Slide Anything shortcode error: A valid ID has not been provided Other colleagues have categorised key and crosscutting academic debates and approaches about social-ecological transformation that influence major policy reports, including degrowth as one such debate (Brand and Wissen 2017). In a recent paper with James Vandeventer and Claudio Cattaneo (2019), we borrow concepts and tools from the interdisciplinary field of transition studies to explore transformations towards degrowth at the intellectual level. Some attempts to draw from interdisciplinary fields are out there. McNeill 2010, White 2011) can help us understand how multiple factors interact to produce significant and closely related political and ecological changes. Environmental history for example, with its more integrated approach to the study of environmental change that looks both at how human affairs may force changes upon the environment and how nature itself acts as an agent in shaping human affairs (e.g. collective organisation relating to nature etc.). material practices social imaginary etc.) and interaction (e.g. More interdisciplinary fields seem to hold greater promise, given that degrowth requires transformations in several spheres of human experience (e.g. Marxism) than those used by institutionalists some branches of psychology and critical marketing studies can tell us about transformations in consumer behaviour and the list could go on. For example, social anthropology can tell us something about cultural transformations some branches of institutionalism shed light on organisational transformation or the transformation of the economy political economy scholars and some economic historians also look at transformations in the economy, albeit emphasising relations of production and using different lenses (e.g. The issue is a complex one, because different disciplines study different types or social domains of transformation. The theoretical challenge relates to the question of how to choose what knowledge is relevant for degrowth from a considerable array of literature that directly or indirectly looks at radical transformations. I’d like to focus on those challenges here. To my mind there are three challenges related to answering the “how” question: firstly, a theoretical challenge secondly, one related to history and historical experience and finally, a practical challenge. But, I believe that answers to that question are closely linked to the project of charting out strategies of political action for degrowth transformations. Admittedly, I am probably less interested in “strategies” and more on the empirical question of how past radical socio-ecological transformations actually happened. In my case, I have been asking myself and my students whether direct democracy is the best political vehicle for advancing towards a radical socio-ecological transformation such as degrowth. Zografos, 2015), I would like to contribute some thoughts and so try to expand the conversations started by those colleagues. As I have also come across this “how to get there” question in my own modest attempts to link direct democracy to degrowth (e.g. In a previous piece in this blog series, Joe Herbert and colleagues pointed out the “how to move towards a degrowth society” gap in degrowth discourse. The introduction to the series and an ongoing list of contributions can be found here. This article is part of a series on discussing strategy in the degrowth movement.
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