About the project
Commons Network has established the Postgrowth Pan-European network which brings together Members of Parliament, trade union representatives, and postgrowth experts to discuss policies and strategies to advance the postgrowth agenda. Apart from discussing strategies and policy proposals , we foster knowledge exchange and greater collaborations between MPs and trade unions as well as integrating efforts at national and European levels.
Run time: May 2023 – Present
The project in numbers
3
Roundtables on food, welfare, and work
75
Partners, parliament members, trade unionists, academics and civil society in the network
2
Panel discussions
The goal
Across Europe, momentum around postgrowth is increasing. Yet, efforts remain fragmented – across national contexts, institutional levels, and societal actors.
Commons Network addresses this challenge by building a Pan-European network for knowledge exchange and strategy development on post-growth. Bringing together Members of national parliaments and trade union representatives, the initiative creates space to align policy proposals and strengthen collaboration between parliamentary and labour actors, and advances the postgrowth agenda, while identifying concrete actions to move it forward in practice.
Roundtable 1
Building on the momentum of the Beyond Growth Conference in the European Parliament, the first roundtable in May 2023 focused on post-growth policymaking at the level of EU Member States. We brought together nine national MPs and three trade union representatives; leading researcher Tim Jackson opened the discussion on national policies and strategies.
Roundtable 2
The second rountable organized in December 2023 was centred on the topic of welfare beyond growth and eco-social policies. We brought together eleven national MPs and five trade union representatives, with specific interventions from Benjamin Denis (IndustriAll), from Aileen McLeod (WEAll), and from two MPs, Severine de Laveleye and Suzanne Kröger.
Roundtable 3
The third roundtable in November 2024 took place at the Spanish Congress in Madrid, co-hosted by SUMAR. We discussed how to organize work in a democratic postgrowth economy, zooming in on policies such as work time reduction, the public job guarantee and universal basic income. UN Special Rapporteur Olivier de Schutter presented his research on postgrowth, poverty and work, and Carlos Martin Urriza presented SUMAR’s policy of work time reduction.
Panel discussion 1
In July 2024, we hosted an online panel discussion on “A just agricultural transition beyond growth” in collaboration with Oxfam Novib, Friends of the Earth Europe, Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the European Environmental Bureau. The panel, moderated by our director Sophie Bloemen, featured politicians, farmers union representatives and members of civil society from all over Europe.
Panel Discussion 2
We co-hosted a panel discussion in Madrid with Spanish civil society, “Postgrowth pathways: Changing course amidst climate crisis”. Speakers were academics, activists, as well as politicians from Spain and abroad. We discussed what postgrowth could look like in practice as well as the socio-economic impact of the recent Spanish climate disaster, the DANA floods.
Published and co-signed op-ed
Over the spring 2024, our network wrote a joint op-ed on postgrowth agriculture “Farmers VS Green Deal? Beyond growth is the answer”. It was co-signed by sixteen politicians, and the piece was published in national papers such as ElDiario (Spain) and Yorkshire Bylines (UK).
Policy primer series
In the Beyond Growth Primer series, Commons Network, together with Oxfam Novib, explores how European countries can break away from dependency on economic growth and prioritize social wellbeing and thriving ecosystems. To do so, we zoom in on Food, Welfare, and Work beyond growth.
Team
