0602122 - FLÚ 2025 RIV eng A - Abstract
Virtová, Tereza - Patočka, J.
Exploring pathways to the scaling of post-growth economies.
[Výroční konference SYRI: Prolomit Bariéry – Nerovnosti v současné společnosti. Brno, 06.11.2024-06.11.2024]
Method of presentation: Přednáška
Event organizer: Národní institut Syri
URL events: https://www.syri.cz/aktuality/konference-syri-se-zamerila-na-nerovnosti-ve-spolecnosti 
R&D Projects: GA MŠMT(CZ) LX22NPO5101
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : commons ecologies * post-growth businesses * scaling-up * world-systems analysis
OECD category: Sociology
Result website:
https://www.syri.cz/aktuality/konference-syri-se-zamerila-na-nerovnosti-ve-spolecnosti

What are the conditions for post-growth economic alternatives to succeed? That is one of the crucial challenges in what has been conceptualised as the „commoning and alternative economy current“ of degrowth (Schmelzer et al., 2022). Whether these are conceptualised as commons, cooperative, solidarity, community or „diverse“ economies, their shared potential for the degrowth transition is supposed to be in their ability to create systems of provisioning and value circulation which escape the growth-compulsions of profit-maximisation, and thus contribute more directly to the goals of meeting needs in ecological limits. But whereas many debates on such alternatives focus on their „endogenous“ characteristics, such as design principles (Ostrom, 2011) or relationship to profit (J. B. Hinton, 2020), the limits to their expansion often lie just as much in „exogenous“ factors: external environments shaped by capitalist and state actors seeking to either destroy them by their enclosure, or co-opt them by using the non-paid labour of their participants or broader ecosystems to cheapen the costs of social reproduction and press down wages. The scaling-up of such alternatives can thus be conditional on their ability to connect with each other into more comprehensive, diverse and resilient „commons ecologies“, and to ally with broader social movements giving them competitive edge against capital and state (De Angelis, 2017). Drawing on experiences from Latin America and South Africa, alliances with social-movement unionism and movements of the urban poor have been suggested as key to disrupting surplus-value extraction in capitalist circuits and shielding alternative forms of social reproduction, realising their emancipatory potential (Sacks, 2019). We suggest that analysis inspired by world-system scholarship, such as an approach illustrated by Agnes Gagyi (Gagyi, 2021) in the context of Central and Eastern Europe can be useful in devising strategies conducive to the scaling-up of alternatives in locally situated structures of social reproduction. After outlining potential questions to guide research into opportunities and obstacles of such an approach, an experimental case-study of commons-social movement alliances, pursued by the presenters in the Czech Republic, will be discussed.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0360468