Keynote Speakers

 

Daniel O’Neill Dan O’Neill is a Lecturer in Ecological Economics at the University of Leeds, and the Chief Economist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. His research focuses on the changes that would be needed to achieve a sustainable economy within planetary boundaries, and the relationships between resource use and human well-being. He is co-author (with Rob Dietz) of the book Enough Is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources, which has been made into a short film. If you’re interested in seeing the film, it is being shown as part of Degrowth Week on Thursday 1 September at 4:30 pm.	Barbara Muraca Barbara Muraca is an Assistant Professor for Environmental and Social Philosophy at Oregon State University, Corvallis (USA) and co-director of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy (IAEP). She holds a Ph.D. in environmental ethics from the University of Greifswald, Germany. From 2012 to 2014 she worked as a senior researcher with the Kolleg ‘Post-Growth-Societies’ at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Jena, Germany and in 2014 participated in the organization of the 4th International Degrowth Conference in Leipzig. Her research interests encompass social philosophy, sustainability and degrowth research, environmental ethics, process philosophy, feminist philosophy, and ecological economics. On Degrowth she has published several articles, both in English and in German, and the book ‘Gut Leben: Eine Gesellschaft jenseits des Wachstums’ (Wagenbach 2014) where she explores the importance of concrete utopias and social experiment for a social-ecological transformation. She is passionate about environmental and social justice and, of course, philosophy. Link: http://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/users/barbara-muraca
Jagoda Munic Jagoda Munic is a Chairperson of the Friends of the Earth International since November 2012. Before she served as member of FOEI executive committee. Born in 1970 and lives in Zagreb, Croatia. She has degrees in Biology-Ecology and Library and Information Sciences from the University of Zagreb and M.Sc. Course in Pollution and Environmental Control from the University of Manchester, UK. Ms Munic is active in Zelena akcija / FOE Croatia since 1997. She lead quite a number of biodiversity research projects and public advocacy campaigns including anti GMO campaign resulted in one of the strictest anti GMO laws and campaign to shift the route of a highway from the river Gacka. The main focus of the campaigning work since 2008 is to stop privatisation and degradation of natural resources in Croatia, which resulted in abolition of notorious Law on golf courses in 2011 that enabled expropriation of land-use change from forest and agricultural land to tourist resorts and cancelling the construction of hydro power plant in Dubrovnik.	Ashish Kothari Ashish Kothari is a Founder-member of Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh (www.kalpavriksh.org). He taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and as guest faculty in several universities including as Mellon Fellow at Bowdoin College, USA. Coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process, served on boards of Greenpeace International and India, Indian Society of Ecological Economics, World Commission on Protected Areas, IUCN Commission on Social, Economic and Environmental Policy, and Bombay Natural History Society. Served as co-chair of the IUCN Strategic Direction on Governance, Equity, Communities, and Livelihoods (TILCEPA), which, along with the ICCA Consortium (www.iccaconsortium.org), he helped establish. Active in several peoples’ movements, and member of government committees on National Wildlife Action Plan, Biological Diversity Act, Environmental Appraisal of River Valley Projects, and Implementation of Forest Rights Act. Initiated the Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence, http://www.kalpavriksh.org/index.php/alternatives.html) process to bring together people working on development alternatives in India, and a global dialogue process on Radical Ecological Democracy. Has (co)authored or (co)edited over 30 books, including Sharing Power, and Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India (http://churningtheearth.in), and over 300 articles (http://ashishkothari51.blogspot.in).
Gareth Dale Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University, London. In different ways, each of his main research interests–Eastern Europe, Karl Polanyi, and economic growth–relates to this conference. After participating in the East German revolution of 1989 he wrote several monographs on the GDR, and, later, edited ‘First the Transition, then the Crash: Eastern Europe in the 2000s.’ On Polanyi, he has published ‘Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market’ (2010), ‘Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left’ (in press), ‘Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings’ (in press) and ‘Reconstructing Karl Polanyi’ (forthcoming 2016). On growth, he co-edited ‘Green Growth: Ideology, Political Economy and the Alternatives’ (Zed, 2016) and has published articles in ‘Journal of Economic Issues’ (on Smith and Malthus), ‘New Political Economy’ (on Marx and Mill), ‘International Socialism’ and ‘International Socialist Review.’ He is currently writing a book on the growth paradigm. He has been active in numerous campaigns, including climate camps and the Campaign Against Climate Change.	Giorgos Kallis Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics and political ecology. He is a Leverhulme visiting professor at SOAS and an ICREA professor at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Before that he was a Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece, a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors in Chemistry from Imperial College, London.
Zoltán Pogátsa Zoltán Pogátsa is an economist at the University of West Hungary, specialising in international political economy and the economics of European integration. He had received his phd from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. He has published several books and many articles on these subjects in Hungarian, English and German, and is a frequent commentator in the Hungarian and international press. He is known to be an advocate of a political economy that takes into account the Rawlsian principles of distributive justice, leading to economic democracy, as well as the overarching principle of ecological and social sustainability. He uses economic theory to highlight the incongruences that exist within neoclassical economic theory, as well as the detrimental social impact these theories have had when utilised by the neoliberal political movements since the 1970s. Zoltán serves on the Board of one of Hungary’s longest standing green NGOs, the Clean Air Group. His personal website is available at: https://sites.google.com/site/pogatsa/.	Matthias Schmelzer Matthias Schmelzer lives in Berlin, works as an economic historian at the University of Zürich and as a free-lancer for Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie and is active in the degrowth and climate justice movement. He has been involved in the organization of the international degrowth conference in Leizpig in 2014, the summer school „Degrowth in Action: Climate Justice” in the lignite mining area of the Rhineland in 2015, and is currently part of the project „Degrowth in Movement(s).” Next to his research on economic history, neoliberalism, and international organizations in the twentieth century, he also did research on the degrowth movement as a fellow at DFG-Kolleg “Degrowth Societies” in at the University of Jena. This year his book “The Hegemony of Growth. The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm” (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/economic-history/hegemony-growth-oecd-and-making-economic-growth-paradigm) will be published from Cambridge University Press.
Danijela Dolenec Danijela Dolenec is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb, where she teaches comparative politics, protest movements and social science methodology. She received her degrees from the LSE (MSc 2005) and ETH Zürich (PhD 2012). Danijela specialises in the democratization and political economy of European states, as well as nurtures a growing interest in critical development studies and the social science history of the former Eastern Bloc. Some of her recent work includes „Exploring Commons Theory for Principles of a Socialist Governmentality” (with Žitko, 2016), „Plus ca change: Mapping Conversions in the Croatian Academic Field in the Early 1990s” (with Doolan and Žitko, 2015) and „Why power is not a peripheral concern: exploring the relationship between inequality and sustainability” (with Domazet and Ančić, 2014).	Jennifer Hinton Jennifer Hinton is co-author of the forthcoming book, How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World, and is a co-director of the Post Growth Institute, a global network of researchers and activists seeking pathways beyond the growth-based economic system. She has a master’s degree in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science and is currently doing work with an EU-funded project called AdaptEcon: Adapting to a new economic reality, as a Marie Curie PhD fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Originally from Colorado in the USA, Jen lived in Greece from 2009 – 2016, during the economic crisis, working with both local initiatives and global networks to help lay the foundation for a new economic era. In all of her work, Jen seeks to bridge activism, research, and business in order to co-create a more sustainable future for humanity.
Clive Spash Clive Spash is an economist who writes, researches and teaches on public policy with an emphasis on economic and environmental interactions. His main interests are interdisciplinary research on human behaviour, environmental values and the transformation of the world political economy to a more socially and environmentally just system. Over 30 years, he has worked on a range of subject areas and topics from the economic impacts and control of acidic deposition through atmospheric and plant science relating to urban pollution impacts on agriculture to the economics and ethics of human induced climate change and the plural values related to biodiversity. For some time now, he has been pursuing interdisciplinary and integrative work within the context of ecological economics and more recently through the evolving agenda of a politically aware and emancipatory “Social Ecological Economics“. He currently holds the chair of Public Policy and Governance at WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business and is deputy head of the Institute for Public Policy and Governance. For more information go to www.clivespash.org.	Amaia Pérez Orozco Amaia Pérez Orozco is a feminist economist, actively involved in social movements both in Europe and in Latin America. She holds a PhD in International Economics and Development. She is based in Madrid and works as a freelance researcher and trainer. Currently she is focused on developing an ecofeminist understanding of the multidimensional crisis and of the possible responses to it, trying to establish a dialogue with other critical perspectives, such as de-colonial thought, degrowth, social ecologism and (neo)marxism. She tries to coherently intersect her political activist work and her professional career. She wrote the prologue of the Spanish version of Degrowth. A Vocabulary for a New Era (D’Alisa, Demaria & Kallis, eds.). Her main latest work is the book Subversión feminista de la economía (Feminist Subversion of the Economy. Contributions to a Debate on the Capital-Life Conflict). She has a broad training experience in popular education, post-graduate programmes and professional training. She has also an extended policy-oriented research experience within social movements, the academia and international institutions.
Susan Paulson Research and theory building on relations between sociocultural systems and biophysical environments comes together in Susan Paulson’s recent books Masculinities and Femininities in Latin America’s Uneven Development (2015) and Masculinidades en movimiento, transformación territorial (2013 available free online). Other relevant publications include Desigualdad social y degradación ambiental en América Latina (1998), Political Ecology across Spaces, Scales and Social Groups (2005), and Huellas de género en el mar, el parque y el páramo (2009). After living and teaching in South America for 15 years and in Europe for 5 years, Susan is now based at the University of Florida. Susan and Lisa Gezon have been facilitating conversations on Degrowth, Culture and Power among interlocutors from a dozen countries; their collaborations include four conference sessions and 15 articles for an upcoming section of Journal of Political Ecology. Susan and Lisa now welcome contributions for their next project: an edited volume of case studies illuminating degrowth, buen vivir and other postdevelopment pathways. (see also: http://www.latam.ufl.edu/people/center-based-faculty/paulson)	Federico Demaria Federico Demaria is an economist working on ecological economics, political ecology and waste policy. He obtained a full scholarship and an IB certificate in the United World College of the Adriatic in 2003. Afterwards he was trained as an economist in the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Bologna (Italy). In 2006 he spent one year working with Professor Alain Caille at the University of Nanterre (Paris X) on anti-utilitarianism in social sciences. He then wrote a final essay titled ‘Happiness and Economics: the importance of social relations’ with Professor Mauro Bonaiuti. He has a Masters degree in Environmental Studies (Ecological Economics) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Currently he is a PhD student working on waste and environmental justice. He is a member of the ‘Ecological economics and Integrated Assesment Unit’ at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology. He has studied cost-shifting, in particular toxic waste dumping . He is now working on wastepickers, both in the South and North. Current research focuses on the (unequal) distribution of benefits and burdens linked with social metabolism processes. Since 2006 he has been part of the degrowth movement and debate, first with the Italian Association for Degrowth and then as a co-founder of R&D Spain.
Filka Sekulova Filka Sekulova is based at ICTA, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She holds a doctoral degree in ecological economics with a specialization in happiness and climate change UAB. Presently she is doing a post doctorate research on the success factors of community-based initiatives, part of the  European research project TESS. Her research interests center around the economics of happiness, income and degrowth. She is a member of Research & Degrowth and the international community working on the establishment of the international scientific conferences on degrowth.	Dr. Mladen Domazet Graduated in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford and completed a doctorate in Philosophy of Science at the University of Zagreb. He’s a research director at the Institute for Political Ecology in Zagreb, Croatia, and was previously a research fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb. His research interest currently focuses on scientific explanation, and degrowth-compatible attitudes and social transformation. His publications reflect a diversity of interdisciplinary interests and collaborations, from analysis of Wikipedias as complex networks, through encyclopaedic contributions to Croatian philosophy lexicon, to recent books Alice Returns from Wonderland: Ontological Frameworks for Explanation from Contemporary Quantum Theories (2012) and Sustainability Perspectives from the European Semi-periphery (2014).
Vincent Liegey Co-author of A Degrowth Project, spokesperson of the French Degrowth movement, engineer and interdisciplinary researcher. He is the  coordinator of the degrowth inspired Cargonomia social cooperative, center for sustainable logistical solutions and local food distribution by cargobikes in Budapest. With Stéphane Madelaine, Christophe Ondet and Anisabel Veillot, all french degrowth movement actors, he co-authored the book A Degrowth Project – Manifesto for an Unconditional Autonomy Allowance in 2013 (Utopia et Ecosociété, Icaria, Eszmelet, Ciela, Sanje). He is the international spokesperson for the upcoming Budapest Degrowth Conference.	Dr. Alexandra Köves Assistant professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest. She graduated from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland with an MA in International Business and Languages and later from the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna with an MPhil in Advanced International Studies. In the first decade of her career she worked within the Hungarian public administration – mostly in upper management positions – dealing with development policy, in particular with social development. This period raised a few question marks with regard to the mainstream developmental paths of the economy and society. These reservations led her to do research and write her PhD at the Corvinus University of Budapest on sustainable employment within the research field of ecological economics. In the last years she has participated in a large number of national and international projects as a consultant and researcher especially in the fields of development policy, employment policy and ecological economics. She is the Hungarian spokesperson for the upcoming International Degrowth Conference.
Ulrich Brand Ulrich works as Professor of International Politics at the University of Vienna. His interests lie in critical state and governance studies, regulation and hegemony theory, political ecology, international resource and environmental politics; his regional focus is Latin America. He was member of the Scientific Council of the Fourth Degrowth Conference in 2014 in Leipzig and member of the Expert Commission on “Growth, Well-Being and Quality of Life” of the German Bundestag (2011-2013). He is member of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s (Quito Office) Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development and of the Scientific Council of Attac Germany. His work in English is published in journals like Antipode, Austrian Journal of Development Studies, Austrian Journal of Political Science, Globalizations, Innovation, Review of International Political Economy. He recently co-edited books on Regulation theory, Political Ecology and Latin America. Currently, he is finishing a book on “degrowth and post-extractivism” (in Spanish, with Alberto Acosta) and a book in German and in English on the “imperial mode of living” (with Markus Wissen). – http://www.univie.ac.at/intpol/en/	Beatriz Rodrígues-Labajos Beatriz is an ecological economist and researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). Her research interests are the socioeconomic dimensions of biodiversity, environmental justice, and ecosystem service assessment. Her field experience includes regions of Europe, Latin America, and South East Asia. Her publications focus on biodiversity conservation, environmental conflicts, water management and agro-ecosystems. She collaborated with the Water Catalan Agency and was deputy coordinator of the EJOLT project.
Miriam Lang Miriam works currently as assistant professor for social and global studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, a public postgraduate university in Quito, Ecuador. As a German internationalist activist, she has worked in and with struggles in different countries of Latin America for more than 30 years. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Freie Universität Berlin. As head of office for the Andean office of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, she has co-founded and coordinated an international working group called Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development from 2011 through 2015. Based on a shared criticism of both the development and growth imperatives, this working group seeks to promote a dialogue between the geopolitical North and South around alternatives to capitalism, patriarchy, old and new colonial relationships and destructive societal nature relations, bringing together different approaches and experiences from Latin America and Europe. She coordinated several books, including Beyond Development – Alternative Visions from Latin America https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_publikationen/BeyondDevelopment.pdf (TNI – Rosa Luxemburg Foundation 2013). Her current research focuses on critical perspectives around the politics and understandings of poverty, bringing together the issues of migration, neocolonialism and degrowth.	Edgardo Lander Professor of Social Sciences at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas (retired). Was part of the Organizing Committee of the World Social Forum held in Caracas in 2006. Participated in the negotiations of the (finally defeated) Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) as part of the Venezuelan delegation. Fellow of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam). Part of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s (Quito Office) Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development. Member of CLACSO’s working group on Political Ecology. Currently part of the Citizen’s Platform in Defense of the Venezuelan Constitution today confronting both severe violations by the government and threats by right wing opposition parties that they will get rid of it, as they see it as an obstacle to return to neoliberal times. Areas of interest: Critique of the Eurocentric and colonial character of modern social science knowledge; democratic theory; politics in Latin America and Venezuela; social movements, life and the depredatory civilization of unlimited growth, beyond development, climate change, progressive governments and extractivism in South America.