Welcome to an open lecture with Timothée Parrique “Decoupling is Dead! Long Live Degrowth!”

When: April 7 kl. 13.00-16.00
Where: Norrland I, Geocentrum, Villavägen 16

The open lecture is organized in collaboration with and part of the Sustainable Economic Futures – Nature, Equity and Community course at CEMUS.

Read the report “Decoupling debunked: Why green growth is not enough“
Is economic growth compatible with ecological sustainability? A new report shows that efforts to decouple economic growth from environmental harm, known as ‘green growth’, have not succeeded and are unlikely to succeed in their aim.

In recent decades, economic growth rose to become the leading measure of changes in prosperity and wellbeing. For that reason, governments have sought to maximise the growth of their gross domestic product (GDP), which tends to involve greater resource use and more pollution.

As the climate crisis and environmental degradation worsened, policy-makers sought to square the circle of maintaining prosperity while reducing the environmental impact of economic activity by decoupling resource use from economic growth. This policy choice has become known as ‘green growth’.

Read more: “Decoupling debunked: Why green growth is not enough”

About Timothée Parrique
Timothée Parrique is a Marie Curie PhD Fellow studying the political economy of degrowth

Parrique’s doctoral research explores multi-policy degrowth transition scenarios for the case of France from a social ecological macroeconomics perspective, and using the tools of prospective (backcasting and scenario method) and systems analysis (causal loop diagrams).The thesis considers a range of different public policies (universal basic income and services, maximum income, work time reduction, job guarantee, community currencies, sovereign money, cap and share, and diverse taxes and subsidies) as to find how these can contribute to transformations toward degrowth.

Parrique holds a Bachelor degree in economics from the University of Versailles (France) and a Masters degree in sustainability science with a focus on ecological economics from Uppsala University (Sweden). After graduating, he spent three years teaching an introduction course to issues of political economy in the context of sustainable development at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) at Uppsala University. When he’s not reading about degrowth, Parrique enjoys extreme sports, playing chess, and memorising random numbers.

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/contact-us/staff/2018-11-15-parrique.html