From Research & Degrowth International, we wish you a happy new year and all the best for 2025! We are pleased to share our bi-annual update on the projects and achievements of Research & Degrowth International.

We have taken significant steps forward with Degrowth Policy consultancy. Our collaboration with the municipality of Girona, a leader in post-growth policies, has entered a new and promising phase. We successfully worked out an agreement to bring forward the city’s socio-ecological transformation, providing consultancy for Degrowth policymaking in the form of a post-growth report for Girona. As we aim to prototype a model for post-growth cities in Girona to create a European network of post-growth cities, our member Borja Nogué Algueró together with Girona city council member Sergi Cot Cantolosella presented the Girona model to other European cities in their talk held on 17 October 2024 at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany on “Postgrowth in the City: New Ideas and Policies from Catalonia.”

Furthermore, we kicked off our Barcelona Action Circle project, starting with the Post-Growth Finance Circle. The project brings together motivated stakeholders from various sectors who advocate for socio-environmental justice. We held four of ten planned meetings with the Post-growth Finance Circle – a Circle that brings together financial professionals from across the world willing to analyse and discuss how can finance promote a Degrowth transformation, and what would finance look like in a no-growth wellbeing economy. We have also been working to launch two other Barcelona Action Circles in 2025, on Labour Unions and Degrowth as well as on Mediterranean Ecofeminism, bringing together different voices necessary for the degrowth transformations we envision.

In 2025, as part of the European Union funded project MERGE we will host workshops with politicians, policymakers and trade unions on key labour and income policies for Degrowth. Stay tuned to learn more about how we research and co-create proposals for the implementation of Universal Care Income (UCI) and job guarantee schemes in Spain. Additionally, in 2025 we will release the Degrowth Policy Briefs we have been working on. The topics of our briefs directed to multi-level stakeholders include A Green New Deal Without Growth, Degrowth & Cities, A Care Income, Trade Unions & Degrowth and Degrowing Fashion.

Along with all the different projects in the policy sphere, we also have exciting news to share on our educational projects. We developed and launched an „Introduction to Degrowth” Online Course. The course spanning 25 hours, with 10 classes is designed to introduce the foundational theories, critical debates, and transformative practices of Degrowth to a broad audience. We had an overwhelming amount of enrolments for the first course that started on 14 January 2025, and we are also preparing a second edition in spring 2025. You can find all the information about the course here.

We also welcomed the students of the seventh edition of our Master’s in Political Ecology, Degrowth & Environmental Justice as well as the online students of the edition of our Master’s in Degrowth: Ecology, Economics and Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The community of master’s students keeps flourishing. We had an insightful community event discussing the BBC documentary “Can Degrowth Save the World?” with producer Alvaro Alvarez and the students of our master’s. You can see a short version of the documentary that covers many of R&D’s projects here. We are happy to announce that we awarded over 5000€ to support Degrowth projects from former master’s students and our wider community. Read about the inspiring projects here. Moreover, we are looking forward to the first Degrowth Alumni Conference that we will be holding in March to bring together over 100 of our alumni from seven year’s of our Degrowth master’s.

In our local ecosystem here in Catalonia our connections with the social and solidarity economy are deepening. We are excited to have joined ECOHUB, the new Catalan cooperative hub to accelerate the socio-ecological transition in the region. To connect with organizations working on Degrowth and the Commons in the region we also co-organized the conference „Comunal Sense“ in Vic, Catalonia on January 25th. See the program here.

Our researchers have published ground-breaking work. Notable publications include R&D’s paper “Beyond the urban shift: towards a relational degrowth spatial politics”, Giorgos Kallis’ paper on Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries, Lucia Muñoz and Giorgos Kallis’ paper on Postfiguring degrowth: How traditional popular culture challenges growth-oriented common senses, Angelos Varvarousis paper on Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency, Lorenzo Velotti’s “Practicing the hegemony of non-hegemony: the pluriversal politics of the Neapolitan commons movement”, Federico Demaria’s “Modelling what matters: How do current models handle environmental limits and social outcomes?”, Filka Sekulova and colleagues’ “Tourism and degrowth” and Lucia Muñoz and Lorenzo Velotti’s article on Degrowth and Anthropology. We did not only intervene in academic writing, but also commented on current news in important newspapers, have a look at Giorgos Kallis’ comment on the flooding disaster in Valencia and Marula Tsagkari’s comment on Fast Fashion around Christmas.

Last but not the least, internally, in accordance with our rotational system, there have been changes in membership of our governing body (junta): We are glad to have Alijoša Slameršak join in as the newest member and grateful for all the work Ksenija Hanaček has put in over the last years as member of the junta before taking a step back in December 2024. Within the office, we are happy to welcome Alexandra Mestre Garcia who will be working on communication. With the whole collective, we had an inspiring and fruitful Grand Assembly, where we strategized, organized, and envisioned the path forward for our collective journey in the coming years.

We wish you a lovely start into the new year.

The R&D team