Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Colombia's ecosocialist transition under Petro (2022–present) through fieldwork with territorial movements, officials, and party actors. It analyses tensions between post-extractivist demands and fiscal imperatives, revealing contradictions in state-led metabolic transformation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines Colombia's nascent ecosocialist transition under the Petro government through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali between 2024 and 2026. The research analyzes how the Pacto Histórico coalition attempts to operationalize post-extractivist politics within a peripheral capitalist state still embedded in extractive accumulation regimes during its first-ever left-wing government.

Using a four-actor typology of territorial movement leaders, government officials, academic experts, and party lawmakers, the study maps alliance dynamics and contradictions within Colombia's ecological transition agenda. Interviews reveal persistent tensions between movement demands for territorial autonomy and institutional imperatives to maintain fiscal stability through continued hydrocarbon exploitation. These tensions illuminate broader theoretical debates about the metabolic transformation required for ecosocialist transition beyond core capitalist nations.

Drawing on Gramscian concepts of hegemonic articulation alongside recent work on metabolic rift and degrowth in the semi-periphery, the paper argues that Colombia represents a critical case for understanding how ecosocialist transitions might unfold under conditions of peripheral dependency and active armed conflict. Fieldwork exposes fractures within the governing coalition between technocratic reformism and radical demands for territorial sovereignty, particularly around carbon frontiers in the Amazon and Pacific coast regions.

Findings suggest Colombia's experience offers insights into three dimensions of ecosocialist transition theory: the necessity of articulating anti-extractive politics within concrete class alliances capable of challenging accumulation regimes; contradictions inherent in attempting metabolic transformation through existing state apparatuses shaped by colonial extraction; and the emergence of new political subjectivities that refuse both liberal environmentalism and traditional party structures.

Presentation short abstract

This contribution, by an inter-disciplinary team of practioners, technicians and academics, will reflect on the experience of Public-Economic-Community (PEC) Planning in the Basque town of Hernani. The focus is on how such "pre-revolutionary planning" can support a ecosocialist-degrowth transition.

Presentation long abstract

With a population of 20,000, the predominantly industrial town of Hernani is located 8km southwest of Donostia-Sant Sebastian. As the pandemic hit, it quickly became evident that residents faced intersecting crises – lack of internet-access for home-schooling, farmers unable to deliver products to market, informal workers left without income. What emerged in response was a unique approach to democratic economic planning (Hernani Burujabe, “Sovereign Hernani”), bringing together organised residents, the transformative economy, and the municipality (Egia-Olaizola et al 2025). With the process consolidated over subsequent years, this Public-Economic-Community (PEC) Planning approach wasn’t just about meeting basic needs, but articulating a new political approach of territorial sovereignties.

Since Summer 2025, a group of practitioners, technicians and academics began collaborating to understand how and why PEC might function as a tool for ecosocialist-degrowth transition. With the practical goal of renewing and strengthening the process, we have been guided by a series of questions: What are the limits/prospects of political agency formed at the ‘local’ level? What political subjects might be forged through such territorial processes? What are the limits of non-antagonistic planning processes, and what antagonistic politics might they come to support? How could PEC help ‘de-link’ a hitherto heavily industrial local-economy? Can we hypothesise what vernacular forms such radical democratic economic planning might take? How far this process can be extended in its relationship with capitalist state?

Our contribution will reflect on this ongoing process and what we perceive are the central challenges in developing PEC as a tool for transition.

Presentation short abstract

Both capitalist economies and real-existing socialist economies have relied on growth. We use the framework of growth imperatives to highlight key moments of path dependence in the history of real-existing socialism, to draw lessons for a transition towards an ecosocialist metabolic order.

Presentation long abstract

The growing scholarly debate on “growth imperatives” highlights the structural factors driving the capitalist world-system towards continuous economic expansion, despite ecological and climate crises. Yet much less attention has been given to how similar compulsions operated within regimes of real-existing socialism, and what this reveals about the challenges of an ecosocialist transition. Thus, in our contribution, we explore the driving forces behind economic growth within existing socialist economies and governments, seeking to draw lessons from the contradictions of real-existing socialism, and to contribute to theorising the ecosocialist transition.

To achieve this, our paper offers a historical-comparative analysis of Comecon economies from the end of World War II to their collapse and market transition in the early 1990s. Combining qualitative and quantitative indicators, it examines how geopolitical pressures stemming from the semi-peripheral position of socialist countries, developmentalist state strategies, and consumerist-authoritarian social compacts generated their own forms of growth imperatives. Using a path-dependence approach, we identify major shifts, such as the economic crisis marking the end of the Stalinist era and the failure of technocratic governance in the late 1980s. The analysis employs a dataset from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, containing key indicators related to “growth imperatives,” to examine contradictions within socialist experiences and to draw lessons for a potentially more successful transition to an ecosocialist “metabolic order”.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the class nature of capitalism’s socio-metabolic crisis articulated in agrarian frontiers of extraction. It shows how struggles over labour, nature and territories reshape (post)agrarian class formations, repositioning agrarian subjects as key agents of ecosocialism.

Presentation long abstract

The political question of ecosocialist transformation rests on a recognition of the immanent socio-ecological contradiction of the capitalist world economy, which is increasingly manifesting as a social and ecological crisis of reproduction at planetary scale. The emerging class character of this contradiction and the socio-environmental struggles that articulate it have often been underrecognized, despite political ecology’s expansive focus on environmental justice movements.

This presentation addresses how this contradiction unfolds in the agrarian frontiers of expanding and deepening extractive capital accumulation, reproducing rural-agrarian and urban-post-agrarian subjectivites. The concrete conflicts between agrarian and post-agrarian communities, on one hand, and capital, on the other, manifests across at multiple interconnected nexuses that crosscut labour, land/nature, and territorial dimensions. These conflictual dynamics, in turn, reconfigure the former as a central anti-systemic class force vis-à-vis the latter.

Based on a historically grounded comparison of multiple empirical examples of (post)agrarian movements, I argue for the vital pertinence of global agrarian transformations and the class (re)formations they generate across relational rural and urban socio-spatial contexts for ecosocialist politics. In turn, this discussion will contribute to the understanding of the changing forms of agrarian subjectivities in making agrarian subjects a key world-historical agent of building an ecosocialist future.

Presentation short abstract

The 2023 French pension mobilizations wove ecological critiques into a typically social struggle. This paper examines how these ecological forays fostered ecosocial alliances and what this reveals about the prospects and limits of ecosocial politics in France and beyond.

Presentation long abstract

The French government’s 2023 plan to reform its pension system sparked one of the largest mobilizations in decades. Pension struggles have long epitomized the social question: a trade union front and mass worker participation frame the issue as one over labor, time and welfare. Yet, among these familiar rhythms, the 2023 episode wove in a new ecological thread. Notably through the penetration of ecological actors in this social struggle, a discourse emerged, linking critiques of longer working lives and productivism with concerns for sustainability. These ecological forays into pensions signal efforts to craft an ecosocial politics in France: ideationally, by connecting social and ecological critiques; and relationally, by forging ties between actors.

Scholarship highlights both the promise and the difficulty of linking social and ecological struggles. Divergences between labor’s productivist orientations and environmentalists’ ecological priorities often obscure what the two in fact share. Theoretical efforts to link social and ecological critiques of capitalism share the hope of forging alliances between traditionally distinct actors and, ultimately, enabling systemic change.

The puzzle of how a social issue like pensions becomes articulated in ecosocial terms raises questions on how this contributes to forging ecosocial alliances. Grasping the mobilizations as a laboratory where ecosocial ideas are invoked, developed, and negotiated, the research investigates the potentials and limits of ecosocial alliances, through the case of France. The research consists of critical discourse analysis and discourse network analysis of interviews and documents produced by ecological and social actors to assess ideational and practical alliances between them.

Presentation short abstract

Engaging the history of twentieth-century internationalism in its socialist, Afro-Asian, and tricontinental registers, this paper consider the possible role of the International in ecosocialist transition, including its relation with the party, the working class, and the state.

Presentation long abstract

This paper will consider the role of the International in the intellectual and political history of socialist and anticolonial transition. While the role of the party, the working class, and the state have been theorised, debated, and tested, the role of the International, and its relationship to these formations, is less clear. Considering the politics of twentieth-century internationalism in its socialist, Afro-Asian, and tricontinental registers, the paper asks: What lessons can be learned about the dialectic between the national and the international? What were the achievements of and constraints on the militant internationalism of the twentieth century? What kind of 21st-century internationalism is needed to engineer an eco-socialist transition? The paper will pay particular attention to implicit and explicit engagement with the environment in the archives of the Third International and of movements such as the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization and the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Foreshadowing contemporary debates in political ecology and eco-socialism, anticolonial and socialist thinkers and movements engaged in a close examination of the ecological costs of imperialism—including diminished food producing capacities, the wreckage of entire ecosystems, and the metabolic rift with nature—and incorporated these assessments into strategies for both internationalism and sovereign development. An engagement with this intellectual and political tradition promises a reinvigoration of contemporary research on and movements for ecosocialist transition, in which there is an urgent need for an internationalism capable of matching the crisis in scale, organization, and strength.