ISEE-Degrowth 2025 conference: Building socially just postgrowth futures - linking theory and action

Title: Navigating to Post-growth via Polycrisis

“Humanity is at a crucial juncture. In addition to the triple planetary crisis (global heating, biodiversity loss, pollution), we are confronting technological disruptions, uncertain global energy (transition) outlook, growing political polarization, worsening inequalities, rising poverty & hunger, stagnating growth, setbacks in achieving the SDGs, crumbling international cooperation, and the escalation of violent conflicts. Multiple global systems (both human and natural) are simultaneously—and at least partly synchronously—undergoing a paradigmatic shift. The term polycrisis is used to describe this predicament, where the old paradigms are crumbling while the new paradigms are yet to form (echoing Gramsci but with the context of the so-called Anthropocene). Not all shifts are inherently negative, but they are characterised by deep uncertainties and non-linear (tipping) dynamics. They may also open up windows of opportunities for a just and sustainable futures.

Scholarship needs to be responsive to this context and discern pathways to post-growth transitions, accordingly. In the first part of my presentation, I would like to provide a brief literature review of key concepts and perspectives in this relatively novel research domain of the Polycrisis. In the second part, which will be less analytical and more normative, I would like to highlight the most under-studied aspects of post-growth transition research that become even more relevant in the Polycrisis context: security and geopolitics. As an alternative to military security framework, I will emphasise a need for social-ecological security framework underpinned by social and biophysical realities - i.e., societies in which everyone’s basic needs are met, tend to be more secure and our survival is contingent on resilient earth systems”