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Ecological Economics, Degrowth and Business: The Beginning of a Field

I am just returning from the 11th conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics, held this time in Oldenburg and Bremen in Germany. As always after conferences, my mind is swirling with ideas, images and notions of what I heard and with whom I talked. This blog entry is just a very raw and weakly reflected summary.

In general, the science of ecological economics had its successes as many of its concepts and reasoning found their way into mainstream economics and politics – e.g.… Read more

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Welcome to my website!

This science blog is dedicated to my research on sustainability & postgrowth. You can find my latest ideas and thoughts as well as publications and talks on sustainability science, the discourse on postgrowth & degrowth, ecological economics, corporate responsibility, systems theory and organizational change within the next society. Feedback is always welcome.

Enjoy and feel free to contact or invite me as a speaker!  You can also follow me on Mastodon

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Educating Sustainability Management

The other day I was teaching an introductory course on Sustainaibility Management to PhD students (mostly Engineers, some MBAs, some Computer Scientists). This is always an exciting experience, many different rationalities and perspectives on the issue. We discussed a case study, the sustainability report of BMW, and some important realities of corporate sustainability became clear to me.

First, for some companies, sustainability provokes some kind of “organizational schizophrenia” i.e. they refer, in the same paragraph, to sustainability and ecological awareness as well as to the overarching goal of earning profits with even the most unsustainable products.… Read more

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Corporate Degrowth

In a recent blog entry, Saamah Abdallah commented on some remarks made by Duncan Green on the Oxfam blogs, as regards degrowth policy. Duncan’s original post was critical on the practical conclusions of a workshop on degrowth in London earlier this year. Myself, I was giving a talk there on “Degrowth and the Firm” and tried to give some empirical substantiations as what a degrowth business model might look like.

Saamah gives three direct policy implications for degrowth:

  1. Reduction of working hours.
… Read more
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Green Growth?

I was just reading an article in the newly established Ecological Economics Review on economic growth, written by Peter A. Victor. In this article, Victor is revisiting Kenneth Boulding‘s remarks on the economy of the coming spaceship Earth, focusing on economic growth and environmental impact.

He defines the concept of green growth as an economic state in which the rate of reduction of environmental impact per unit GDP exceeds the rate of increase in GDP.… Read more