- Convenors:
-
Dominique Arsenault
(Université de Technologie de Compiègne)
Simon Tremblay-Pepin (Saint Paul University)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
Academic panel with suplementary talks organized in conference lunch time.
Long Abstract
In recent years, democratic economic planning has emerged as a vision for a post-capitalist economy, offering an alternative to the ecological destructive market economy. This imaginary has been partly developed through planning models: abstract configurations of alternative economic structures and institutions. These include the Half-Earth Socialism model from Vetesse and Pendergrass (2022), the Commonism model from Sutterlütti and Meretz (2023), the ecological planning model from Cedric Durand and Rasmig Keuchen (2024) and many others. While they vary in their specifics, at the center of all these proposals are alternative mechanisms for organizing production and distrubition via democratic participation and deliberation, while also integrating social-metabolic sustainability.
As an emerging branch of utopian thinking, these proposals remain necessarily incomplete. In particular, they remain connected to conventional conceptions of economy and labour (largely masculine industrial labour), and, as Planning for Entropy (2022) argue, ecology is still to narrowly concieved. Imaginaries of planning must further be transformed by perspectives of care and reproduction, global-south centered economic and ecological transformation, and diversity in human and more-than-human relationships with nature.
This pannel seeks to understand democratic planning as a powerful Post-Capitalist narrative. Secondly, it wants to challenge the existing frame of economic planning and take it beyond its existing terrain, transforming this vision in the process. As democratic planning, at its core, is about the negotiation between diverse lived realities, democratic planning itself must be subjected to deliberation from a pluriversal perspective and therefore may become part of a democratic process towards utopia(s) . We invite contributions which combine discussions of planning with the topics of reproduction and care, gender, race, north-south relations, decolonization, dissability and ableism, more-than-human relations, ecology, contemporary social and ecological struggles, commons, and other post-capitalist imaginaries.
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
Grass-roots proto planning, based on commons and social movements, offer an alternative to state-centric vision of planning. Industrial commons such as distributed production networks, community fabrication hubs, and socially integrated factories are explored as examples.
Presentation long abstract
Existing theories of democratic economic planning focus on state-lead planning. As such, they identify emergent forms of planning in top-down structures, like the state planning capacities of the “Secrétariat général à la planification écologique” in the work of Durand and Keucheyan, or the corporate planning capabilities of firms like Amazon or Walmart in the work of Phillips and Rozworkski. This reflects a vision of planning concerned with the capacity to direct and control the economy along non-market principles. However, if we instead conceptualize planning as primarily a question of creating capacities for self-governance and aligning production with social needs, we identify different existing practices as sites of inspiration for planning systems and as vectors of political transformation.
Drawing on the literature on the commons as well as workers councils and council communism, this paper proposes a concept of "grass-roots proto-planning structures" as a category of social practices which lay the foundation for self-governance and production based on needs. These proto planning structures may exist in a variety of forms. This paper explores the form of "commons based manufacturing": projects which organize the production of manufactured goods based on shared, collectively governed resources. Three elements of industrial commons ecosystems are identified, drawing on empirical examples: the distributed production network, the community fabrication hub, and the socially integrated factory.
Presentation short abstract
Current ecological macro models reproduce technocratic, capitalist assumptions. We explore Democratic Economic Planning and possibilities for integration with ecological macroeconomics to incorporate democratic coordination and support exploration of transformative post-capitalist futures.
Presentation long abstract
Ecological Macroeconomic Integrated Assessment Models (EM-IAMs) dominate ecological macroeconomic modelling yet remain structurally constrained by institutional and epistemic assumptions of capitalist dynamics and technocratic governance. Whether neoclassical/CGE, post-Keynesian stock–flow consistent, or physical system-dynamics, existing IAMs typically treat economic transformation as an implicit planning problem involving apolitical optimisation processes. This marginalizes democratic agency and participatory decision-making—qualitative dimensions of social life that ecological economics has long argued are central to just and sustainable transformation. As a result, post-capitalist alternative futures are largely excluded, and economic change is depoliticized in ways that conflict with the field’s normative commitments.
This paper argues that Democratic Economic Planning (DEP) provides a necessary framework for grounding ecological macroeconomics in institutions of collective reasoning, accountability, and shared responsibility. We survey prominent DEP proposals, showing how they challenge both market dependence and technocratic planning while enabling multilevel coordination within ecological limits. We then examine emerging computational modelling of DEP, including agent-based, cybernetic, participatory, and commons-oriented simulations that illuminate practical mechanisms and implementation challenges.
From these insights, we outline a research agenda for integrating DEP with ecological macroeconomic modelling. This agenda spans analytical, institutional, and pedagogical innovations, including modelling non-market quantities, incorporating communication and information flows, and exploring participatory macroeconomic planning through human-in-the-loop simulations and multiplayer ecological-economics simulations / games. Together, these directions of inquiry reorient ecological macroeconomics toward an explicitly democratic and post-capitalist modelling paradigm capable of exploring genuinely transformative socio-ecological futures.
Presentation short abstract
Combining Degrowth’s call for planned downscaling, the Foundational Economy’s emphasis on essential sectors, and Democratic Planning’s governance tools offers a framework for ecological democratic planning that can support fair socio-ecological transformations within planetary boundaries.
Presentation long abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic made the “essential economy” visible, as governments prioritized sectors that sustain everyday life—healthcare, food systems, utilities, social care and transport—while shutting down non-essentials. This exposed both the indispensability of foundational provisioning systems and their fragility after decades of neoliberal austerity (Foundational Economy Collective, 2020; Russell et al., 2022). At the same time, the climate crisis underscores the need to reorganize economic activity within planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023). This chapter brings together three strands of scholarship—Degrowth, the Foundational Economy (FE) and Democratic/Ecological Planning—to outline an integrated framework for socio-ecological transformation focused on essential provisioning.
Degrowth calls for a democratically planned downscaling of harmful, high-throughput sectors to open “metabolic space” for socially and environmentally beneficial activities (D’Alisa, 2014; Hickel, 2021). FE scholarship identifies the essential sectors that sustain everyday life, and its recent “FE 2.0” turn incorporates ecological limits into their governance (Calafati et al., 2021; Bärnthaler et al., 2021). Democratic and Ecological Planning contribute institutional architectures, participatory mechanisms and socio-metabolic tools for coordinating provisioning systems across scales (Beaucaire et al., 2023; Durand et al., 2024).
By mapping synergies across these literatures, the chapter suggests that planning for the essential economy can be approached through a conceptual bridge linking degrowth’s socio-ecological aims, FE’s identification of essential sectors and ecological planning’s governance tools. This convergence offers a lens for examining how essential provisioning might be organized within ecological limits and highlights avenues for future research grounded in ecological accounting and democratic deliberation.
Presentation short abstract
Modelling tools that push technocratic boundaries and engage with the multiple interlinked socio-ecological crises while projecting degrowth in the North may be an interesting ingredient of collective deliberation and socially inclusive economic planning.
Presentation long abstract
Modelling and economic assessment has for long been relegated to the terrain of squarely quantitative and ‘objectivist’ science. Yet, modelling tools that push technocratic boundaries and engage with the multiple interlinked socio-ecological crises facing humanity, including soaring wealth inequalities, while projecting degrowth in the North, have been increasingly employed (Lauer et al. 2025, Van Eynde et al. 2024). As an illustration, studies present degrowth dynamics through shrinking metabolic throughput, or associated policy interventions like an introduction of a Job Guarantee, A Basic Income and working time-reduction, funded by progressive wealth tax (D’Alessandro et al. 2015). One may argue that attempts to represent societies that are not underpinned by the ‘growth imperative’ and the core tenets of capitalism (such as economic accumulation), may be conceptualized as planning lenses, or rather approaches to inspect the multiple entry points from where the disentanglement with financialization and profit-seeking in our capitalist systems could actually emerge.
A core question for much of this modelling work, however, is whether, how and under what conditions could progressive eco-social macroeconomic modelling be grounded in a wider democratic and deliberation processes? This could imply consulting many underlying assumptions, indicators, and knowledge premises with multiple publics and epistemologies. The other way round may also be also relevant for economic planning: democratic deliberation that stems from pluriversal visions may also benefit from assessments and calculus that have been produced under assumptions and knowledges that have been inclusively negotiated and equitably decided upon.
Presentation short abstract
The importance of deliberation in participatory planning schemes has become increasingly recognized, particularly as societies grapple with the complexities of environmental and social challenges in the form of uncertainty and cognitive limitations.
Presentation long abstract
In recent years, the importance of deliberation in participatory planning schemes has become increasingly recognized, particularly as societies grapple with the complexities of environmental and social challenges. The talk will begin with a brief introduction to the participatory planning approach and will argue that deliberation is essential for a successful process. This stands in contrast to formal democracy, where the preferences, values, and interests of different agents are aggregated through a voting mechanism, on two grounds: a) The aggregation system is susceptible to manipulation since it is technically flawed in finding an appropriate way to construct social outcomes from individual positions. b) The aggregation mechanism eliminates the possibility of public reasoning.
Following this, the talk will focus on two key requirements: a) Achieving a broad consensus on which stakeholders to include in the decision-making process and how to weight their inputs. b) Ensuring equal recognition and power (economic, social, and political) among participants while also fostering reciprocity.
Finally, the talk will assert that since deliberative democracy prioritizes the process itself, procedural rationality must also be defended. Given the inherent uncertainty and cognitive limitations involved (especially on environmental issues), the methods by which policies are designed are of paramount importance. The talk will conclude by highlighting that public reasoning through mutual understanding is a prerequisite for a healthy public sphere.