This is the website of Research & Degrowth (R&D). R & D is an academic association dedicated to research, awareness raising, and events organization around the topic of degrowth.
R&D defines degrowth as a multi-level voluntary path towards reduction of production and consumption aiming at ecological sustainability, good life, liberty, and social justice. For R&D, degrowth is grounded in ecology, ecological economics, anthropology, psychology, and social sciences in general. In the degrowth process, R&D is concerned with democracy, international cooperation, and understanding as opposed to societal closure, fragmentation and authoritarianism.
R&D strives to bring scientists, civil society, practitioners, and activists together to think, imagine, discuss, and create proposals for sustainable degrowth. R&D supports and aims to maintain a diversity of degrowth strategies for achieving social equity and ecological sustainability, including: grass-roots action and institutional interventions; academic and practical work; building of alternatives and opposition to environmentally and socially destructive projects and policies; local and international level work. At present R&D conducts the majority of its local activities in Spain and France, while organizing and co-organizing international events in various parts of Europe and beyond. R&D has presently about fifteen active members based in Barcelona and France. It has created an informal network with members in more than 40 countries.
R&D, like other organisations and associations working on the concept of degrowth, offers an example of an international alliance that is grounded on a strong critique of growth-based economy and consumer society. In spite of its radical challenging of the main underpinnings of the existing economic system, R&D has managed to work together with different (also political) stakeholders that helped to bring the debate on degrowth into otherwise closed political spaces.
Examples of their recent activities include a multistakeholder conference on degrowth in Brussels (September 2018) and the open letter to EU institutions on post-growth economy, signed by over 200 academics and published in 18 different language across the region. The R&D website contains a sizeable library on degrowth-related academic and other publications, campaigns and public events.