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Degrowth Course

Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal

Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - Sunday, July 12, 2015

Module: Degrowth Public Policies

Organized by ISCTE and Oficinas do Convento

This is a six days intensive course where we will explore what are the principles of degrowth one can use to assist public policies and the design methodologies for the management of common resources.

In the first day of the course there will be an introduction to degrowth and to the local context, Montemor-o-Novo, a 10 thousand people town in the region of Alentejo, Portugal, with an history of interesting public policies since the revolution against fascism in 1974. The second day will introduce what are degrowth public policies, the methodologies of systemic analysis (Mapping Pathways) and systems of management of common resources. In the third and fourth days, case studies on different topics regarding public policies (sea resources, health, agroecology, mining) will be addressed and participants will create proposals within degrowth principles. In the fifth day, the experiences will be systematized and the ideas that have arised during the course on how to define and design degrowth public policies will be summarized.

In our course, we consider that public policies are an instrument either to mediate conflicts arising from the scarcity of resources (water, soil, etc.), or to make use of processes of cooperation whenever different stakeholders share common interests that are more easily addressed collectively. They are materialized, for example, in the form of laws and law enforcement systems, construction of infrastructures, co-ownership and management of equipment, provision of social services, and may imply the use of natural resources or monetary fundraising (usually trough taxes).

How these policies are designed and implemented is not a neutral process: certain groups (with more money, contacts within high political positions, more organized, higher formal education levels, etc.) tend to be more able to see their interests satisfied. Additionally, the guiding principles of mainstream public policies tend to consider growth as the main goal of society, without considering what this goal may imply for the long-run availability of resources (sustainability and inequality in their access) and disregarding social and cultural aspects like reciprocity, trust and participation. Given this, there is a demand to rethink how public policies are designed and implemented, in order to better attend the needs and wishes of citizens.

In this course, we shall be thinking about what are degrowth public policies, having as a starting point the following guiding principles:

1. the focus is on the well-being of citizens, on the services that support this (e.g. healthcare, education, etc.), and on the promotion of fair access to resources essential for living (land, water, etc.).

In the growth approach, the main focus of policies is to promote the increase of the binomial production/consumption of products and services (GDP), implying that needs are mostly material.

2. there should be an attempt to avoid uses that put at stake the availability of resources in the long-run (e.g. contamination of soil or water, overuse/extraction, etc.

As the objective is to grow production, also the objective is to facilitate the use/extraction of resources, even when this puts their long-run availability at stake;

3. cooperation, reciprocity and active participation of citizens are to be promoted in the design and management of public services;

In a growth perspective, citizens are seen as individuals acting in the pursuit of their individual satisfaction, so reciprocity is not seen as crucial, because monetary transactions are considered to produce the same and more efficiently. Simultaneously, citizens are clients of State, and State collects taxes to provide a service (e.g. good roads, health system), therefore participation in public services was substituted by the monetary relationships implicit in any market, and so citizens are not part of it - they opt or not to buy the services of the State and they are forced to contribute in the form of taxes.

4. equal power among citizens of a territory (independently of their nationality) and direct access in decision-making processes on the uses to be given to the commons;

As in growth societies, institutions also tend to grow and manage bigger and bigger regions with the same laws, policies, etc. Consequently, it’s each time more and more difficult for citizens to participate in the decisions that concern their natural resources or the use of their taxes (which investments are supported, subsidies are given, etc. - see example of E.U. and its structural funds, with money collected from citizens of all over Europe). In order to legitimate decisions there is a representation system (called “representative democracy” or “sephocracy”, characteristic of Western States), where citizens are represented in parties, which act as intermediaries between people and decisions.

5. given its’ capacity to enforce the law and collect taxes, State institutions are expected to manage the commons. However, in case that political authorities do not proceed under the principles 1. to 4., citizens should be able and capable to develop among themselves co-management systems for implementation of services or creation of infrastructures to respond to their needs, generating and managing their own commons, normally through the creation of associations or cooperatives;

“Public” in growth societies (or in any), normally is not really “public” if we define it as including all living within a territory. In EU countries, for example, often there is a “public health care system”, but there is a significant number of citizens that cannot have access to it, although they live, work and contribute for the respective territories (i.e. «illegal» immigrants). Additionally, States are often dominated by the interests of a few, and this may imply that the needs of many are not responded, that policies can even harm their livelihoods (namely by promoting an unsustainable use and unfair access to resources), or that groups are excluded from rights that a majority has.

6. each person is considered to have his/her own valid perspective of how resources should be used and what should be the objectives of public policies (even if it goes against principles 1. to 4.). Differences of perspectives do not mean that people are against each other, but rather that we have to understand that the opinion of "the other" matters as much as ours, that it is not irrelevant but rather part of our own.

Inside a growth hierarchical power structure, competition and opposition are favoured as a «spectacle» by impoverished settings for dialogue (e.g. mass media) which impairs the expression and acceptance of different views from different people (that don’t access them, or don’t share the same linguistic codes, etc.). Hence normalization occurs. Public debate is reduced to adversative forms of argumentation and privileges persuasion-based dialogue.