This article is part of a series that highlights why The Beyond Growth 2023 Conference aligns with several of the ten theses of ECOLISE
The Beyond Growth Conference, taking place from May 15-17, 2023, is set to bring together experts, activists, and practitioners from around the world to discuss the urgent need for transformative change in our societies.
Beyond growth is a concept that challenges the idea that economic growth should be the ultimate goal of societies. Instead, it advocates for an approach that prioritizes social and ecological well-being and sees the economy as a means to serve those goals, rather than the other way around. This approach is increasingly gaining traction, particularly in the context of the urgent need to address the planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and other forms of environmental degradation.
The conference will explore the urgent need to support a plurality of non-economic values, including relational values, in political and economic decisions. Extractive economic systems, which are the root cause of the planetary crisis, promote mindsets and extrinsic values such as hyper-individualism, materialism, competition, and consumerism. The current mainstream vision of being a good citizen and leading a “good life” is centered around working and consuming, leading to an unsustainable lifestyle that is driving the planet towards a catastrophic future.
On the other hand, an increasing body of evidence highlights that sustainability is a normative concept and that values and worldviews (culture/mindsets) play a decisive role in achieving transformative change. For example, in July 2022 the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) stated that the “way nature is valued in political and economic decisions is both a key driver of the global biodiversity crisis and a vital opportunity to address it”. The IPBES Values Assessment finds that there are a number of deeply held values that can be aligned with sustainability, emphasising values like unity, responsibility, stewardship and justice, both towards other people and towards nature. This supports the argument that there is an urgent need to support a plurality of non-economic values, including relational and transcendental values, in political and economic decisions. A regenerative culture is a culture that is “consciously building the capacity of everybody in a particular place to respond and change and accept transformation as something that life just ‘does’”. Regenerative cultures are based on a systemic approach that recognises that our cultures are the foundations of the material systems in which we live.
ECOLISE, the European network of community-led initiatives for sustainability and climate action, argues that community-led initiatives such as permaculture groups, ecovillages, and Transition towns have created principles, methods, frameworks, and processes that are practical expressions of these regenerative systemic perspectives. These initiatives focus on care for the soil as a guiding principle and value, nourishing life by creating the right contextual conditions, with a focus on the process and not only on specific outcomes. The relevance of values and worldviews is also expressed in the Transition movement’s concept of “Inner Transition”: tending to inner landscapes is seen as a prerequisite for outer transition (action).
The Beyond Growth 2023 Conference will explore how these values and regenerative cultures can be brought to transformative change. The conference will discuss the principles of systems thinking and how they can be applied to any activity, such as governance, regenerative agriculture, renewable and cooperative energy systems, and more. The conference will also explore the importance of nurturing relationships and cooperation between humans and their environment, valuing abundance over scarcity, and shining a light on the fact that real values are not currently part of the economic market system, which operates on scarcity.
ECOLISE calls for:
- Non-economic values that nurture pro-environmental behaviour and Earth stewardship to be incorporated into political and economic decision-making, such as unity, cooperation, responsibility, earth stewardship and justice, towards both people and nature.
- Greater participation and interaction of EU citizens in civic life and with nature. Strengthen policies that recognise the need for and support a partial shift from economic activity (working time) to civic activity (e.g. participation in CLIs or participative democracy) and cultural activity (with greater access to nature, but also culture – arts, literature, sport etc.).
- Acknowledgement of the role of culture and values in achieving transformative change in general, and in particular in initiatives such as the New European Bauhaus and the European Climate Pact.
The link to the European Green Deal
The EGD has started to acknowledge the need for values, culture and in general a new inspiring narrative. This is exemplified in initiatives such as the NextGeneration/Recovery Plan for Europe “Build back better“, which sees the Covid pandemic as a call to a new start to transform the system. The New European Bauhaus initiative was set up in order to connect culture and the creative sectors with the planned Renovation Wave (with a current focus on design and architecture/urban planning) but holds the potential to become an interface between culture and the EGD in general. The European Commission’s ongoing search for a strong “narrative” and values is also embodied in its focus on a European way of life.
Beyond growth and towards non-economic values
The Beyond Growth 2023 Conference is an innovative approach to policy-making that challenges conventional policy-making and promotes a post-growth future-fit EU that values abundance, sustainability, and regenerative cultures. By exploring the urgent need to support a plurality of non-economic values and promoting community-led initiatives that focus on care for the soil and inner transition, the conference will provide an innovative approach to policy-making that prioritises the well-being of people and the planet.
This article is part of a series that highlights why the The Beyond Growth 2023 Conference aligns with several of the ten theses of ECOLISE
The Beyond Growth Conference, taking place from May 15-17, 2023, is set to bring together experts, activists, and practitioners from around the world to discuss the urgent need for transformative change in our societies.
The conference has several mutually reinforcing goals, including:
- discussing the significance of economic growth as a policy goal
- shifting the discourse towards future-oriented economic policymaking
- shaping the EU’s path to a more resilient economic agenda
- creating real policy impact with new proposals to establish a new social, economic, and environmental contract, and creating new and unusual alliances between a great diversity of stakeholders
