Organizing for a Post-Growth Economy – future utopia or current reality?

The conference was a focal point for scholars who visited Copenhagen from all over the world to present their ideas on how a post-growth economy may be organized.

“Current political and popular beliefs tend to hold that the crises of economy and ecology are merely temporary and that the global economy will soon bounce back to business as usual. This conference was used to speculate whether we might be in the midst of a paradigm shift in the nature of capitalism”, Bent Meier Sørensen, professor, CBS (MPP).

Are we living in a Post-Growth economy already?
Professor Bent Meier Sørensen opened the conference and welcomed the participants with an introduction to the notion of ’post-growth thinking’ in future economic settings. He was followed by Professor Donncha Kavanagh, University College Dublin, who managed to raise a question that became a recurring and well debated issue throughout the conference: “Are we living in a post-growth economy already?”

The theme of the conference also offered the opportunity for co-organizer, associate professor Ole Bjerg (MPP), to hold the official book launch of his new book ‘Making Money: the Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism’, which was moderated by Dr. Stephen Dunne.

“It would be paradoxical, if the ambition of a conference on Post-Growth Economy would be merely to contribute to the perpetual growth of scientific knowledge. Hence, the purpose of the conference is not only and perhaps not even primarily to produce new knowledge but to think about what to do with all the knowledge that we already have. The most pressing problem today with regards to sustainability does not seem to be that we do not know what to do. It is rather that even though we know very well, what to do, we are still not doing it.” Ole Bjerg, associate professor, CBS (MPP)

New ideas
During the course of the three day conference, participants gave presentations within a wide area of themes: from financial investments in sustainable German agriculture, the development of a Bitcoin economy, to local food participation in East England, just to mention a few.