Transformative Economy

The crossing of global planetary boundaries and the growing inequality require us to rethink economic concepts. Today’s dominant neoclassical concepts with their exclusive focus on economic growth ignore power asymmetries, social inequality and the destruction of nature. We explore new economic approaches and innovative policy concepts that promote a socio-ecological transformation.

We provide spaces to discuss such new economic approaches and concepts. For many years, we have placed particular emphasis on the debate about the commons.

Internationale Politik: Commons Landingpage englisch

Since 2001, the annual Development Policy Discussion Days (EPDT) have been a cooperative event between the Seminar for Rural Development of the Humboldt University of Berlin (SLE) and the Heinrich Böll Foundation (hbs).

The discussion days serve the exchange of experts from science, politics, civil society and the private sector with an interested expert audience on development policy topics. They provide participants and guests with an insight into current development policy concepts and discussions on development cooperation. On the one hand, the aim is to demonstrate the responsibility of actors from the Global North for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

On the other hand, the aim is to increasingly include the voices of people from the Global South directly or indirectly in the debate in order to make their perspective on development cooperation visible and useful for further development.

The following discussions took place in 2021 and can be followed on Youtube:

Partners in climate? – The role of African renewables in the European Green Deal
Trap or trampoline – Smallholder digitalisation in sub-Saharan Africa
The emperor´s fair clothes – Are labels and due diligence key to more sustainability?

Partners in climate? — The role of African renewables in the European Green Deal

Trap or trampoline – Smallholder digitalisation in sub-Saharan Africa

The emperor's fair clothes - Are labels and due diligence key to more sustainability?

Eine Person verlässt den Pfad und steigt über einen Holzzaun

How the coronavirus is forcing us to think beyond market and state

Analyse

The Corona crisis demonstrated in fast motion the dilemma into which market-state-thinking leads. This is where commons come into play, i.e. what people do and are able to do with each other in a self-determined, self-organised, needs-oriented manner and without any marketing interest.

By Silke Helfrich

Foundations for prosperity without growth

Our economy is obsessed with productivity and growth. How can we transform it into one built around a broader sense of prosperity? One that makes our lives worthwhile instead of destroying our planet?

By Tim Jackson

Publications

Free, fair, and alive: the insurgent power of the commons

Book

Ambitious, sophisticated, and resolutely grounded in everyday realities, "Free, Fair and Alive" present a compelling vision of a future that can actually work. Written by two highly experienced commons activists, this book is at once a penetrating cultural critique, table-pounding political treatise, and practical playbook for building a new world of commoning.

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The Wealth of the Commons

The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale – but most of all, it’s about commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. It’s about common people doing uncommon things.

Patterns of Commoning

More than sixty frontline activists, academics and project leaders from twenty countries explain how commoning is empowering people to challenge the deep pathologies of contemporary capitalism and invent powerful, participatory alternatives. A special series of essays explores the inner dynamics of commoning - its ethics, social practices and worldview - to explain why the building of new worlds starts from within.

The Care-Centered Economy

Why are all those means and measures for satisfying needs - which despite emancipation are provided for free by many more women than men in the so-called private sphere - customarily defined as pre- or non-economic? An Essay about the unjust consequences of this omission.

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Wohlstand ohne Wachstum – das Update

Die deutlich erweiterte Neuauflage von Tim Jacksons Wohlstand ohne Wachstum bietet eine aktuelle wie fundierte Analyse der Auswirkungen der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrisen und des ungebrochenen Strebens nach Wachstum.