Presentation long abstract

Human societies confront the challenge of achieving wellbeing while living within their fair share of planetary boundaries. Research on degrowth speaks to this challenge and has expanded rapidly, yet much of it remains focused on future scenarios and on policy prescriptions. Empirical understanding of how degrowth-akin dynamics emerge in real places remains limited. And the absence of a systematic analytical framework to compare such territorial dynamics hampers efforts towards cumulative knowledge. Here we propose a tripartite framework for studying what we call “Real-Existing Degrowth territories” (REDs) focussing on the material fabrics, territorial regulations and prevalent social imaginaries that interact in specific territories to produce degrowth outcomes. We propose indicators to assess such outcomes, and put forward variables that can measure important causal attributes. The RED framework enables systematic, comparative research of degrowth-akin processes across scales and geographies, from remote islands and shrinking cities to post-extractivist regions or planned, ecosocialist economies. In doing so, it offers diagnostic insights into how degrowth-akin modes of living, producing, and governing emerge and endure within a growth-dominated world. By identifying and analysing systematically such low-throughput, high-wellbeing territorial systems, the framework offers sustainability science a practical method for investigating diverse, real-world trajectories towards living well within limits.

Presentation short abstract

Ikaria offers a real example of degrowth, showing how decent social wellbeing can be sustained with minimal resources. This study traces the island’s historical, cultural, and geographic foundations to reveal durable egalitarian, feminist, and frugal territorial arrangements.

Presentation long abstract

Identifying territorial constellations that achieve high levels of social wellbeing with minimal resource and energy use is essential for advancing degrowth research and practice. Ikaria, a small Aegean island, has long served as a key reference point for the development of the Real-Existing Degrowth (RED) agenda. Recent studies show that Ikariots sustain decent and fulfilling lives while consuming only a fraction of the resources typically associated with comparable levels of wellbeing. This article advances this line of inquiry by examining the historical processes through which Ikaria's distinctive socio-spatial arrangements were produced. By being the first article that fully operationalises the RED methodology, combining 25 biographical interviews, extensive archival research, and long-term ethnography, it traces how a rugged and remote geography, a succession of historically specific social innovations, and the cultivation of cultural values centred on simplicity, sharing, and festivity have collectively generated durable forms of social organisation. These arrangements consistently exhibit frugality, inclusivity, egalitarianism, and feminist orientations. The article concludes by assessing Ikaria's capacity to continue reshaping itself in response to external pressures for homogenisation and by distilling lessons relevant to broader post-growth transformations. Together, the findings illuminate how alternative territorial trajectories can emerge and persist, offering concrete insights for envisioning and enacting degrowth transformations.

Presentation short abstract

What does degrowth mean in relation to real-existing wellbeing alternatives in the global south that bear the destructive effects colonialism, hegemonic development, geopolitical shifts and neoliberal intervention? The paper explores conundrums of degrowth in the global south from a decolonial lens.

Presentation long abstract

Degrowth, as a socio-political movement, has expanded from the periphery to the center of debates of the way economics and ‘development’ can be reimagined and reconfigured. This shift is crucial and timely as the world faces global polycrises. Yet, as degrowth expands in the global north, gaps remain in its engagement and traction in the global south. What does degrowth mean in relation to real pre-existing wellbeing alternatives in the global south, which themselves bear the destructive effects of waves of colonialism, hegemonic formations of development, geopolitical shifts, and neoliberal intervention? Degrowth faces challenges in the global south, set against skewed relations of power and vested interests that privilege global north actors – and complex power relations in both locales. It also holds important potential for engagement of real-lived conundrums confronting those living in global south peripheries. Based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in the remote highlands and spiritual-ecological landscapes of Bhutan, this paper explores the way climate change generated elsewhere on the planet and GDP-centric development are experienced by pastoralists and more than humans in the world’s first carbon negative country. It comparatively reflects on negotiations and contestations over the pursuit of endless economic growth, and development alternatives focused on happiness. The findings provide insights for centering indigenous wellbeing cosmologies, valuing of sentience, agency and rights of more than humans, and convergence of degrowth with real existing alternatives. The paper argues for expanding degrowth framings to account for complexities of coloniality and decoloniality, and relations of power that shape them.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines depaving as a degrowth practice in the climate crisis. Focusing on the depaving movement in the U.S., the incremental subtraction of impervious surfaces is a minor demolition with major ecological benefits, operating at both local & infrastructural scales of urban transformation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines depaving as a degrowth practice in the climate crisis. Depaving, a minor demolition with major ecological benefits, operates at both local & infrastructural scales of urban transformation; it resists normative notions of degrowth as spectacular, instantaneous acts of demolition, or as a decline or stagnation in urban transformation.

Under a growth model, U.S. cities have experienced increasing heatwaves, storm surges, and floods not only due to climate change, but also due to material design decisions to pave over the earth for cars and construction. Impervious surfaces compound the effects of climate by design, and depaving regards a built environment in need of an ecological repair of the ground. If degrowth in construction (a historically growth-oriented industry) entails urgently addressing architecture’s “carbon form,” it becomes crucial for designers not only to contend with the verticality of the built environment, but also its vast horizontality; its petrocultural urban crust.

Focusing on the depaving movement in the U.S., I examine how the incremental subtraction of impervious surfaces such as concrete and asphalt (and the parallel act of planting and remediating soil) has played out in community and regulatory contexts in the U.S. Northeast, including its impetus, its site-specific and material actions, its organizational structure and timeline, and its barriers to implementation. Drawing from an architectural and urban design perspective, this paper reflects on the potentials and paradoxes of subtraction as a design act, and speculates on how designers may adapt their services toward urban degrowth practices and resist economic growth.

Presentation short abstract

Communal bakehouses are real existing fragments of a (former) rural degrowth economy. I aim to understand how these, sometimes still operated, commons produce concrete utopias and if they point towards emancipatory or regressive ruralities. I explore this in an ethnographic triangulation.

Presentation long abstract

Just 70 years ago, communal bakehouses were the basic infrastructure for the daily supply of bread in Germany. In many villages, these historic commons are still used for various occasions throughout the year and are considered by the people as part of their rural traditions. In my research, I want to understand this potential fragment of a rural degrowth economy. The spatialization of degrowth policies points to rural areas, mainly due to the availability of resources and situational degrowth practices. At the same time, rural regions appear to be left-behind places, inhabited by people with often reactionary ideas. Through communal bakehouses, I want to understand how materials, practices, and imaginaries interact and produce ruralites. I ask what concrete utopias arise at the bakehouse and what emancipatory or regressive moments they exhibit. One challenge is how I can question and record hidden latencies in addition to more or less obvious tendencies. I attempt to address this in my field research through a triangulation of participant observation, interviews, and an art-based workshop. In my presentation I want to lay out the theoretical and methodological basis of my research and share some first insights from my fieldwork.

Presentation short abstract

Degrowth needs the state, yet research focuses on grassroots movements. This paper examines La Foresta in Rovereto, Italy - a public-commons partnership that is repurposing a train station into a community academy - to explore the role of municipalities in experimenting with nowtopias.

Presentation long abstract

There is no degrowth transition without the state. Yet, research on local degrowth experiments has prioritised grassroots movements, trapping the degrowth transition in a binary of with/against the state. This paper challenges this false dichotomy by examining how local degrowth experiments can emerge through collaboration with what I term the "experimental local state": local authorities willing to question the growth imperative and support nowtopias.

Nowtopias are real existing prefigurative initiatives that materialize post-growth futures. A promising avenue for the establishment of nowtopias is public-commons partnerships, where local authorities collaborate with grassroots groups. We lack empirical analysis and theoretical frameworks to understand what types of support can local authorities provide to nowtopias, and whether collaborating with institutions may advance or undermine their degrowth ambitions.

This research addresses these gaps through a case study of La Foresta in Rovereto, Italy, a community academy born from collaboration between the Municipality and a grassroots organization. Inside the spaces of the train station of Rovereto, members of La Foresta experiment with commons, self-sufficiency, local food systems, multispecies justice, and transfeminist practices. Using Participatory System Dynamics Modelling and Q-methodology, this study illuminates a case of "real existing degrowth" where the municipality functions as an enabling stakeholder.

By documenting how La Foresta operates as a public-commons partnership, this research reveals a third path beyond the sterile with/against binary: collaborative experimentation that leverages the resources of municipalities while preserving the radicalism of nowtopias. This is essential to build the institutional infrastructure where nowtopias can develop.

Presentation short abstract

Based on three months of fieldwork on Ama Island, this study examines how local initiatives—such as the Island-as-Library concept, Adult Island Study Abroad, and community-based welfare—reflect elements of real-existing degrowth rooted in the island’s resistance to the Heisei municipal mergers

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Ama Island in Japan between September and November 2025, this research explores how the island’s locally driven initiatives embody elements of real-existing degrowth. Ama is known for its unique history of resisting the Heisei no Daigappei municipal mergers, a stance that reaffirmed local autonomy and collective decision-making. This historical trajectory provides the foundation for a set of practices that challenge dominant growth-oriented development narratives.

In my presentation, I will introduce key initiatives—such as the Island-as-Library concept, which reimagines the entire island as a distributed space of shared knowledge and collective learning; the Adult Island Study Abroad program, which brings in newcomers in their twenties as “関係人口" or relational population to engage directly with local challenges; and community-based welfare approaches that strengthen intergenerational ties and mutual support. Together, these initiatives demonstrate how social relations, cultural continuity, and everyday practices can serve as concrete examples of real-existing degrowth from Japan.

Through daily observation, conversation, interviews, and discussion with town council members, this study analyzes how these practices foster resilience, cultivate slow and intentional forms of living, and reinforce communal responsibility.

By situating Ama’s practices within broader debates on degrowth, this research contributes a Japan-based case to discussions of real-existing degrowth, illustrating how initiatives on this small island can offer grounded, pragmatic models for post-growth futures rooted in lived experience rather than abstract theory.

Presentation short abstract

With very few inhabitants and newcomers promoting communal practices, the tiny island of Alicudi offers a way to ask what social, ecological, and organisational conditions would be needed for it to become a case of Real Existing Degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

Alicudi, the most remote and least populated of the Aeolian Islands, offers a small-scale context in which the idea of Real Existing Degrowth (RED) can be explored in concrete and grounded terms. With only a very small permanent population and minimal infrastructure, the island already functions with limited connection to a growth-driven economy. Recent demographic changes have introduced new dynamics: newcomers, often “foreigners” seeking a slower pace of life and a closer relationship with nature, are increasingly the ones promoting communal and cooperative practices, such as shared maintenance of paths and terraces or collective approaches to food provisioning. These ideas coexist with the habits and expectations of long-term inhabitants, producing moments of alignment as well as tensions around everyday organisation and visions for the island’s future.

Alicudi is not proposed here as an existing case of RED. Instead, the island serves as a site to consider what conditions -social, ecological, and organisational- might allow a community like this to move toward forms of degrowth in practice.

By focusing on Alicudi’s demographic fragility, ecological constraints, and emerging social initiatives, the paper uses the island as a lens to reflect on the practical pathways and challenges involved in building degrowth-oriented ways of living. Rather than presenting a model, Alicudi becomes a space for examining how small, remote communities might negotiate the conditions needed to move toward Real Existing Degrowth.

Presentation short abstract

An organizational ethnography that examines how the Post Growth Institute embodies Real Existing Degrowth across North-South geographies through experimental, relational and imperfect forms of organizing that surface tensions, facilitate learnings and generate possibilities.

Presentation long abstract

This paper presents an organizational autoethnography of the Post Growth Institute (PGI) as a generative case of Real Existing Degrowth (RED) that expands notions of territory to include organizational ecologies shaped by diverse histories, positionalities, and power dynamics across North-South geographies. Drawing on analytic and impressionistic forms of organizational autoethnography and ethnographic data generated through the PGI’s Fellowship and Alliance programs, it examines how an organization embodies post-growth principles as it transitions from a White, Global North-led organization to one governed across diverse socio-spatial, cultural, and epistemic contexts. By tracing the everyday processes, tensions and learnings within the PGI, the paper highlights the ongoing experimental practices through which the organization models degrowth. These include the internal circulation of money, power, and resources, while nurturing relationality across a network of members in the Global North and South. The analysis reveals how post-growth principles become materially and emotionally entangled in collaborative work across difference and argues that the PGI represents a liminal organisational formation that offers a lived, global attempt to practise degrowth through context-specific, relational, and imperfect arrangements. The paper contributes to debates on how degrowth-oriented organizing can navigate and potentially transform North-South divides within contemporary research, governance, and innovation cultures.

Presentation short abstract

This paper presents a comparative case study of Community Energy Initiatives in Greece, showcasing their contradictions, limitations, and potentialities as real-existing degrowth particularly within the context of austerity, residual redistribution eco-welfare and green capitalist paradigms.

Presentation long abstract

Community Energy Initiatives (CEIs) have been hailed as examples of real-existing degrowth with promising potential in furthering energy justice and democracy. However, there is a lack of attention paid to the effects and constraints that austerity eco-welfare regimes and privatized energy systems impose on their capacity to actualize energy justice and democracy. Through a comparative case study of two CEIs with different governance structures (top-down and bottom-up) and geography (urban and rural) in Greece, this study showcases the contradictions, limitations, and potentialities of CEIs in delivering eco-social justice in green capitalist, residual welfare regimes. Through qualitative interviews, document analysis, and in-person observation, the study employs a multi-level, inter-textual discursive methodology that situates the case studies within the broader, structural context and eco-welfare regime. Clashes between radical decommodification imaginaries and techno-managerial practices, universal claims-making and philanthropic redistribution policies and practices, common good conceptualizations and entrepreneurial discourses are identified as contradictory manifestations of the commons-commodity hybridity of CEIs. Central policies are shown to entail instrumentalization and cooptation tendencies that are limiting but not entirely defining the local initiatives which both internalize and resist dominant discourses in a contradictory manner. This study contributes to the spatialization of the “just transition” and situates community initiatives within broader structural socio-political dynamics furthering our understanding of local conditions and characteristics that define Real Existing Degrowth.

Presentation short abstract

Degrowth movements must build mass social power. However, real existing degrowth practices often exclude the groups who could form this social base. In this presentation I will draw on participatory ethnographic field work to explore some of the ways class and nihilism create these barriers.

Presentation long abstract

The degrowth literature has demonstrated the desirability and viability of a post-growth future – there are possible non-capitalist futures in which humanity flourishes. However, we are still missing strategies for transition (Heron and Dean 2022; Barlow et al. 2022). Crucial to these strategies are organisations that build economic and democratic alternatives to capitalist firms and nation states (Schmelzer et al. 2022, ch. 5). This presentation will draw on the findings of 22 months of embedded participatory fieldwork in a grassroots activist project in Hull, UK attempting to do exactly that.

One of the ‘strategic wagers’ (Nunes 2021) made by the group I am researching with is that disenfranchisement with mainstream politics provides an opening for radical organisation. Furthermore, Hull is already experiences negative or no growth, and the harms that come with this in capitalism. However, the actual processes of forming relationships and organisation in this context has been difficult. Interviews with ‘outsiders’ to the organisation revealed ways that many of the real existing practices of degrowth performed by committed activists created barriers to participation. These intersect with experiences place, identity and class to create feelings of insiders and outsiders to the political project. In this presentation I will draw on Wendy Brown’s (2019) and Mark Fisher’s (2012) work on neoliberal subjectivities to explore the challenges of nihilism and disenfranchisement in building vibrant degrowth organisations in a post-industrial city.