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Together, we are redesigning the economy and society beyond the hegemony of growth. We not only propose the redistributive downscaling of the biophysical size of the global economy, but also a feminist-inspired paradigm of a regenerative economy: a socio-ecological transformation centred around the key values of care, autonomy and sufficiency.
In December 2023, Commons Network organized a roundtable on welfare beyond growth in the European Parliament with national MPs and trade union representatives. This event was the second of a series that aims to establish a pan-European network for knowledge exchange and strategy building on post-growth policies.
Commons Network is activating the community economy in the 2 year Transition Laboratory project on Community Wealth Building. Together with various municipalities and neighbourhood actors in Amsterdam and other cities, we are helping build caring economies where collective wellbeing, democratic ownership, and participation take centre stage.
During three days, a landmark conference on post-growth took place in the European Parliament. As a contributing partner, Commons Network co-organised two events in the Beyond Growth conference: a session on what post-growth means for the digital transition and a round table with MP’s.
We took the initiative to establish a cross-party working group for and with parliamentarians from the First and Second Chamber in the Hague, that would function as a sound board, inspiration hub and an instigator of postgrowth thinking within national politics in The Netherlands.
Even though the effect of the ecological crisis is already a daily reality for many people living in the Global South, those who have an interest in preserving the status quo continue to defend why we need more economic growth in the Global North. In this series of articles, we respond to their arguments one at a time.
We publish our Manifesto for a Caring Economy, which is a plea for caring as an antidote to neoliberalism. In it, we argue for a regenerative and provisioning economy in which caring communities are the foundation of a truly democratic and sustainable society.
Common In: A half year-running project together Art Collecive TAAK on the intersection of commons and art. Common in is a process of collective imagination, where artists, organizers and participants together experience a commons-inspired world.
We publish our new book which is the result of a two-year exploration of the degrowth movement, merging planetary health thinking, feminist economics and fieldwork from Dutch caring commoning practices.
Our new publication (in Dutch) about the future of social security in the Netherlands is launched! Based on our collaborative theoretical and empirical research with the innovation lab Novum, the book contains a rich bundle of insights about a possible new meaning of the term ‘social security’ – one that is built around values like care, reciprocity and trust. We then discuss a set of ‘building blocks’ and ‘transition paths’ towards a society that serves this novel understanding of social security.
We kicked off our new research to explore what a degrowth transformation could mean for how we think about health and organize care. We dived into literature on degrowth & (planetary) health and conducted fieldwork to caring citizens collectives in the Netherlands part of NLZVE.
In 2020 Commons Network worked together with Novum, the innovation lab of the SVB, which is the institution responsible within the Dutch government for national insurance schemes, to find out what the commons can teach us about social security.
