Online Degrowth Movement Assembly 2026

We invite you to take part in the upcoming Online Degrowth Movement Assembly, bringing together IDN circles and the wider global degrowth community. The assembly will feature interactive sessions, workshops, and discussions hosted by the Asia, Europe, North America, Practice, Transformative Learning, and Research Circles, with more to be added. It’s a space to share work, build skills, exchange ideas, and strengthen international solidarity. The assembly is open to both IDN and non-IDN participants! 

Explore detailed descriptions of each session. This document also includes links, hosts, formats, and themes.

👉 (external link)Explore the programme and sessions. (external link)

A few months have passed since the last online International Degrowth Movement Assembly, which brought together people from different parts of the world.

The sessions were organised and facilitated by different Circles of the International Degrowth Network and resulted in rich information and insights that the degrowth movement could take into consideration in shaping future strategies. As Donatella Gasparro and Daniele Vico (external link) pointed out during their session, degrowth transformation may require rethinking strategies beyond binary oppositions.

Instead of choosing between competing approaches, the movement may benefit from embracing strategic pluralism that enables coordination across different paths of change, a discussion that should remain ongoing in spaces such as these movement assemblies. 

A dedicated session on “Degrowth in Asia” brought together perspectives from South Korea, India, Singapore, and Japan to reflect on how degrowth is understood and practiced across the region.

Degrowth cannot be approached as a universal framework. Countries across Asia occupy very different historical and economic positions, shaping both the possibilities and challenges for degrowth organising. In India, degrowth should focus on confronting elite overconsumption, strengthening sovereignty, and being mindful of the risk of reducing access to social and economic necessities. In Singapore, ecological overshoot and excessive consumption often remain hidden behind narratives of green growth. In South Korea and Japan, memories of poverty and rapid industrialisation continue to make critiques of economic growth politically sensitive.

Moreover, grounding degrowth conversations in local cultural and historical contexts is important. Philosophies and traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and seasonal rituals connected to nature were discussed as possible reference points for ideas around sufficiency, interdependence, and alternative ways of living. However, we should not romanticise tradition uncritically.

For the participants Degrowth is often communicated more effectively through lived experience than through abstract debate. Examples such as community farms, urban gardens, commoning practices, convivial spaces, and community-based care initiatives were highlighted as ways people can directly experience degrowth principles in everyday life. Discussions also revolved around elderly care, public health, community support and, more broadly, the importance of care within post-growth imaginaries.

Finally, participants emphasised that climate breakdown, extraction, and global supply chains create shared struggles across the region despite different national contexts. This could be an important starting point for building stronger cross-border solidarity, collaboration through networks, and exchanges between movements and communities, particularly in response to mining and other extractive activities linked to wealthy countries and corporations.

The Global North carries specific political responsibilities and there is a need to move from analysis and dialogue toward sustained political organising and material solidarity. Focusing on sustainability while leaving global systems of inequality and extraction largely unchallenged risks keeping degrowth transformations depoliticised.

Particularly, degrowth spaces in the Global North can unintentionally reproduce global inequalities when they remain mainly academic or NGO-based, focus primarily on individual lifestyle changes, or avoid confronting structural issues such as coloniality, militarism, unequal trade systems, and global finance. Even when Global South perspectives are seemingly included in such spaces, they are often not accompanied by a real redistribution of agenda-setting power or resources.

Examples on how to address this may include:

• Shifting leadership and agenda-setting power toward Global South struggles. In practice, this involves giving Global South organisations the power to define meeting agendas, co-organising assemblies with equal control over facilitation and priorities, securing funding so they can participate easily, and ensuring decision-making roles are meaningfully shared rather than simply be “consultative”.
• Building long-term political alliances and campaigns moving away from one-off events or declarations. This means developing sustained collaborations around shared political targets, for example coordinated campaigns against extractive industries, fossil fuel infrastructure, or global debt systems. It also involves aligning strategies across contexts, such as linking European climate justice groups with land defense struggles or anti-mining movements in the Global South.
• Avoiding academic extractivism and changing how knowledge is produced and circulated. Instead of researchers collecting data in the Global South and publishing elsewhere, it requires, for example, co-authorship with local actors, funding research led by Southern organisations, and ensuring that outputs are returned in accessible and useful forms. It also implies shared control over how knowledge is used and represented.
• Connecting degrowth work to broader struggles around labour, housing, militarism, and economic justice means embedding degrowth in real material issues. For example, linking degrowth to housing movements fighting against speculation and touristification, to labour movements demanding shorter working hours without wage loss, to anti-militarist campaigns challenging rising defence budgets, and to economic justice struggles such as wealth taxation, debt cancellation, and public service expansion.

The second session of the Transformative Learning Circle highlighted that many movements tend to move directly from critique to advocacy without sufficiently analysing how power operates. In response, participants discussed power mapping as a practical tool for identifying decision-makers, institutional power structures, indirect influencers, potential allies, and possible leverage points for intervention. The session emphasised that effective political action requires a clearer understanding of where decisions are made, how influence circulates across institutions and actors, and where movements can strategically intervene to build pressure and make systemic change.

Discussions further highlighted that political outcomes are shaped not only by governments, but also by corporations, financial institutions, media actors, regulatory bodies, and civil society organisations operating across different scales. Power can be also exercised through less visible actors occupying administrative or intermediary positions, who may not appear politically influential but can nonetheless facilitate, delay, or enable important institutional changes. Understanding the diverse interconnected power relations is essential for developing effective strategies, and approaches to organising and intervention must be adapted to specific political and regional contexts rather than relying on a single universal model.

The power mapping is a useful tool for identifying potential allies, understanding where influence is concentrated, and locating strategic opportunities for coalition-building and coordinated action since degrowth movements cannot act in isolation if they aim to build meaningful political leverage. Alliances, for example, with labour unions, housing movements, advocacy groups, and other social struggles broadens support and strengthens collective pressure towards change.

Related particularly to degrowth policies, for these to become politically stronger, they need to be directly connected to everyday material needs rather than framed only as environmental measures. In discussions around transportation, proposals such as free public transit, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies, and restrictions on large cars and SUVs were presented not only as climate policies, but also as ways to reduce living costs, improve mobility, reclaim public space, and strengthen public services. This implies also that it is important to combine incentives with regulatory measures while linking ecological transformation to economic justice and quality of life in order to be consistent with degrowth principles and climate justice.

In sum, both sessions of the Transformative Learning Circle highlighted the need for deeper political learning within the movement in order to better understand global interdependencies, develop less Eurocentric approaches to organising, and strengthen shared political and strategic skills.

Using the Beyond Growth conferences as a reference point, the session reflected on the limitations of both degrowth and conference spaces as political arenas. Unintentionally, the same hierarchies and exclusions can be reproduced. Academic language, movement jargon, and the dominance of university-educated participants often make working class communities, migrants, and other marginalised groups feel excluded or unheard. Discussions therefore stressed that inclusion cannot rely only on representation through invited speakers, but requires shared power in shaping conferences from the beginning, its content and its agenda. This includes involving working class, migrant, and Global South communities in planning and decision-making processes, creating more accessible and safer spaces, and integrating issues such as labour, class, and decolonisation throughout entire programmes rather than isolating them into specialised sessions.

In practice, creating more accessible and safer spaces can include translation, childcare, travel support, free or affordable participation, and using community spaces outside universities. It can also mean having clear anti-harassment guidelines, confidential ways to report discrimination, and facilitators who can intervene when discussions become exclusionary or hostile. Integrating labour, class, and decolonisation across programmes means discussing issues such as inequality, migration, exploitation, and global extraction within sessions on transport, housing, food, or climate, instead of limiting them to separate “justice” panels.

Moreover, stronger alliances require long-term outreach, attention to communication and conflict resolution, and the creation of informal and creative spaces where relationships can develop beyond formal conference settings. Film screenings, poetry events, community kitchens, and mutual aid initiatives are examples of spaces that can foster trust, participation, and political exchange in more accessible ways.

Another recurring theme concerned the political tensions surrounding language and framing within the movement. Terms such as “degrowth,” “post-growth,” “beyond growth,” and “wellbeing economy” were discussed not simply as labels, but as strategic choices shaped by different political and cultural contexts. In several Southern European contexts, for example, “degrowth” can remain politically difficult because economic growth is still associated with security and development after years of crisis and austerity. Participants therefore emphasised the importance of using language that connects with people’s everyday experiences, material concerns, and shared values beyond relying on abstract movement terminology. For example, discussions about “degrowth” can be framed through concrete issues such as lower living costs, affordable housing, reduced working hours, cleaner public transport, energy security, healthier food systems, or more free time and community care, instead of focusing only on theoretical critiques of economic growth.

Particularly, fairness can serve as a powerful entry point for building broader support for ecological transformation. People are often more willing to support climate and social policies when responsibilities and benefits are perceived as fairly distributed (e.g., taxing wealth, guaranteeing access to energy and public services, and reducing excessive consumption by wealthier groups). However, we should be cautious since right-wing narratives frequently instrumentalise feelings of unfairness, especially around migration, welfare, and resource allocation, making it important for movements to engage with people’s insecurities and material realities instead of relying on moralising narratives. Many working class communities are already organising around issues closely connected to degrowth, including housing insecurity, energy poverty, and mutual aid networks. Furthermore, as presented before, it is important to connect ecological struggles with critiques of global inequality and the imperial mode of living associated with lithium mining, solar infrastructure, extractivism linked to Global North consumption and unequal exchange, while also recognising that such perspectives often remain marginal within mainstream European environmental discourse.

Finally, participants reflected on the difficulty of maintaining political momentum after conferences end. Conferences alone were seen as insufficient for simultaneously engaging institutional politics and building durable grassroots movements. Several speakers therefore emphasised the need for long-term continuity through democratic organisational structures, stronger local organising, ongoing campaigns, and alliances across movements. Participants repeatedly stressed the need for political spaces capable of working through disagreement and difference collectively rather than suppressing them. Differences around labour, class, environmental politics, and the meaning of degrowth itself were not seen as obstacles to unity, but as realities that movements must learn to navigate collectively. In this sense, common ground was understood as emerging less from ideological consensus and more from shared commitments to fairness, democracy, care, and collective wellbeing.

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Across the different sessions, several common patterns emerged. Participants repeatedly stressed the need to move beyond universal frameworks, abstract debates, and isolated strategies toward more grounded, plural, and politically coordinated forms of organising. Questions of power, responsibility, accessibility, material needs, care, justice, and global inequality appeared in the discussions. Taken together, the sessions highlighted the importance of building degrowth practices that are context-sensitive, rooted in everyday realities, capable of working across differences, and connected to broader struggles for social, economic, and ecological justice.