Degrowth conference seeks submissions

Normally, discussions about the economy revolve around growth as a positive thing. But the organizers of Montreal’s upcoming International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas, which runs from May 13 to May 19, are calling for a big slowdown.

“The linkage of sustainable development to economic growth requires profound rethinking,” state the organizers on the conference website. “It has not offered a convincing solution to one of the most dramatic crises in history: how to avert ecological collapse while enhancing social justice and improving life’s prospects.”

The conference organizers, academics from McGill, Concordia, Université de Montréal, UQAM, and the École des hautes études commerciales de Montréal (HEC), are inviting graduate and undergraduate students to submit poster presentations based around the conference themes.

“The posters can cover research reports, testimonies, accounts, political standpoints or simple questioning of the status quo,” the organizers state.

The conference brings together academics, activists, environmentalists and indigenous people to discuss how to move beyond popular, accepted models of sustainable development, which the degrowth movement views as a dysfunctional model that is only prolonging the planet’s ecological collapse.

“Sustainable development is a project suggesting that infinite growth in a finite world is possible,” writes Yves-Marie Abraham, an associate professor in the Department of Management at HEC, in a primer for the event.

Previous degrowth conferences occurred in 2008 in Paris, and in 2010 in Barcelona. The Montreal conference will focus on the challenges of applying a degrowth model in the Americas, where the perceived need for constant growth drives most political, social and economic policies.

Related link:
•  International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas