Short Abstract:

This panel investigates the ecological limits of capitalism, exploring radical critiques and transformative alternatives to the eco-social contradictions driving environmental degradation and crisis.

Long Abstract:

In the face of multiple crises, the call for socio-ecological transformation is increasingly gaining traction, not only in academia but also in political discourse and market summits. However, the terms of this transformation remain all too often confined to techno-scientific fixes and top-down policies that fail to question the socio-ecological contradictions and colonial dynamics that drive capitalism. As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen (2021, pp.163-4) argue, the prevailing assumption remains that “the necessary absolute reduction of resource consumption and of the strain on sinks is feasible without challenging the imperial mode of living, the political economy of capitalism, or the relationships of social forces that sustain it”.

This panel is a call for papers that recognise the necessity of radical critique to inform a transformation that is founded on social and ecological justice, identifying development as a key ideological framework through which accumulative and externalising regimes of capitalism have not only expanded over the last seventy years but continue to renew through contemporary crises in the guise of ‘green growth’ and ‘green colonialism’. We welcome theoretical and empirical research that critiques the contradictions and limitations of green initiatives and discourse, as well as explorations of alternative, ‘bottom-up’ approaches towards socio-ecological transformation in both the Global South and North, that disrupt, negate, and navigate the logic of capitalism and its expression through colonial, juridical-political, patriarchal and racial forms.

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