. You only count the expenditures to clean it. The problems with GDP are well known, but even when they are well known, they are considered as like, oh, they did this mistake or whoa, we could improve it and make better indicators. What political ecology brings to the picture is to understand why these things happen and why they persist. They're not just a matter of a technical mistake that some technicians haven't realized and some other technicians are going to improve in the future due to good will. So when I started studying about the growth, the first thing I did is like to start looking at the histories of GDP and growth. They are extremely interesting, because you see all the debates that they were taking place in the 1930s and 40s when GDP was started being counted. How did they decide what is in, what is out? The political struggles in the US Congress where the conservatives didn't want GDP actually measured, which is interesting because they were, they didn't want private enterprises taxed and the Republicans, let's say, of the day. And they were afraid that by a better metric system of the whole economy, you would get a better picture of revenue also of private companies, you would tax them more. It was a government project, GDP. So there was a lot of reaction to it from, let's say, anti-government political factions. But then of course, there's the whole thing, what GDP measured, but not then how did it get standardized at the international level? What obstructions took place there? How did it take place in the context of the Cold War with Soviet Union? How did Soviet Union try to measure its economy? How were then they were trying to overshoot the other in terms of GDP growth and that was linked to the military competition? So all the stuff are political in the broad sense. So to think about something, even I'm not talking about growth or capitalist growth where it's obviously that's political. Do you want to think of the simple thing of how do we measure growth, which is a GDP and it seems like a neutral innocent number and it's full of politics, of course. Just before we move on, Julia Jason, perhaps you don't know that, but you're always, what's, do you have on your right hand? Is this the Amartis still? This one is Amartis, of course. But I'm keeping it a little bit too long for the custom, the tradition. The tradition is by the end of March you put it under a tree and then you make a wish. But I prefer to wait until July and August and celebrate my vacations by putting it in a tree, in a dry tree by then, but it's fine. Yeah. Okay, now we have the considerations, the diagnosis of the problem, right? We are in an ecological and injustice crisis both are caused by political choices and it also means that we have alternatives. We don't necessarily need to consume that much to get to the same social outcome. So these are, let's say, how we triangulate the problem and then you fit them on a board and you say, okay, we need a project. Was this during the London, the famous London meeting between Yorgos and Jason where you had coffee and you said we need a project or who was behind it? I mean, you wrote a number of articles already together in post-growth scenarios, I think. But what was the impetus behind this project? Who kind of pushed it? Yorgos. Yeah. Yorgos pushed it. I pushed it, but not as far back. When Jason was too young, Nina said I didn't try to scare him too much. He was full of energy at that time. You lured him in with degrowth and then when he took the bait, then you started yanking. He was living his nice life in London. He wasn't up for that. No, but the meeting in London was very far back. It was in 2015 or 14 or something like that. So the project, we started working on it in 2021, 22. 21, 22, I mean, I'm not sure. Yeah, but at least two years ago from now we started working on it. So it was 2021. So it was much later. I mean, yeah, Jason, as he said the story, Jason got gradually into degrowth and at some point there was an opportunity where professors came here in Barcelona. He came and then within the overall thinking of how can develop a research agenda research group here in Barcelona, but also internationally. I was thinking of an individual legacy for myself, perhaps Jason for himself, because here in Catalonia they're also, as elsewhere in Europe, this type of grants are valued a lot in an academic trajectory, but they also give you the opportunity to build a team, build a long research agenda. So they are welcome schemes, let's say, and useful. And then, yes, I, we were thinking of what team would we like to make and Julia was an obvious person to first contact and collaborate with because these are synergy grants and synergies, they put a lot of emphasis on the complementarity and on bringing different research expertise and agendas together. And I think I and Jason cover one extent the political economic, political, ecological part of it, but at different scales. I'm more interested on the politics, on the local politics, on the movement politics. Jason looks at the big international political economy between majority and minority world, et cetera. But then we luck, let's say, the necessary technical skills to put the models in place, to really think of how particular infrastructures in a post-growth context would look like and also have also the real numbers and the real models that give us a picture of what an alternative future could look like. So it was an obvious synergy between the three of us. I mean, you could have also other possible synergies, but I think it was between more people. It's not just the three of us. So I don't think it's a trinity, as you said. I mean, there are many, many more capable and great people now, and we are among them. But it was one good, strong synergy and also there were good vibes from our first meetings. So that was a good reason to continue working like that. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I think in general, we just kind of realized that there's so much additional research that we all want to do. I mean, this field is one of those things where like questions multiply, you know, and new ideas are being born every day. And it feels like there's a lot that we went to discover and it's constantly pushing our horizons and inspiring our imaginations. And eventually we felt like the resources that we had available to us in terms of our own time and so on, we're just not enough for us to be able to answer all the questions that we thought were important. And so the possibility of working together and building a big team around this research was just really, I mean, it felt like the right time, right? It felt like the right time in terms of the trajectory of this field. And I'm very grateful that it worked out because otherwise we'd only be able to answer a fraction of the questions that inspire us. And this is a real chance to make a broader contribution. I think in general also, like both Yurgis and I were incredibly inspired by the kind of empirical work that Julia was doing. And I think the potential of that kind of approach was just so clear to us. And I think that the project we put together is able to mix political economy and political ecology and empirical modeling approaches in a really exciting way. That's, I hope, will make a profound contribution. Yes, I mean, just by reading it, it seems that also during the last five years there was the foundations of works of your colleagues as well. I mean, apologies, yes, Trinity, perhaps it's not the right term, but I tried to find something catchy for this, but the idea was that you have so many colleagues as well that have built foundations that we are at a certain level that we can question and empirically test a number of fundamental ideas. And I think that we have passed the idea test. Now I think more and more people agree with post-growth, more and more people are behind it, but we are now into this second phase of post-growth where we kind of need more theoretical, empirical and applied elements to make this a reality. And I think that's where I welcome very much your transdisciplinary research. And you say in, I think in the ground that you have five pillars of post-growth that you want to explore, right? So this time I didn't invent it, you invented the five pillars. Let's start with one, and I think the first one perhaps is also fits a lot with this empirical research of you, Julia, where you say you want to explore and determine the planetary spaces of possibilities, modeling the use of resources needed to live decently and as a third point to identify how we can have a convergence between North and South. Julia, you have worked on this for a couple of years now on the provisioning of services and essential needs, what is an excess, what is the right amount, what is decent, these are vast questions. Can you perhaps mention what are these, you know, provisioning, well, provision of services and where do they fit in the puzzle? So provisioning systems actually has its own third work package, right, which is work package three. So that's the third pillar. So are we discussing the first pillar, which is possibilities, or are we discussing the third one? Aha, yeah, because indeed, when I saw the third one, I thought it was the counterpart of the first one. So the first one is more ideation, or what is the difference?  So we need something catchy and cute. And I was like, really? And then it worked, so I can't complain anymore. But at first I was unconvinced to say the least. But so- Five P's is because it's post-growth, you know, so it's- Ah. That's right, because- A friend of mine who has a Marie Curie project, I mean, the advisory board reminded me, I have also the five P's, you know, you took it from there and I said, oh my God, I forgot that. But there they were the five P's of something else, you know. So it's the magic P's that's the- I mean, the thing, because my previous project was called Living Well Within Limits, and I had an advisory group already and I emailed them and I was like, you know, what do you think of these different project titles, blah, blah, blah, and they got back, you know, and they answered they all liked Living Well Within Limits better, and then one of them, one of the project actually had started at the first advisory board meeting was like, do you know you stole that from Tim Jackson? He has a whole chapter on that. And for that he did for the Sustainability Commission, I was like, dude, I asked you. You could have told me it was like, I didn't, you know, I mean, I didn't mean to steal it from it. So I had to write this really embarrassing email that Tim Jackson saying, really, I'm sorry about this. I can only apologize. Also, it's John O'Neill's fault, because he should have told me. So the first, but going back to the project, the first P around possibilities is sort of an empirical package. So the thing that sort of ties things together in that one is that we're trying to basically lay the quantitative and qualitative groundwork around some of these post-growth ideas. So we're trying to lay out the big picture scenarios, we're trying to understand the material requirements, material labor, et cetera, requirements of wellbeing, do a whole bunch of foot printing. And we are, there's two qualitative aspects around what are examples of de-growing or post-growing account or flatlining not low growth economies that what policies have they put into place to protect their population, what does that look like? So learning from those empirical examples and learning from empirical examples for instance during the pandemic of what are the economic activities and the sectors that are the most crucial to keep an economy going and to keep the population protected against again. And then there's sort of culminating that. There's this idea that we would try to do overall one of the most ambitious things we propose to do in the project, which is over alternative integrated assessment model scenarios consistent with the post-growth future. And that's super ambitious and we have to see how far we get with that. So we're working on it, but yeah, that's already a stretch, but that's what the first one does is lay the empirical groundwork and sort of culminating in this idea of an overarching alternative modeling pathway. Yes, indeed. And I had Lawrence Kaiser as well on the podcast on integrated assessment models. And perhaps it's important to mention that none of the scenarios reviewed by the CIPCC, sorry, have a convergence between North and South. And I think this opens up a million other possibilities and alternatives if you have another constraint, which is the one of convergence. Because right now we just have one constraint. Let's bring the, I don't know, Greenhouse gas emissions down to 1.5 degrees. But of course now you, in the possibilities, they are, I don't know if they're narrower or wider by adding more constraints. I don't know if you, when you think about that, this possibility space, when you think about it, do you see it as a constraint one or as an abundant one? I'm not gonna say anything, given the fact that the man who wrote the book on limits is sitting in the, you know.  Jorges, would you like to? No, the man who wrote about North-South convergence is also in the room, but he doesn't have a... It's the game of hot potato I see here, yeah, yeah. I can say something about North-South convergence and then Jorges wants to say something about limits and abundance, that's cool. No, look, I mean, really, this has to be emphasized. The existing climate mitigation scenarios are deeply unjust, and this should trouble all of us in the sense that, look, they basically start with the assumption that the global North countries should continue to increase production every year for the rest of the century. Growth, and maintain very high levels of energy use. And they square this with the Paris Agreement targets by suppressing energy use in the global South. In some cases, suppressing it to below the levels that are required to meet basic needs. So this is deeply colonial, and it's surprising to me, actually, there's not a broader discussion about this. I don't think the modelers necessarily intended this, but it's certainly the way that it's come out. And so one of the very urgent things we want to do is think about, okay, what if we take climate mitigation seriously, but also take global inequality seriously and think about what's going to be required to ensure access to energy to meet decent living needs for everyone on the planet. And I think that's really, I mean, it's interesting because basically what we see is that the so-called green growth scenarios are balanced on the backs of the world's poorest people, and this is unacceptable. And I think that we talk a lot about the technical unfeasibility of green growth, visions, et cetera, et cetera. I think that we have to also pay attention to the deep inequities that are at the heart of green growth visions. And once we confront that fact, then it becomes clear that a different kind of approach is needed. And this is what we're referring to as North-South Convergence. We have to increase energy use in the global South in order to meet decent living standards very clearly. But in the global North, a significant reduction in energy use is going to have to be achieved, even assuming quite rapid technological change, which we embrace, by the way. So we need models and scenarios to pay attention to that. And that's one of the exciting things that we hope this project will do. You're always, you want to bounce back on the limits element, abundance versus limits, and what's that space of possibilities? I didn't really understand, to be honest, the question because I was paying attention to the North-South Convergence, IPCC, and then I heard some words that seemed to be mine, but I didn't get the connection. No, at the beginning I was asking, Julia, whether the fact of constraining more even further the models and this space by not only having an ecological limit, but also having a social limit, does that kind of pushes and squeezes the space of possibilities? Or because we take the shackles off of growthism, we kind of unleash and make the space of possibilities much larger than before. Is there a, or how do you think about it? I mean, I also had a discussion with these two authors, Frédéric Albot and Karl Wienerland on the Scarcity book that they wrote. And I think this ties back on inversely proportionality than your limits book. So the Scarcity and limits or abundance and limits. What are your thoughts about this? So I'm not sure if I have something wise to say. No, I mean, I think the current system is producing scarcity all the time. So I don't think that these scenarios of nonconvergence, there are scenarios of abundance in any sense, right? So I mean, there are scenarios of continuous inequalities, continuous social deprivation for majority part of the planet, even though they supposedly achieve with unrealistic assumptions, some kind of better climate future than would otherwise be the case. So I think our intention is to create scenarios that they are both socially acceptable and socially just and socially beneficial as well as climatically sustainable.  I barely mentioned it, but now the way you framed it, it sounds to me like the donut. Now that there is like a social minimum that we have to achieve and also stay within certain climatic thresholds and this social limit is a universal idea of everyone in this world being equal. So the goal, the minimum part of the donut should be, we should aspire to a future where everyone in this planet has more or less the same. There's no justification whatsoever why to plan for futures where some people in some parts of the world by virtue of being born there or being born to reach parents there, they will have like a thousand times more than people born somewhere else. So that's a minimum, you know, I think that's a minimum goal and that's how we treat it in our project. So we want to create models, not incorporate this goal alongside, as you said, climate goals. And I think in, so is it in this work package, if I understand correctly, where you also look at existing case studies where this type of lifestyles have been achieved or I think, Julia, I didn't understand. No, it's not lifestyles that saved. No, no, it's because I'm responsible for that. This first work package of possibilities was a little bit the package where we put all the interesting ideas we had and we didn't know exactly where to put them. So the rest, I think the other package is a little bit, the other pieces are more consistent. The first P was P for everything, you know, and me really, not the P. So yes, I had put there the interest to study the experience of low growth economies or no growth economies in the last year. So like to be bold and start trying to learn also from stagnation, because stagnation of course is not post growth, but stagnation is stagnation. And we have, we cannot only think about post growth in the abstract, but also think and learn from what different people in different governments have tried in periods of where growth has not been possible to begin with. So that's the objective there. And we might get to study more detail the experience of Japan the last 20 years, maybe the experience of a country like Cuba in the special period. I mean, these are examples that I often mentioned, but rarely studied with this intention that we have here. And then the other was to reflect a little bit on what happened during the pandemic, you know, that not because we want to close bars again to a world climate change because I think bars should remain open. But because we want to, it was a very particular and special period where a very big part of the economy was put in hibernation. There was a very important distinction introduced that didn't exist before between essential and non-essential sectors and services. Most of the times it was essential for capital, but at least as a distinction, it is important because it speaks very much to our emphasis on human needs versus superfluous types of production and consumption. And when you talk about essential and non-essential, so during the pandemic, not intentionally, intentionally there was interesting experimentation of how do you handle the closing down of parts of the economy? How do you distinguish what you maintain and protect at all costs and what is superfluous and you can let go or you can do without it for a while? Very different context, of course, virus, social distancing and all these things. That has nothing to do with our scenarios of the growth of climate change, but as an approach, I think we should study it. I mean, it's obviously something unique that happened. It's a social experiment of a big scale. And before the pandemic, we couldn't think of what would it mean for the economy to under-operate for one or two years. Now we have this thing, it has happened, so we should learn from it. We might come back to some other possibilities in the future of the first peak. Let's try to get to the second peak, which is, I guess, policy, policy packages, if I understand correctly. And of course, over there, these need to be contextualized and they will also be differentiated as, well, what we need to add in our lives and what we need to remove from our lives. We need to add well-being, we need to add care, we need to add a number of elements. And at the same time, we need to reduce phase out fossil fuels, substitute some elements with some others. We need to cap, I guess, some resources. So what are some of the elements that you envision in this second peak and who feels particularly interested by developing these piece? I can talk really briefly about this. Yeah, I mean, I guess kind of the centerpiece of this particular pillar is to put together what we're calling post-growth deals. And the idea is effectively to develop a coherent and empirically informed policy framework that say the EU or a particular EU country or other country in the core could implement to achieve something approximating a safe and just de-growth transition, right? In a way that scales down less necessary forms of production, but also ensures strong social outcomes at the same time without the kind of disruption that normally accompanies things like recessions and so on, right? So an equitable transition, which hasn't really been worked out yet. I mean, there's lots of policy proposals out there which are interesting. I think there's kind of a convergence that's occurring within the field around some of the core policies that would need to be implemented like universal public services and a public job guarantee and working time reduction, et cetera, et cetera. But it's never really been put into a kind of, yeah, like a coherent economic policy framework and that's what we want to produce from this. For the Global South, it's a little bit different. For the Global South, we want to think about what kinds of policies and strategies governments in the Global South could use to reclaim productive capacities and reorganize them around producing for human needs and human development objectives locally, right? So again, it's totally nonsensical that so much of the resources and labor and lands in the Global South are mobilized around servicing accumulation of the North when they could be mobilized instead around human needs, right? Closing the massive gap in social outcomes between periphery and core. But this requires, you know, radical approaches to fiscal policy, to monetary policy, to industrial policy, et cetera, et cetera. So we went to map out what that would look like as well. So different strategies for different parts of the world, but that's kind of the idea of this package. And then we also have the idea of modeling some of these policy outcomes through, say, for example, stock flow consistent models. Just to see, you know, if you implement this kind of policy package, then what are the outcomes in terms of, say, employment or in terms of, or even more interestingly, in terms of social outcomes and ecological impacts and so on. So, and this is the kind of empirical data we would like to be able to present to policy makers and say, look, I mean, this is the, you know, a possible policy framework and these are the likely effects given the assumptions that are models, et cetera. So at least it can start a conversation about alternative trajectories. Yeah, of course, when you were mentioning about the two different sets of deals, I was internally hoping that you would pronounce also the term modeling. And when you said that, I was like, oh, that is gonna be, I was thinking how hard this must be. And when you said the word, I was like, okay, I'm very curious about how this is gonna pan out. And does that immediately fit in with the next one, with the service provision and the word package where there is more modeling or is there like an integrated model across the spine of the project or are these smaller models that run in parallel or how does that work? Yeah, so to prepare for this project, the ERC proposal submission, there's different rounds of selection and at some point you have to go to interview and then you have lots of people who help you out if you're lucky and we were very lucky, lots of people helped us out by asking you hard interview questions as practice. And it was Michael Jacobs who went through a proposal and was like, you guys have six different models or seven or whatever it was. And we were like, oh yeah, that's right. Anyway, there was not an overarching model. That is not one of our ambitions but we'd like to advance in each direction that we're sort of trying to push forward to have at least some idea of how changing the things we're interested in changing would result in different outcomes. And so the third working package around provisioning systems is this idea of democratizing the economy. Basically facing the problem that right now our political system and political decision-making stops at the boundary of the quote unquote, lots of scare quotes free market. And that basically our democratic decision-making process does not go into what is extracted, produced and consumed. That that's something that we're supposed to sort of let the market figure out for us and we are supposed to only interact with it as workers and consumers but not ever as citizens with some kind of decision-making capacity that goes beyond that. And so this idea of democratizing provisioning systems is basically trying to address the fact that when we look at the system of capitalism we're looking at a global interconnected system of profit accumulation that Jason described. We're looking at a macro economic system of finance and monetary interconnectedness and how governments finance different programs and so on, which is another aspect. But we're also looking at sectors like the automotive industry like the fossil fuel industry or like the real estate and housing industry that are hugely problematic and anti-democratic in the way that they push both inequality and resource use. And this is something that we, that if we need to face or basically move towards a post growth future where people have better living conditions and working conditions we need to face what those industries are doing. And so the idea of this work package is that this has to be thought through sectorally. There are a lot of ideas around democratizing the economy in general like democratizing finance or the monetary system but very few people are thinking through it sectorally and that's what I'd like to push forward. So this is my work package even though I am not, this is not my area it's an area I've stumbled into it's just this is what I thought needed to be needed to be thought about. And I think it's really, it's really quite crucial because a lot of these proposals are very naive. I think that this is also something that it's good to have proposals, it's good to have ideas but this is also something that Jason's facing in the second work package around policies which is you have these laundry lists of policies and maybe they'll work at grade or maybe they won't but we need to understand how they're gonna interact with the macro economy and how they're gonna interact with each other. And the same is true for these ideas around democratizing the economy. Everybody's going around saying we should have worker cooperatives. Okay. Is one size fits all ever a good solution for anything? There are people who are saying we should just have commenting, okay? Is, so I think it's really about having more subtlety learning from existing examples and trying to have a more synthetic representation of the risks and pitfalls. And that's where the modeling comes in. So the idea of the modeling here is that we have some synthetic representation of what different decision-making and institutional configurations can do across these really entrenched sectors and sort of try to represent what some differences could do in terms of social and environmental outcomes as opposed to others. But this part is very challenging. I don't have a very, very good idea of how we're gonna do it, let alone do it right. So I'm looking for anybody who's listening to this if you have any clever ideas, please do send them that your email I will try to read. That would be great. Thank you very much. Because it's just very hard to think about how you represent alternative decision-making in terms of sort of those kinds of outcomes. And I mean, in your previous papers, you kind of reverse the problem instead of having it top down, how much we consume and therefore where does the consumption end up? You try to reverse it and say, okay, let's stop a moment, let's think about what do we really need and what is the most efficient way to get there? Sorry, you want to jump in on this? Well, that kind of modeling fits more in the kinds of modeling that we're gonna be doing in work package one, which is around these possibilities, the material possibilities for living well within limits for achieving North-South conversions within planetary boundaries. So work package three is much more focused on the political economy and the organizational capacity we need to get there. Because right now we're not in a situation where we can decide for ourselves what is being produced and what is being consumed and how we would do things differently. Because we're under the decision-making of very powerful, very vertically entrenched and interconnected sectors that if you go through transportation, agri-food, real estate and housing, you're really basically, you start seeing how hard it is to sort of liberate the entire society from the imperative of over-production and over-consumption. And one of the pathways for this would be giving people just democratic decision-making over, how do you wanna run your own transportation system?  So instead of sort of pitting people as consumers against these systems, let's try to pit ourselves as organized citizens. Yeah, and these are, I guess, we're gonna come back to this to the fifth pillar, which is participation or practical implementation. I guess that these are fora that will also come hand in hand into thinking of this or because I guess as a citizen, it's hard to imagine because we're stripped so much of our possibilities and of our freedom to choose. Today, we don't have the practice or the muscle to rethink what is our extents of control agency and participation in these discourses. So I can imagine this ties with Work Package Five. Is that the case or Work Package Five is also throughout the project where we also talk about the policies and the possibilities or how do you envision participation in all of this? Do you wanna pick that one up or? This patient, you mean of stakeholders and public or? Work Package Five and bringing things into practice.  I think we each have different sort of ideas of how we'd really love to do that. So, but go on your own. It's also tagged as a research action project. And so I mentioned you want to, and a transdisciplinary one. So of course it's a high-end issue settlement. Yeah, no, it's fine, but it jumps from the Work Package Three to Five. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Whether you were asking something else or, so you skipped mine, you know. So I was preparing to answer. We'll come to that, don't worry. You were following a pattern. I know, I know. But I'd like to put something in the wheels, you know. I'm not very flexible. Yes, I mean, the general idea there was that we wanted to somehow put these ideas in the test of reality of real processes, political processes, participatory processes. I mean, we'll have to admit that when we were doing the proposal, it was probably the least well-thought part of it because the rest of the project were the core questions that each one of us has come up over time and the ones where we felt they would most benefit from the collaboration of the three of us. The last one on participation was a desire that we all shared, but not somewhere where has been the core of our research, at least not recently, although we all want our research to be relevant and also inform action, I'm sure, if not fuel action. So in that we are still open. We are not set on what we're gonna do. We know that we want to create processes where our knowledge is put to the test of people, to the evaluation of people, of stakeholders, and we see where it goes, processes of co-production of knowledge. On my part, I mean, what I want to do is to see to what extent some of the ideas we will be developing can inform processes of local planning, participatory planning at a more local scale, at a municipal scale, or at something that is dear to my heart as a Greek, to the island scale, because we are three researchers now addicted to that in one way or the other. We are interested in islands. I was going to say, in one way or the other, we are Greeks. No, we are all three Greeks, and we are all three interested in one way or the other on islands, and we were thinking that it's a nice scale, nice local scale, a small-scale bounded scale, in one in which in different islands we have developed relations and research collaborations over time, where we could try at the pilot scale some of these ideas and see whether they make sense for local communities, whether they make sense for local decision makers, whether they can offer alternatives to futures of overtourism and commodification and commercialization. So this is one scale, the island, the other is like the small municipalities or bigger municipalities here in Catalonia or elsewhere. We are not 100% set on the cases yet, because I'm really interested to find cases where the demand to do something in the direction of post-growth is coming from the authorities there rather than us trying to find somewhere to do it, because my experience, my maths old back in the past experience a little bit with participatory science, participatory planning processes that if it's not coming the demand from the people on the ground and it's you as a scientist going there and trying to move things, it doesn't really work well. So right now we have contacts with at least two or three islands that they are very promising, that they are important people they're interested to try and see how input from our science can inform local post-growth planning processes and also with a medium scale municipality here in Catalonia where the new authorities are quite progressive and they want to try some of these ideas. Ideally I would say, I mean, but again, this is an ideal, I'm not promising it, but ideally I would like us to develop like some kind of procedural blueprint for using post-growth ideas to develop plans towards post-growth at the local level, something similar to the Donut Economics Labs but not in terms of the Donut, more in terms of the ideas that we are more interested in which is about post-growth transition, justice within and between places, et cetera. Of course, the island idea is very dear to my heart as well. You're Greek too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.  And with the paper, I mean, sorry, you have, the three of you have a tradition to just publish banger papers month after month and it's hard to keep up but of course the one on Nicaria is very close to my heart, so yeah. If I had to choose one, it's out of contextual rather than of course just the merit of everything that you all have done. Okay, let me just revert back to order before we go to some more broader questions. So sorry, I broke the pattern of going through the list of work packages. Let me just go back to normal and we missed the final P, the P- Number four, number four. Yeah, exactly. Of course, this is about politics so I guess politics are not the sexiest one but please make them sexy, Jorgos. You want to explore the types of political movements to realize these post-growth visions. Yeah, because it's a main obstacle. I mean, politics were even some conservative analysts now or liberal analysts are saying, yeah, okay, this post-growth or the growth makes sense but politically it's a non-starter so and it's such a huge change that we can't imagine it happening in the current liberal democracies where you can just get like marginal changes and this with a lot of sweat and then they are reversed and it's true. I mean, this critique is very true. So we want to work with it and we are working with it by looking at three scales. We're looking at the scale of movements, what movements are struggling and in what ways and when are they effective to open up spaces, alternatives to capitalist growth? So sure you mean activism, you mean... I mean, activism, yeah, I mean... I mean, social-political movements but we are interested in movements that they're not just social, they're also social-political. I mean, they have an ambition to change also to take political power in one way or the other. One might think of trade unions, might think of the municipalist movement, might think of organizations in food sovereignty, et cetera. The second scale that we are interested is institutional politics and party politics operating mostly at the national scale. So on political parties on government that they have flirted with ideas close to the ones we are exploring and then what is the experience from this political efforts? Where did they stumble? What are the obstacles they face? How could they be strengthened? And then the third big question where we don't have the expertise and I think there's much expertise around but it should be part of the question is geopolitics. So in what sense the current change or changes or non-changes in the world order, how are they opening or closing opportunities? Or trying different economic futures in different places and generally the way the world system is organized in terms of power politically, institutionally. How does this prohibit post-growth political projects and how this might change? This obviously links to the more material economic analysis that Jason is performing in terms of unequal exchange. It's a counterpart I would say. It's a political counterpart. And of course, as you were mentioning it, I was thinking of the policy deals that Jason was mentioning just before about how does that interfere with the political movements. Jason, you were invited also recently to the Dutch parliament while during the Beyond Conference you were also part of the plenary session, also the other sessions. I don't know how much you can share of course but what are some of your feelings when you are invited in these venues? What are the type of discussions when we have to compare them with just what Jorgos mentioned, right? So where, what is the, are they just curious? They want to learn what the opposition has to say in order to be prepared and to balance arguments. Is it a new way to present an agenda? Do they feel that this is an opportunity or something that they need to invest upon? Or what is your feeling when you speak with politicians and parliaments in these fields? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm still trying to process this myself a little bit but my sense is from closed door meetings that have occurred after I spoke at the Dutch parliament and so on, my sense is that politicians on the left and the green parties, the progressive green parties in particular are clearly aware that existing approaches are not working and are also are eager for alternative pathways. And I think that they're increasingly open to post-growth ideas because they see that's where the energy is at and that's where ideas are coming from. And so they want to learn about it, right? But they're also terrified because they're not sure like what kinds of narratives are gonna make this possible? What kinds of political movements will this require, et cetera? And so I think that they're kind of in an exploratory phase is the sense that I have. But I think that the more we're able to unite social and ecological problems and solutions together, the more it makes sense for them, right? Because there's just no way that any politician on the left can legitimately go out and talk about de-growth without clearly triggering the massive sense of insecurity that huge numbers of people under capitalism live under, right? Live with constantly. And so there has to be a strong social policy platform that is going to assuage those concerns. Like we have to fundamentally address the question of economic insecurity, the question of structural unemployment, et cetera, et cetera. And only they can really have a rational conversation about what to do about ecology and radical climate action, et cetera. So they're looking for that synthesis, I think. In my sense is once they are able to see that, then there's potentially quite a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of potential, I suppose, in a popular post-growth deal that could emerge. And I think they see that. But there's still convincing to do. And I think that's where this project comes in, right? Like they want to know how it's going to work, what the empirics look like, and so on. I think that's what we'd ultimately like to provide to kind of, what should I say, kind of expand the Overton window of what's politically possible. But ultimately, I think that we're all very clear on one fact, which is that it doesn't really matter what's empirically possible. Of course, that's important for us as scientists, but the possibility of a post-growth deal or a post-growth transition rests entirely on the balance of class power and the balance of political forces. And so the social movements and political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transition against the interests, as Julia mentioned, of the oligarchic ruling class who benefits her prodigiously from the status quo, those movements have to be built. And that's not a small task. And right now, those movements don't exist in the form that they need to. And I think that's really what's going to have to occupy all of us for the foreseeable future. Of course, what's something that is missing is this either social acceptance or mass push from labor movements and from the labor movement in general. Yeah, but I was thinking also, if we mobilize the concept of environmentalism of the poor from Hermitage Salier, have you discussed with any parliaments in Africa, in Latin America and other parliaments? I mean, you and in general, in your laboratories as well, your host perhaps we can go there later on. Are there any laboratories that you would like to experiment with or together, well, on the other side of the plundering, let's say? So Jason, I don't know if you have discussed with parliaments elsewhere than Europe and what's their take on all of this? Are they also open or the discussion of, well, development is very much the prevalent one and these go to the side? Well, I think it's clear that, I mean, there's something happening, you know, across the Global South that's disrupting the balance of geopolitical power a little bit right now, right? I mean, you can see this emerging from some of the Latin American governments who are now questioning, you know, their reliance on the currencies of the core and specifically the US dollar, you're looking at like more regional trade integration and so on and that's, I think, interesting. I think increasingly, you know, there's kind of a resurgence politics in the Global South that is gaining steam right now and they're experimenting with new ideas around industrial policy and modern history policy a little bit, but I would also caution that this is very early days and we'll see how the core powers respond. I mean, it's always a really, this is a tricky situation but in general, I mean, that's primarily the focus right now in terms of radical politics in the South, at least the government level is to think about that, like how to overcome the obstacles they face in an imperialist world economy. In terms of social movements, I think that there's a lot of interests and mobilization around, you know, pushing against extractivism by foreign multinational companies and the kind of ecological harms that that, you know, inflicts on communities across the Global South. So there's different kind of factions of this discontent, I suppose, that we see. Yeah, and you're also in the, sorry, Julia, you wanted also to chime in. Yeah, because I realized that we didn't talk about one of the things that I'm most excited about is global North and Global South pathways and also the policy proposals and sort of trying to explore these different things, which is, I think we're gonna be able to do some labor footprinting, which is something that a lot of people are doing, but we'd like to really integrate that with this question of what lifestyle changes in the Global North would look like in terms of, you know, reducing resource use and then what that frees up when we get rid of, for instance, unequal debt and unequal exchange in the Global South and we can sort of see, you know, who's going to work for who. So who is currently working for who? What is the appropriation of Global South labor in the Global North through our over-consumption right now and how that could flip and how the Global South countries might be able to reinvest in their own living conditions, much safer, much more prosperous living conditions.  And but, you know, we basically put some numbers and some modeling into that. And I think that that's going to help change the narrative and the perception of what a post-growth future could look like, because I think a lot of people are afraid of for jobs and livelihoods and so just sort of pointing the way towards what that alternative could look like, I think would be quite exciting. And maybe another thing I'd like to say is in terms of this work package five and going into practice is that one of the things I'm excited to do is to try to initiate dialogues with political parties, you know, maybe here in Switzerland and also with international diplomacy. So there are groups of international diplomats at the various UN locations. And one of them is in Geneva, which is not far from where I am. And so basically try to start these discussions at ground. Okay, what do alternatives look like? Who is interested in this? And what feedback do you have? What do you like? What do you not like? What more questions do you have? What questions would need to be answered for you to go back to your governments and actually propose this or your political parties and go back and propose this. So I think really just starting these dialogues to sort of spread the ideas out and test the ideas against people who rely on basically convincing their populations that this is something worth going for. I think that that's gonna, that's something that I'm really looking forward to doing in this project. I had Yamina Saheb as well on the podcast and she was mentioning how she wanted to initiate sufficiency diplomacy. So they did this first sufficiency summit between France and Australia through these diplomatic ties. So I'm curious to see how that goes. Indeed, like where are some best practices that can then be also pushed through diplomacy kind of showcasing how post-growth is this new well, element that you want to push as value, you know, as a national value that you want to have solidarity and you want to share with the rest of the world how you managed in your own context to implement it. So I would be very curious to see how that goes. Just for these case studies and I'm wondering, so Yorgo, you mentioned some islands, perhaps some municipality in Catalonia, perhaps some other islands that they will be identified also in the future. Do you have also counterparts in rural areas, in areas that are industrial or extractive and how they will change their lifestyle? These are not case studies, sorry. Let's not confuse it. So we're not doing any case studies of post-growth. What we said is we want to try a little bit and develop some. This is part of something we wanted at the beginning and establish some dialogues at different levels. With diplomats said Julia, I said with local communities but the point is not to try different communities and see how, so it's not a research there. It's more like piloting processes to see how our ideas could be part of a planning process at the local level. So in that sense, it doesn't matter what type of community it is because we are piloting the process, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't work or we learn something from it but it's not an effort to do case studies of post-growth processes or anything like that just to make clear. Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, I'm just asking this. I also have a friend who wants to see, to experiment with what he calls untraceable cities or territories which have almost no impact to the environment and see how little, I mean, how can you reduce to an absolute minimum to everything and go to these degraded places, a landscape of extraction, landscapes of pollution and at the same time restore them and have kind of a post-growth lifestyle. So I thought of him and his project when I was asking this particular question. So we now have the five P's that will fertilize the soil and then bring new ideas, perhaps just some general questions before we wrap this up. Of course, there is one element which is dear to my heart which is urban areas or territories and how does this land in territories? And lastly, I discussed with Federico Savini who works on post-growth cities and degrowth cities and tries to implement that and we're discussing a number of what we have just said today and how we implement them in cities. So how do we take back the land from, let's say fossil fuel infrastructures and then convert it into something else? How do we de-financialize the built environment and not make it as a spatial fix, et cetera, et cetera? And I was thinking if we have to reverse engineer it once again, I think, and we don't have a lot of empirical studies into this, that's why I'm asking to you three, perhaps you have already given a thought to this. The easiest way forward for me was when reading one of your, the decent energy standards, Julia, where you mentioned what were some of the square meters that would be decent for everyone, I think it was 15 square meters per person, plus five of communal space or something like that. And I tried to say, okay, so if I take the case of Brussels, I think they have 45 million square meters of residential space and it's 1.1 million. So let's say one, by having the 20 square meters, we have almost half. We can reduce by half the square meters of residential footage. And I'm thinking about cities and a number of territories where we just have too much, right? We have just too much stocks and just because we have too much stocks, we need to maintain them and these will perpetuate more consumption and unequal consumption. So something needs to be reimagined in the existing, not in the future, not in the new, but in the existing. And do you have any ideas about how do we scale down from the existing, we sacrifice, we, well, we put away, or what are some of the steps with perhaps of where you live right now, you know, in your physical territories? What are some, if we were to take some of the potential outcomes of your products in six years' time and apply them in where you live, can we do this exercise and think about what will change in your, in Lausanne and in Barcelona, let's say. Julia, do you want to? Yeah, so actually there's a colleague here who's a Sasha Nick, who's also working with Philip Talman on a joint project, who's, you know, all of these people since their IDPFL and doing some sort of calculations and saying, listen, we don't need new buildings, we need to repurpose existing buildings so that people have this flexibility of, you know, changing their living space, changing their over consumption of living space. Now, I'm not, I really want people to, I hear a lot of people saying, hey, we need to implement this 15 square meter thing. It's a first model, it's a very simple model. We made our lives, you know, we, Joel Millward Hopkins who led the work had to do a lot of simplification and, you know, for instance, one of the things that's over simple in this model is 20 degrees year round, which is a comfortable temperature, both for cold and hot, but you could bring the temperature down to 18 degrees in colder climates and still be comfortable and safe in terms of your living conditions. And you can raise that temperature in hotter climates to something like 26 degrees and still be okay. So that's already one thing where one of the reasons we get to 15 meters is because of this 20 degree thing. If you change the temperature, you get to more space, right? So don't take any of this stuff as religious, model it for yourselves, people. And then this idea, but I think that we have to take seriously this idea that in current urban situations, one of the things we need to face is the real estate sector and the construction sector and their imperatives, their growth imperatives around always building new stuff as opposed to doing the much more socially and environmentally necessary work of retrofitting existing and making the existing living spaces a lot more flexible. Because that's one of the things in the UK, for instance, which is actually I know better than Switzerland for various reasons that was there for longer. In the UK, you're stuck with two-bedroom houses, two-bedroom apartments, three-bedroom houses, three-bedroom apartments, well, actually the two-bedroom apartments. And you have very little studio space and you have very little one-bedroom space. And even the two-bedroom space, I think, is a bit limited in terms of the sort of terraced housing. And so people, because of smaller household sizes would quite like to move into those kinds of spaces, but they just don't exist. So I think it's a lot of this creative architecture around taking the existing build stock and turning it into something that suits the needs of changing household sizes or also has this idea of co-housing and turning, you know, not always having to build new co-housing developments, but taking existing building stocks and creating communal spaces, communal guest rooms, communal play rooms, the kinds of things that are very attractive in eco-housing or co-housing right now, how do you do that? That's the real architecture challenge. And the other one is around the space, you know, giving space back from cars. So repossessing the car space and turning that into parks, into living space, into recreation space. I think that that's really important. And you use the word sacrifice, which I think is right now we're being asked to sacrifice a livable planet. So I always like to put that sacrifice front and center. I think it's probably the most important one, like, you know, we're just not gonna be able to live in any kind of disinstability in any kind of, you know, millions and millions and millions and people, possibly billions will be dying on our current trajectory. That's not good. Let's keep that sacrifice in mind for front and center. So I think it's more about trade-offs. And I think that one of the things we always have to put forward is the increase in quality of life that we gain from changing our provision of basic needs away from the sort of market-based every individual for themselves to this sort of more common, you know, universal public services, public luxury private frugality type of picture. And I think that putting forward what we gain is really important. I've been asked a couple of times by people to tell us more about your renunciation ideology. I'm just like, right, this is an email I will not answer right now because that is not, you know, when you choose that framing, you're already admitting defeat to some extent. So I think it's really much more about saying, okay, this is the parameter space that we have and we can go forward in a very different way. In terms of the North-South convergence, Jason, do you see any change in a territory once we converge in the future? Would that radically change a number of elements that you will see around you in your city and in your territory or something different that you will envision in terms of territories thanks to this convergence? Well, yeah, so I grew up in Eswatini in Southern Africa and I mean, even just a cursory visit to that country will reveal how messed up, you know, the world economy is and the integration of the South into it in Eswatini. I mean, it's a very productive land and there's a huge portion of that territory that's given away to, it's given over to producing sugarcane under extremely exploitative conditions. And the land is owned and controlled by British companies, you know, and it's not so different actually from under colonialism. Meanwhile, a huge portion of the population cannot access even the most basic nutrition. I mean, think about this, right? Talk about a massive misuse of land. And so it's not difficult to imagine how a different arrangement of the economy, which allows countries like Eswatini to have more control over their own productive capacities through more monetary and fiscal sovereignty would be able to remobilize that land around meeting human needs domestically and end poverty in a very short period of time. I mean, really like the kinds of production that is necessary to end poverty is actually really not difficult to do. We're talking about houses, electricity, sanitation systems, nutrition, clinics, schools. Most of this kind of production can be done with domestic materials and labor. It's not rocket science actually. It's simply a matter of being able to reappropriate and reclaim productive capacities and reorganize it. And so, you know, this discourse is out there that poverty is this intractable problem and will take generations to solve, if ever, totally wrong. It can be addressed more or less immediately. I mean, very, very quickly, when you've seen this happen before under revolutionary conditions, and that's the kind of aspiration that I think we should have now. And so under a scenario where we achieve the kinds of transformations that we discuss and model in this work, that's the kind of change you would see happen very quickly. And I think that's incredibly inspiring. Yeah, this is very nicely also complementing what Julia mentioned about the, it's not about sacrificing, but also all of the fantastic possibilities that we have when we take out the shackles. And Jorgo is perhaps to finish in terms of the political side of things. Where do you, do you see any, I mean, of course I'm not talking necessarily about parties or, but the way that democratic processes will take place in this post-gross territory, how will this take, I mean, how will you experience it in your practice, in your life? Would you have different levels of choices that you need to take? Some resources need to be dealt at a certain levels and democratically we figure out what is the urgency that we need to tackle together.  Yeah, I wonder. I worry, I worry it might not look at all like that. It might look like Orban in Hungary all over Europe and in the US. So it's a more likely scenario where people like 70% of the population doesn't vote. The other 30% votes dedicatedly and votes right-wing and far-right, unequal proportions. And then there is a opposition that is just liberal, which is the problem also today. So there is a very bad scenario and it's unfolding. So it's a bit hard for me to... I mean, I am utopian, but not to utopian, you know. So I don't want to think too far away. I mean, the reality right now is that there is a turn to right-slash-far-right in Europe and it has to be stopped. And the other reality is that within the radical left and even within social democrats, there are people open to our ideas. So the immediate priority is how these voices and generally how there will be a space reserved for social democrats and the radical left and the greens. And then within these spaces, how our ideas are going to be accepted and perhaps with some human light and liberals or conservatives that they are open also to think differently. So that, I mean, immediately within the current system. Then of course the current system of democracy has... Liberal democracy has many problems, has led to a generalized apathy. And this is a problem. So again, the immediate challenge is how to stop this apathy.  When I was growing up in Greece, like elections were a big thing. 90% of people were voting and I remember everyone being out with flags now. You were going with your current. You had the flag of the party you were voting and then there were Suvlaki being grilled everywhere. And the Suvlaki also had their own flag. So it was like a big thing, you know? And then I read that in these elections were of course right plus far right triumph to 52%, which is unprecedented in recent Greek history. Only 40% of the population voted. So it's a huge reduction. It's less than... I remember 80 to 90 was like taken for granted in Greece. I don't know when this started changing but definitely I think it's recent. And 40% is demoralizing, which means that this system is no longer really democratic. It's like a small minority of people. And for the grand majority of people, it doesn't mean anything. So why don't they vote?  I mean that they are all equally bad. So the challenge again, therefore, progressively in the sense of socialist, eco-socialist forces is to really prove that they can make a difference and motivate again people and take them out with flags and have again a real class of ideas. Ideally after, yes, we need much more decentralized democracy. We need to be involved politically not just every four years when we vote. We need more opportunities for a direct input. We need more assemblies. We need more, yeah, but that's a little bit too far right now I think compared to where we stand. Well, of course, we also need to remind that in Greece there was also a history of dictatorships and after that, I mean, the left and the right were not just left and the right. They were heavily political stances that stained many generations after that. Yeah, but people believed that there would be a change. It goes to go out. I mean, I remember going out with a car and like bipping your form and honking, celebrating who won't because you thought that this would make a difference in your life and actually, you know, when a socialist, I guess I'm older than you, so I can remember. So I remember when a socialist government was the first time a left-wing government was elected in Greece in 1981.  I mean, I remember my parents were working six days and he was elected and they were working five days and then Saturday we were all sitting home taking it easy. So it wasn't just theoretical that we just liked Papandreou because he was better in the public debate the television or, you know, because he was nicer in the morning chats like it's what's happening today. It was like the next day, yes, we were working less in the school, I was in the elementary school and they were still beating us up. I mean, I remember being slapped and I was a good student as you can imagine for being a professor today, right? But I received a lot of beating in the, Papandreou elected next day, it's forbidden to hit anyone.  So, you know, salaries, political positions for women, all these things were real differences, material differences. So they weren't symbolic. I mean, they were to a large extent also symbolic but they were also real. And I think this is what is missing today, like to vote someone and really the next day or the next month say, okay, this made a difference to my life. I'm gonna vote them again, you know? And again and again, I'm gonna take also flag for them. And also on your Suvlaki, yeah. And the Suvlaki as a bonus. Sorry, sorry, we're vegetarians, we're not eating Suvlaki. Yeah, yeah. Falafels, we don't have falafels in Greece but something like that. So just to wrap up so many great elements that I, well, that now the word expects from you. So we in one year will be knocking on your doors and hoping for solutions and having everything ready for us. Do you have in the meantime anything for us to read, to listen, to watch, do you have any inspiring or not inspiring song, book, article, movie, something that you would like to share for us to be patient? I just finished listening to a very good podcast. So I'm just saying the last thing I did but I really liked it. So it's from, it's called, let me see that. I think the podcast is called, it's a Jacobin magazine podcast. It's called The Dive, I believe. And it had a great one on artificial intelligence. I was like, such a pleasure to listen.  Of course, there are real changes happening but how they're building up all this hype to avoid real regulation. And also how they're doing it to, I mean, as always, the main objective is to slash labor rights and reduce the cost of labor. I mean, anyways, it was great because we hear so much about artificial intelligence and it's all about exterminator and artificial intelligence escaping and then I listened to some Marxists and I said, okay, this guy really makes sense because the rest somehow didn't make sense. Something was off with this whole narrative. So please listen to it if you're worried about artificial intelligence. Yeah, great, thanks. Because it's also now a nice way to postpone for climate action because AI is now the new thing to worry about somehow. Julia, Jason, anything that you've read, listened or watched that you would like to share? I'll go next. So in terms of research, because you said, what can people expect? I think this is a good place to say that there's lots of other research projects on degroup and closed growth coming down the line and existing. So I'm not gonna fail to list all the ongoing projects but there's 2B which involves Dan O'Neill and Milena Brooks and other fabulous people. There's the WISE project led by Ritger Hochstra on alternative indicators. There's not particularly degrowth post-growth but at least moving away from TDP. There's Mario Pancera has a project on post-growth business models. Simone and Alessandro is continuing his fabulous modeling work and one of the big challenges we have is we want to work with all these people. We refuse to compete. We want to work with. And so this is something that is a challenge for us right now is to think about how we can best collaborate across this fantastic research landscape in Europe right now. And there's gonna be more and more of this research coming down the line and we really have to sort of federate ourselves because I think Simone and Alessandro, we were speaking in Brussels and he said, we have one chance and this is it. So we have one of the ways, one of the burdens on us is to not mess this up is to really work together. So I just wanted to say that as well. The other thing in terms of recommending reading or listening, everybody needs to read The Nutmeg's Curse by Amitav Ghosh. Everybody, everybody, this is a really good book. And one of the reasons it's a really good book is because he does things like cite Jason a lot and Robin Wallkemer and other people. So you get a lot of thinking condensed into one fantastically readable book. So please do yourself a favor this summer and read that. Fantastic. I'm glad that Julia mentioned the other projects because I was going to say the same. There's lots of people who are doing this and really it's actually too big to keep track of. It's funny, a couple of years ago I felt like there's so few people working in this space. I mean, even at the time it was actually pretty big but now it's just overwhelming and very exciting and I feel it's encouraging somehow now. And it's like, we have a lot of solidarity and companionship in the research community towards the objectives that we share. So that's great. In terms of books or texts that have inspired me, I mean, I guess since I've been talking a lot about the world system, I'll just mention one book that I think is very good on that, which is, it's called Capital and Imperialism by Patneik and Patneik, two Indian economists who have taught me a lot and I really owe a lot of my insights to their work. And then there's also a Senegalese economist called Dongo Sambasila who I think is doing amazing work thinking about what global south governments and social movements can do to achieve more freedom, more economic freedom within their position in the world economy and that's to me also very inspiring. Well, it's good that I'm going on holiday so I have time to read all of that. Thanks so much once again. I mean, it was fantastic. Next time let's try to do this in person. I think in one year time the ecological economics conference will be with Mario Pancera in Pontevedra and I think it's combined with the international de-gross conference. So in one year time let's reconvene to talk about progress and to discuss new exciting opportunities and new exciting readings. Thanks so much, Julia, Jorgo, Jason for this fantastic discussion. Thanks as well to all of you for listening, watching. Yeah, I think there is a number of elements that we discussed. You can go back to the episode with Raj Patel on cheap nature, cheap labor with Jason Moore on the capital scene. Tim Jackson, you mentioned him, Julia on the post growth as well. So yeah, there is such a vibrant community and I want to thank you once again for this, for making this happen and for this discussion as well. Thank you. Thanks very much for having us. Great, that's a wrap.


Hi everybody, they have just called votes and so I thank you for allowing me to interrupt your slow here. Look, this is just great to invite and welcome everyone here to this wonderful caucus event. I want to thank Representative Van Hollen and Representative Reiner for being the leaders of the caucus that deals with renewable energy and energy efficiency. I happen to be co-chair of CEC, the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Coalition in the House that is also joining as a sponsor, co-sponsor of the program. But I thank you gentlemen and the members of their caucus for leading us in this effort. Let me say something very strong here that I truly believe. I believe in climate change and global warming and that we need to address that phenomenon with science and policy. As an engineer, I embrace science, I don't reject it. So I submit to this notion that we as a world are challenged by climate change. I think the naked eye can speak to that. So your industries here today are part of that responsiveness that we require. It's essential as we weed ourselves off of dependency on fossil-based fuels and grow a renewable industry and energy efficiency to see as our fuel of choice we will achieve and we will respond to the threats and the challenges of climate change. If you can't find that concept, if you need to reject science, see it as job creation. See it as an impact to the positive on the quality of health of our nation and our world. See it as national security. Let me go through those points quickly. There are many, many stats already that are showing the renewable energy industry and energy efficiency industry as a job grower. We are growing many, many jobs in the green-collar variety that are strengthening our economy. They provide for a sustainable outcome. With the health care situation, more and more stats are speaking to asthma and various illnesses that children and adults have. We can address that positively by putting together an agenda that is robust on growing the renewable energy supply up there and again reaching to energy efficiency as our fuel of choice. And finally, not so long ago in my district, I hosted three veterans recently returning after their deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Two gentlemen, one from Arkansas, one from New Hampshire and another woman from Wisconsin all recently returned for active service in the military on the battlefield. They saw that American energy consumer dollars were going into the treasuries of four nations who were fighting the U.S. troops who were training their troops with our energy consumer dollars. So this is an issue of national security. It speaks loud and clear. Again, not a firm belief in climate change. I want Congress to accept that notion. Until we do, let's see it as self-sufficiency, energy independence, innovation economy, job growth, health care improvement, national security strengthening.  God bless you for being here, but let's do it with the fundamental principles of accepting science, not rejecting it.