Down and out in Paris and Dubai | CUSP Newsletter, Dec 2023
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Welcome to the December edition of our CUSP Newsletter.
As CoP28 wrangles over the difference between phasing out and phasing down, it’s a good point to reflect on a year that’s been notable for phasing in (or should it be up?) a more serious attention to postgrowth ideas and thinking.
Questioning growth was probably never going to be front and centre in Dubai. But elsewhere things were different. Even as CoP was in full flow, CUSP was engaged on the issue in Paris with both the Ministry of the Economy and the Banque de France. Those high-profile conversations came at the end of a year which has featured our involvement with the Irish President, with the Icelandic Prime Minister, with an Early Day Motion in the UK and with the EU’s extraordinary Beyond Growth conference in Brussels. Witnessing the ferocious energy of young climate activists there was both wonderful and daunting. When a history of the postgrowth movement comes to be written, the year 2023 will have to feature somewhere.
With so much going on, it’s easy to forget that our role in CUSP is to advance the science of all that as well as engage in the process of change. But that’s always been our strength. And this year it was no different. We’ve curated two extensive handbooks, one on Green Finance and the other on Pro-Environmental Behaviour Change, contributed to a new Encyclopedia of Ecological Economics, published papers on natural capital markets, on flow, on neoliberalism, on anxiety, on Baumol’s cost disease, on the North South divide, on changing cultural practice, on embedding sustainability in education, and on the role of financial regulatorsin the net zero transition amongst many more.
Our wide-ranging blog series has remained as active as ever. Recent highlights include contributions on ‘positive tipping points‘, advertising, on the rolling back of net zero policies in the UK, on raising degrowth to the next level and on the extraordinary example of a poet imprisoned for protesting the destruction of nature.
We’ve also been delighted to continue our support for the Climate Parenting podcast series, Mum, will the planet die before I do?, curated by Katy Glassborow and Babita Sharma. This second series included interviews with Clive Lewis MP, Nadia Whittome MP, Guy Singh-Watson, and Lucy Siegle. Needless to say, we’ve also participated in numerous podcasts ourselves, including a gripping narrative podcast series called The Water We Swim In, a brand new C40 Cities podcast series on Neoliberalism and its Discontents, and the somewhat extraordinary vox.com excursion into postgrowth territory. (I have never been trolled so profoundly in my life as I was when that episode dropped!)
As the popularity of face-to-face begins to rise again, we’ve been pleased to co-host a well-attended workshop, jointly organised with Lund University on postgrowth business and are looking forward to our Post-CoP 28 seminar What’s Next for Sustainable Consumption, to be held on 15th December in London. And our home-grown interactive installation the People’s Palace of Possibility went on tour across the UK. More details of all these engagements and more can be found on our website.
Finally, I was delighted to be able to find time during a busy year to record personally the audiobook version of Post Growth – life after capitalism, with the invaluable help of Jen Hinton and her team at Sound Understanding.
We wish you well for the holiday season and as usual welcome your thoughts, reflections or questions about our work.
Best wishes
Tim
Prof Tim Jackson
CUSP Director