The UNMAKING team is happy to share two papers that were published in the first part of January 2023. The paper titled Degrowth and Agri-Food Systems: A Research Agenda for the Critical Social Sciences, led by Leonie Guerrero Lara, has appeared in the journal Sustainability Science (link here). The paper titled Unlearning in sustainability transitions:…

Spanier, J., Feola, G. 2022. Nurturing the post-growth city: bringing the rural back in. In: Savini, F., Ferreria, A., von Schönfeld, K. C. (Eds.)  Post-Growth Planning: cities beyond the market economy. Routledge, 159-172.  Abstract It is widely acknowledged that cities are destructive to the environment and the natural resources that sustain human and non-human life (Næss et al., 2020). Any planning for post-growth…

Raj, G., Feola, G., Hajer, M., Runhaar, H., 2022. Power and empowerment of grassroots innovations for sustainability transitions: A review. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 43. 375-392. Abstract The sustainability transitions scholarship is increasingly applying power and empowerment frameworks to investigate the role of grassroots innovations in the politics of societal change; however, theoretical fragmentation persists. This paper…

The politics of deliberate destabilisation for sustainability transitions. By: Laura van Oers, Giuseppe Feola, Ellen Moors, Hens Runhaar. Published in: Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 40, 159-171. Abstract: This paper advances scholarship on deliberate destabilisation for sustainability transitions. To understand how deliberate destabilisation plays out in practice, the politics of such processes must be confronted….

(Un)making in sustainability transformation beyond capitalism by: Giuseppe Feola, Olga Koretskaya, Danika Moore. Published in: Global Environmental Change 69, 102290   Theorizations of sustainability transformation have foregrounded the construction (making) of novel socioecological relations; however, they generally have obscured processes of deliberate deconstruction (unmaking) of existing, unsustainable ones. Amidst ever more compelling evidence of the…

Olga Koretskaya and Giuseppe Feola published a paper titled A framework for recognizing diversity beyond capitalism in agri-food systems in the Journal of Rural Studies. The paper is available open access here. Abstract Calls for agri-food system sustainability transitions abound and increasingly draw attention to the need for addressing deeply ingrained social, cultural and economic…

As part of the collection ‘The Open Society and its Future‘ (free download here), Giuseppe Feola published a chapter titled ‘Open Societies and Ecological Challenges: Transformation to Sustainability?‘. In this chapter, Giuseppe Feola argues that the threat posed by ecological  challenges, such as climate change, exposes the dysfunctions of our common socioeconomic perspective of open…

Giuseppe Feola and Olga Koretskaya discuss how we can enrich our understanding of disruptions of capitalism in a way that goes beyond the notion of ‘decolonization of the imaginary’. Liberating our minds from the imperative of endless economic growth and profit maximization is one of the key inspirational ideas of degrowth. Scholars and activists call…

Giuseppe Feola discusses the use of historical analogies to develop strategies for degrowth transformation. Degrowth scholars and activists often turn to past cases of social or socioecological transformation for inspiration to inform transformative action in the present. Yet, there has so far been insufficient awareness of the bias that comes with using any historical analogy….

“Green growth is doomed to fail, since it refuses to acknowledge the root cause of climate change: continued economic growth which proves impossible to dematerialize”. This is an excerpt from the short essay PhD researcher Jacob Smessaert submitted to The Economist when they asked young citizens of the world “What fundamental economic and political change,…