degrowth

Circular economy initiatives in Australia increasingly reference reuse, yet dominant recycling-led approaches continue to reproduce business-as-usual. This paper asks what kinds of worlds are made through reuse by examining Substation 33 and St Kilda Mums (now Our Village). Drawing on Karatani’s reading of surplus value, we develop “reuse value” as a parallax concept that captures both the embodied potential of discarded materials and the relational forms of care through which they re-enter circulation.

While degrowth as a plural and decolonial movement actively invites the Global South to be part of its transformative project, the current North-South dichotomy threatens to miss the variety of semi-peripheral contexts. Against this backdrop, we aim to contribute to dialogues on degrowth from the often-overlooked ‘East’ – specifically post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Instead of being viewed as a site for transformative examples and inspiration for degrowth-oriented socio-ecological transformation, CEE is often portrayed as ‘lagging behind’.

As ecological and social crises mount, academic work which explores the transformation of unsustainable socio-ecological systems has flourished. Surprisingly, however, there have been few, if any, concerted attempts to consider the resonances and divergences between two of the most prominent approaches to rethinking the economy as we know it: degrowth, and diverse and community economies (DCE), respectively. In this Critical Review, I reflect on resonances and similarities, as they emerge from the academic literature.

As opposed to political democracy and its attempts at power control in the public sector, the concentration of economic power, and its antidote, the concept of economic democracy, has received much less attention.

The aim of this paper is to look at alternatives to the classic for-profit shareholding enterprise and to suggest how such alternatives might be supported within the current economic system. Another aim is to link the social enterprise and degrowth discourses. We first re-define the economy as including non-monetised sectors (the core economy and the economy of nature) and discuss the liminal zone of not-for-profit and not-only-for profit organisations.