 Hola, buenas tardes. Good afternoon, everyone. Hello, good afternoon. My name is Raúl Gomez. I am the director of Transición Verde. And on my name and on behalf of the Green European Foundation, I wanted to thank you all for spending some of your time this afternoon with this webinar. And I'm sure that considering the topic at hand and the speakers that we are having here today, you will not regret it. The title for the event is Geopolitics in a Post-Growth Era, Europe at a Crossroads. And this is part of a project that we have been working on with the GEF and other European foundations under the coordination of Richard Wouter, who will be one of our speakers today. And with him we will have Gaia Herrington and Jesus Muñez. And our moderator will be Lourdes Lucia, who is now going to be taking the floor. But I wanted to say a couple of things before I start regarding logistics. The first one is that the session can be followed along both in Spanish and English. And you have to click on the globe icon that you have on the bottom side of your screen. It's like a globe and it says interpretation in it. And you have to choose the language that you choose to follow along in. So we will have Matilde Vuelgo interpreting and it's always a pleasure. So you can always choose Spanish and when someone speaks English, you will be listening to Matilde's voice. And if you want to make comments, if you want to ask questions to your speakers so that Lourdes can ask those questions later on, you can use the chat box. So any comment, any question, please use the chat box. That's what we're going to be using. And that's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much. I will now give the floor to Lourdes Lucia, who's a lawyer and an editor. She's also a translator and the co-author of various books. And she's always been very much linked to the publishing houses world. And she has been in debate and club intelectual, always an activist with regards to peace, the environment, democracy. She was a co-founder of Attack in Spain and she still participates in activities such as neighborhood activities against the deportation of nature or other sorts of activism. But she's always there, always in the fight. Lourdes, I give you the floor so that you can leave this meeting. Thank you very much Raul and good afternoon everyone. And first of all, I wanted to thank the Foundation Transición Verde Europea for organizing this webinar where we will be talking about the report post-growth geopolitics Europe but across roads. Thank you so much to the people who are here today and the people who are in charge of the technical work such as Matilde, the translator. And also I would like to thank the three people who are going to be intervening and the people that I'm going to be introducing now. So first of all, we will give the floor to Richard Woodes, who is a project leader and researcher at the Green Links Bureau, the think tank of the Dutch Green Party where he works on issues such as raw materials, energy, technology and geopolitics. He leads the project geopolitics on a post-growth Europe for the Green European Foundation. As an advisor to the Green Links, he co-wrote numerous publications and electoral programs, so hi Richard. And Gaia Harrington is a Dutch econometrician. She is a researcher on sustainability and she is an activist and she fights for human rights. In 2021, her study update to limits to growth, comparing the World 3 model with empirical data, which confirmed the conclusions of the Club of Rome's in 1972 report, was something that created waves worldwide. And she published the book Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse. She works and lives in the US. She is the vice president of sustainability research at Schneider Electric and she is a member of the Transformational Economics Commission. And hi Gaia, thank you so much for being here. Pesos Nunez is the co-director of the Institute of Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action. He is an expert in international relations, international security, peace-building and prevention of violent conflicts and the Arab Muslim world. He is an economist from the Autonomous University in Madrid and he is a retired military officer. He is also a professor of international relations at the University of Comillas. And he's a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a member of the Spanish Committee of UNRWA. And I'm going to give the floor to Richard, so that he can present to us this report on geopolitics for post-growth Europe for the Green European Foundation. Richard was the coordinator of this report, so I'm well giving him the floor. Thank you, Lordist. So I did rewrite this report basically to get a conversation going between critics of economic growth and geopolitical thinkers. Post-growth and geopolitics are two ways of looking at a world that do not go well together or to put it differently, ecological and geopolitical security are hard to reconcile. It is unlikely that we will be able to solve the climate and biodiversity crisis as long as our economy continues to grow. To get back into balance with the living world, we need to scale back overproduction and overconsumption. That is the call of the degrowth movement. More and more scientists agree that which countries should stop chasing growth are gross domestic product, GDP, and the next speaker, Gaia Harrington, will tell you more about the limits to growth. One important insight that we borrowed from Gaia is that it is better to manage the end of growth through democratic elaboration than to have it imposed on us by ecological breakdown that would spell massive social upheaval. However, degrowth or post-growth is not popular with experts in foreign and security policy. And it is easy to see why. In geopolitics, many determinants of power, trade, aid, technology, defense are closely linked to GDP. If they do not ignore planetary boundaries altogether, geopolitical thinkers prefer to talk about green growth. But it is precisely this narrative of green growth that degrowth and post-growth thinkers try to refute. Whereas geopolitical thinkers opt for an easy way out by embracing green growth, many degrowthers also cut corners. Their pacifism and anti-militarism is downright naïve in my view at a time when aggressive autocracies are invading their democratic neighbors. Russia's imperialist attack on Ukraine has brought war to the doorstep of the European Union. That forces us to take a hard look at defence and deterrence. After all, the transition beyond growth must be democratic. Democracy offers a public space to challenge the growth dogma. Many degrowthers even advocate deepening democracy by extending it to the economic sphere as a way to overcome the growth compulsion of shareholder capitalism. Democracy in turn relies on constitutional safeguards that protect the rule of law, pluralism and human rights. Preventing ecological collapse will not only require green policies at the national level, but also unprecedented global cooperation. That will not happen in a world where might is right, a world of autocrats that would be a world of even more violent chaos. Democracies can misbehave as well, but they are more inclined to resolve conflict. Global rules that just about every country has agreed to. So a rule based international order is indispensable not just for preventing more wars, but also for tackling the climate and biodiversity crisis. So the degrowth movement should be more concerned about protecting democracy, human rights and the international rule of law. In turn, geopolitical thinkers would do well to recognise the limits to growth. Together they should try to finance us to some uneasy questions. Which I put on the screen. Can we stop pursuing economic growth and still be a global actor? Would a post-growth European Union be able to defend itself, its allies, its values? And can post-growth and geopolitics support each other? If so, how? In our report, which we based on interviews and meetings, we offer some tentative answers to these questions. And I will briefly outline some of these answers. A post-growth EU would have to be more united in its external policies. And this includes getting serious about defence integration. The current fragmentation of national armed forces is very inefficient. The European Union national armed forces have some under 80 different major weapon systems. The United States only has 30, for instance. And these 180 weapon systems sometimes can't even communicate with each other. That makes it difficult to cooperate and it's too expensive. Of the 200 billion euros that the 27 EU countries spend each year on defence, 120 billion could be saved depending on the level of integration. And these savings could be used to increase combat power. The better the member states' military forces fit together, the more bang we get for our buck. Defence integration would also require that EU governments jointly develop and procure new weapon systems. It is urgent today to strengthen EU defence in the global rivalry between democracy and autocracy. The US may well defect from our camp at the next presidential election if Trump gets elected. We need to prepare for an Atlantic storm. NATO may lose its credibility as the guarantor of our security. We as EU need to be able to support Ukraine and defend ourselves against Russian aggression without relying on the US. This is a total order. I know the Spanish Left is not fond of NATO. Well then, meet the moment, rise to the occasion, I would say. Take responsibility for the security of our continent for the defence of democracy. And this starts in Ukraine. Spain lags behind in providing military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as you can see on the screen. Spain gives less than significantly smaller countries such as Sweden and Denmark. Spain is still importing LNG from Russia, liquefied natural gas, thereby funding the aggressor. Sorry for being blunt, but Spain should clean up its act. Call your government. Taking in new members would become an even stronger geopolitical imperative for a post-growth EU. More members means more resources, more legitimacy. Ukraine, if it survives the Russian invasion with our help, could be a formidable ally even before exception. Both in terms of civil courage and military strength. EU enlargement must be accompanied by a more robust oversight of the rule of law, human rights and democracy. It only takes one outlier, like the authoritarian Hungarian government today, to undermine mutual trust and triple decision making in the EU. The growth of the far right, including in my own country, the Netherlands, makes it all the more important that the EU acts against democratic backsliding within its borders. The EU should be less tolerant of the intolerant. It should become a militant democracy. The post-growth EU would not only benefit from having more members, but also from having more partners. Our report contains many proposals for strengthening partnerships, non-exclusive partnerships with the Global South. Some of these proposals will be costly for an EU without economic growth, but global security comes at a price. One of the synergies between post-growth and geopolitics may be the fact that a post-growth EU would be less dependent on imported energy and materials, but this will also increase tensions with the Global South. Increasing the export of natural resources is often still viewed as a way to develop the economy, even by democratically elected progressive governments of not-so-poor countries such as Brazil and Chile. Our report outlines a partial way out of this dilemma, because a post-growth EU would still need critical metals for its energy transition. That's painful, but it also creates an opportunity to assist metal mining countries in adding more value to their metal ores, for instance by helping them to produce batteries. That would provide them with more income and better jobs. You can find more proposals in our report. The report also contains some of the interviews that we held, and each language version, including the Spanish one, has a different selection of interviews. You can find all the interviews we conducted on this website. We are very grateful to the interviewees, including Gaia Harrington and José Núñez, because they provided us with very important insights. There will be more webinars and seminars on post-growth and geopolitics this year. If you want to keep up to date, subscribe to the newsletter of the Green European Foundation. If you want to send me any good ideas, here's my email address. Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to our discussion. Thank you so much, Richard, and we will now give the floor to Gaia and then with Jesús. We're going to be formulating one question that is similar for both of them, for Gaia and Jesús, so that in 10 minutes each they can develop their answers as they wish. We would like you to talk about the dilemma that Europe is currently facing, that is dividing us between the urgent need to advance towards post-growth so that we can tackle this climate and biodiversity crisis and at the same time survive and maintain our economic situation so that we are in a good economic situation. That is becoming very complicated in the geopolitical field. I would like you to ask both Gaia and Jesús to talk about the aspects that you know best and that you think are fundamental, or those that worry you most. Yes, thank you. Very glad to be here. I'm also very much looking forward to the discussion later on. Let's start with the question that Richard also posed. How can post-growth and geopolitics work together? In very short, I would say, well, let's talk about well-being economics. That's the term I use. Very quickly, my name is Gaia. I was born in Europe, but I now live in the US. I work at a big multinational, Snyder Electric, as their VP of sustainability research. Snyder Electric works in energy transition. I'm an advisor to the Club of Rome, and I talk about and write about these kind of things, so systemic sustainability issues, and increasingly I'm being called a well-being economist. What's well-being economics? Well, we just discussed the need to move beyond growth as the ultimate goal for the economy. That doesn't mean we're anti-growth, but it shouldn't be the top priority. The question is, what do you replace it with? That proposal is then well-being, human well-being, and ecological well-being. You could also say, more like as Kate Rayworth frames it, meeting human needs within planetary boundaries. In this economy, you design it so that people and planet are strictly above profit. Profit is fine. Growth can also be fine. We want to have growth with renewable energy. It's just not the ultimate goal, very simply put. That's increasingly being proposed as a sort of overall paradigm for these kind of post-growth policies. What does this mean concretely, though? I think it's worth lingering around that. As was mentioned, I did my research on limits to growth. When you talk about limits to growth, a lot of people hear, oh, we all have to do less. When you say degrowth, they're like, oh, that sounds like a permanent recession. Really, it's a lot better than that. It's actually a more fun place to live, because what does it mean, a well-being economy? Well, it means that we have to deliberately bring our environmental footprint down. We know that we are above our share of the Earth's carrying capacity. How you do that without growth is really not impossible. You just have to share what you already have. When you share more, you bring down inequalities. You create community and connection. It actually also, in that way, benefits our well-being also in all these social needs that we have. Or to have a sense of meaning in our lives. Concretely, what this would look like is an economy where we work much less hour, much shorter workweek, say 15, 20 hours should be enough. You work in meaningful jobs, so you don't just do tricks for your income. You actually are working to, let's say, regenerate nature, to clean up stuff, to really help people in their health and that sort of thing. We have locally grown food, of course, with knowledge of local environmental factors. Much less waste. We have clean energy, obviously, but it's not just clean in terms of less greenhouse gases. It's clean in the sense that there's not plastic in everything we eat and sit on and breathe. There are not these about 80,000 chemical toxins in there that doctors think are bad for our health, but they haven't been properly tested, but they're out there anyway. All those things will be brought down. Because we want to meet our needs with much lower environmental impact, we're going to be sharing a lot more. We're going to have libraries not just for books, but for tools and for toys and all those kind of things. We're going to have low impact leisure activities, which you typically do with one another. So you're going to have make music together or just go for walks, all those things. And as a result, we have better physical health and as well as mental health. So it's really a well-being economy is about less stuff, but a lot more of the things that we actually want. So it's an atmosphere of conviviality and generosity and fun. So with that in mind, back to the geopolitics, I think it's a good to for a second realize that business as usual is not an option. So what works in the past will not work going forward. Typically where you have these kind of discussions around, okay, what should change people always talk about the cost of changing. There are also costs of doing nothing because that's a choice as well. And this is from my research. People mentioned the limits to growth. So what I did was I took a few scenarios of that limits to growth publication. And I compared that to empirical data because this publication wasn't in the 70s. So we had a couple of decades worth of data. And this is the human welfare. So well-being variable. The dash purple line is the empirical data. What we found was that we are actually aligned pretty closely to the business as usual scenario that was made again in the 70s. That one shows that indicates a collapse setting in around present time. So as you can see, there are two business as usual scenarios. The only difference between them is the assumed amount of non-renewable resources because we don't know exactly how much fossil fuels we have, etc. It doesn't matter. We have a collapse in both scenarios. It just sets in a little bit later. Really what this comes down, you don't need my research to notice everybody on this call already knows this. Everybody knows about the IPCC reports, etc. But we're bumping into limits. What that means is that growth is going to halt one way or another. And as Richard already summarized my research very accurately, we have a choice now. Either we maintain what we have, which would be the yellow scenario that does not end in collapse. And that is a scenario that comes most closely to well-being economy. The authors didn't call it that, but that's what it is. Or we bring or we go down. Continuing to grow is not an option where that's not where we are in this point of human history. And so when you couple it back to geopolitics. Yes, that used to be a source of power. On one side, that's a design choice, right? You don't have to do voting based on GDP size or growth rate. You can just do one country, one vote. That's just a human choice and we could change that. But even apart from that, of course, yes, you do need physical capital to be able to defend yourself, for example. But that's not the only thing you need. You also need social capital. And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. What we see right now is that this growth-based economy is, we all know that environmental impacts, that's bad. But what is a little bit less known is that it also drives social disenfranchement. And that's what we see. We see a lot of social unrest because of increasing income inequalities, other inequalities. That's where the rising populism comes from. So a growth-based economy is not just environmentally degenerative. It's also socially degenerative. And you really can wonder if your social capital is being eroded. How is that good for your geopolitical standing? Another thing about warfare is technology. People talk about innovation that we need. Where does innovation come from? It comes from a group of people who have access to the education they want, working together, not being continuously stressed, thinking, what if we try this and then try it out? You can easily imagine that happening a lot more in a well-being economy instead of less. And these policies and underlying values, this notion of we share the biggest shoulders, carry the biggest weight, those kind of things, they're actually widely popular. Especially in Europe. So you see this very discreetly in surveys where majority people just agree with it. But around the world, you see post-growth thinking picking up in Japan, even in the US. So in the end, you could easily ask the opposite question. Can you still defend yourself if you let go of growth? That's a fair question. We should talk about it. At the same time, you could also just as easily ask the question, if you hold on to this growth-based economy while you won't be able to pursue that anymore, while being on the precipice of collapse, can you still defend yourself while you are exhausting your natural capital and fraying your social cohesion? I think that's harder. I think the Ukraine is an excellent example of that. You see that Ukraine took everybody by surprise. Why are they holding on? It's because they have their social capital. They know what they're fighting for. The Club of Rome is now working with the Ukrainian government and I'm in that group. Their short-term goal is winning the war. They have a long-term vision. They know what they're fighting for. They say we want to have democracy. We want to have democracy. We want to have clean water. We want to have clean energy. This is what we're working on with the government. They're like, when, not if, when we win the war, we want to be this kind of well-being country. I think that's the social capital that keeps them going. I'll leave it to that for discussion. I'll leave you with a couple of links. I don't know if these slides will be shared. My update is in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. There's also the update in my book, which is free for download. You just Google it. And there are a couple of other links, including a free one-hour lecture about post-growth. Thank you. Thank you so much, Gaia. We have shared all of the links and we will have time later on to keep on talking about this topic. But I would now like to give the floor to Jesus so that he may take the floor and talk about all of this question that we have been tackling for the last 10 minutes. So I give him the floor. Good afternoon, Lourdes. It is a pleasure to be here with you and share this afternoon with you with such an interesting topic. And I'm going to go straight to the topic tackled by Lourdes from a geopolitical perspective, which is the field I am an expert in. I think that we should maybe start considering that the Ukraine and Gaza, just to give two clear examples, show in a very obvious way that we are not in international order based on rules. There are two thresholds and two ways of measuring things, depending on the interests play, depending on the geopolitical situation, different situations will be made, and they have nothing to do with the rules that we have imposed on us theoretically to try and manage the geopolitical situation we find ourselves in. And from that point of view, I think that what we are currently seeing is a scenario of competition between big powers. And obviously the scenario has been defined by a U.S. that wants to maintain its hegemony and a China that is in expansion mode that is challenging that hegemony. So in that context, the EU has not even managed to be a big power because they don't have a unique voice. They don't have a sole voice. They are an imperfect actor. So what I mean by this is that when we think about something such a post-growth scenario, we have the same situation as with disarmament when we talk about disarmament for defence. When we talk about unilateral disarmament, we are condemning ourselves to be extremely vulnerable and nothing can be gotten out of it. The disarmament has to be multilateral or it won't work. And with post-growth, the same thing happens. Imagine that the EU thinks on its own disconnected from that international growth, something similar to a post-growth economy. That would, that obviously would not work if China and the U.S. are not in that same dynamic. So from the beginning, it would be to go against the current. And obviously that has costs that currently no country wants to consider. And when we think about national government, we have to think about everything from the point of view that for any chief of state or president, the end of the world war, the furthest from sight scenario that you can think of is the next elections. And the rest is out of the agenda. So from that point of view, only if we share the urgency of the fact that the climate crisis that has been defined together with the mass destruction, arms proliferation and technological disruption considered as an existential threat for humankind, only if we share that urgency to face that threat could we simultaneously set up a process, dynamic that would take us to a different scenario, a geopolitical framework and a geoeconomic framework that is different to the one that we have. But unfortunately, from my point of view, we haven't reached that point yet because we don't have the critical mass that we need for that to happen because those pushing from national governments and international institutions are not all pushing in the same direction. And when we think about that factor, when we understand that factor, then we can understand as well immediately that when we think, if we think about it from the EU, if we think about post-growth scenarios, then the thing is about seeing what is more important is not really post-growth, but in any case this illusion that has been refuted but that still comes about, which is the fact that technology will solve the problems that we have created or that we can reach and we have seen that during the last COP in Dubai, that we can try to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. But unfortunately, we cannot go beyond that. There isn't a common position. And within the scenario of the EU, we don't have a common position amongst the 27 with regards to this topic. The governments have not even included it in their political agenda. Governments and community institutions have not reached a common position with regards to that point. And if we add to that the fact that nowadays the GDP, so the growth of GDP is still the way in which we measure your presence in international institutions, your weight in the World Bank or in the IMF that is all measured by the GDP, then obviously it becomes even more difficult to imagine how a government is going to leave growth aside or decide to no longer be important in the international context. I'm not saying all of these things from the point of view that I deny the need for that post-growth scenario, but rather to highlight the great obstacles that we're facing to reach that point because what is imposed in the short term and the international politics are still being led by short-term mindset is considering that these things are still very important for the decisions made by governments. And from that point of view, and I'll conclude shortly, when we think about all the mobilization that we are seeing in the primary sector in many European countries, what started in Germany and that we're currently seeing in Spain after Italy and France and other countries, if we go to the yellow jackets, for instance, yellow vests, sorry, we know that right now gas and nuclear energy have been greenwashed, so that, well, that is the signal that we're getting so that we can keep on betting for the same model without thinking about a new model, then we can understand that what we have is a dynamic that is making it ever more difficult to get out of the current scenario since if I look at the next elections, the European elections, June this year, sorry, what we see is an increase of ultra-nationalist movements and far-right movements which are actually negationists. They refuse to acknowledge climate crisis, so it will be very difficult in the short term with this dynamics to impose or at least to promote a post-growth model and all of it with just one last reference. When we think about all of the current scheme, everything is based on this geopolitical and geoeconomic principle which is based on the security of states and the defense of the higher interests of the state which very often go beyond the interests of people and human beings. So one of our missing points, one of the things that we have to do is to achieve for the humankind security with all of its dimensions to be present with the same weight than the security of states because only if we can think about humankind security can we think about the sustainability of our models. So as Richard and Gaya have said, this way, this path is at an end. We do not have a possibility of continuing with growth. But once again, the concept of humankind safety has almost disappeared. It was born in the 90s after the Cold War with Canada, Japan and some other countries that were pushing that concept along that were focusing on human beings, on the satisfaction of the basic needs of human beings and the full respect of human rights. But that has disappeared as of today. So what I have tried was to just talk about the big hurdles along the way to try and manage for that scheme to replace the current scheme so that we can go along the way of post-growth because there are many previous conditions that are needed so that it can go beyond the efforts made by just one nation, by just one government considering the difficulties that we have at the EU, who we don't know what it will be when it grows up because we have Eurocentres, we have neutrals, we have all sorts of different trends and it's very difficult for the 27 members to follow the same road. So I will stop here and we will have the possibility of keeping on talking about this topic later on. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jesus and thank you very much for managing the time so well to all of you. There are lots of questions on the chat from the people participating in this debate so we will have time at the end to talk about them. And I would like to ask Richard now, could a post-growth EU play a role in shaping world politics rather than merely being subordinate to it? Thank you, Lourdes. It could, but it would have to work better together than it does today. I try to explain that in my presentation as well, especially on the external policies. European diplomacy is often a cacophony of national self-inflation. EU government should really work better together and that also should be a case in the domain of defence, as I explained. In that case, I think, yes, we could still be an actor and defend ourselves and our allies in a post-growth scenario. I agree with Gaia that regardless of geopolitics we should prepare for post-growth and focus on a well-being economy because apart from ecological disaster there are other factors that may soon herald the end of economic growth. The EU has an ageing population. Conflicts are rising all over the world, threatening our supply chains. Then we have the rise of the far right in the European Union. The more they are represented in governments the harder it will be for the EU to work together. All these factors force us to face the prospect of the end of economic growth and then it's better to be prepared than to have it imposed on us as Gaia said as well. In external policies the EU can unite by and large. We've seen that after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. I would like to see our governments unite earlier because that's the only way to be a global actor. Look at the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The EU is divided there and therefore it plays no role at all. We're the biggest trading partner of Israel. We're the biggest donor of the Palestinians. But no one listens to the EU because we send out completely contradictory messages. So more European unity is paramount in the post-growth scenario. Thank you so much, Richard. I would like now to ask Gaia because you talked about the well-being economy and that was very interesting. So how can we make the transition towards that well-being economy? Right, right. Yeah, because that's what I propose, right? So he mentioned a couple of obstacles and I agree within the current economic system we will not make the systemic changes. That's exactly why I advocate for changing the economic system. If it could have been done within the current growth-based economy it would have happened by now. So that's why we have to go to the economy itself and change that. So just one note. I am not calling for disarmament at all. I actually think that geopolitics and post-growth can reach each other across the aisle with the well-being because safety is paramount to well-being too. So it very much depends on the context. Costa Rica has disarmed but that's a very different setting. That's in the context of its protection from the US. So they had the luck to be able to do that. They are one of the most sustainable countries in the world. Ukraine, which we work with, that's not in our plan for their well-being economy to disarm. I mean, one of the pillars there is, of course, also to be the so-called frontline NATO partner. So this is it very much and that makes sense. If you want to have well-being of your citizens in Ukraine or, say, Finland's position, you can't disarm. So it very much depends on the context of how you will implement a well-being economy at the local level or the national level. But in general, how you will want to make that transition from our current growth-based economy to a well-being one where, again, we can still have growth. It's just not the ultimate goal. So we do not sacrifice environment and social goods anymore. But if it increases well-being, let's do it. And if it grows, that's fine. So how do we make that transition? I think there are several ways to answer that question. So I will start with concrete policies. Because these are very clearly defined by now. We know what we need to do. Political feasibility might be a different thing, but we know we have to drastically bring down income inequalities. So we tax the rich more, much more. There's going to be a guaranteed basic dividend and or income, job guarantees, good adequate pension schemes, affordable health care, that sort of thing. What that means, basically, ultimately, on a macro level, you basically are cutting the dependency of our livelihoods to growth. And that's what the point of those policies. What we now do and why degrowth is sometimes so toxic is because when people hear degrowth, they hear, I'm going to lose my house. I'm going to lose my job. And that's a legitimate fear. But the answer to that is not to keep pursuing growth, which is impossible at a certain point. It's to cut the dependency of our livelihoods to growth. And that's what these kind of policies do. These dependencies are designed. We don't have to do that. We can afford all these things like a national guarantee. Some, a very small percentage of the population will have to do with much less. We can no longer have private jets or big multimillion-dollar yards. I think that's an acceptable sacrifice. So that's the macroeconomic answer. And then ultimately, the third one, the last one, is really our mindset, ontology, our narrative about what we say to each other, about what we think we are, what humans are, what the world is, and what world we want to live in. That's ultimately what we want to have. We want to have a new narrative. Are we holding on to this idea of domination where humans are separate from nature and should dominate it? Or are we part of nature? Are we nature? Is there no such separation even between that? Is God above us? Or is it in everything? And if it's imminent, we should respect everything around us as such. So this goes ultimately to a very deep level about our shared narrative as human beings. Thank you, Gaia. Thank you, Gaia. Thank you, Gaia. Jesus. Do you think that the pressure of social movements and collectives could maybe have an influence on the decisions adopted by the EU towards a really ecological force and to force them to take a step in a short period of time? Or do you think that there is still a long way to go in order to achieve this? Well, it's not just a belief. The thing is that we can go to the facts. If we have a treaty for minds, for that made people and the governments to approve the Ottawa Treaty, if we have weapons and arms treatment, it's because the civil society managed to force for the arms trade to be regulated. So obviously civil society is an actor that needs to be considered. It's not the most important, obviously. It's not the only one. But it is a very important element in a globalized world such as the one we live in, especially in those places where we have full democracies because in other places, unfortunately, they do not have that civil society because the authoritarian regimes are dedicated to eliminating that civil society. So from that point of view, we always have to have this need of being informed, of raising awareness, of mobilizing in favour of certain frameworks that try to go beyond the reality that we see has reached these limits. But it's also true, and I'm saying this to avoid frustrations, that we always have to remember that civil society is not the one making all the decisions. We are facing political order problems that will have to be resolved by political agents. And in today's world, those are national governments and international entities. So if there is political incidents and we make pressure, we exercise pressure at the civil society level that could accelerate processes. But we must never think that it is in our hands to change things from one day to the next. So we always have to understand that there is an effort there. We have to go step by step, and it has to be in the long term in order to achieve those long-term transformations. I have just given you two examples that have certain results in some cases and others they don't. And finally, just to try and mention some of the things that have been said by Richard and Gaia, maybe we were wrong and when we thought that well-being economy was enough to show that it is a different scenario from post-growth, you can have well-being within growth. So I don't think it's a clear alternative and we can also reduce inequalities without rejecting growth. So it's not really alternative models, one from the other. What we need to understand is the need to change the framework. And I was talking about a concept that I think is central, which is that of humankind safety. We have to focus on the well-being of each human being and have all their basic needs satisfied and to focus on human beings and see their fundamental rights respected. If we can add that to the security or safety of states, of borders against external threats and the guarantee of living in peace and a certain territory, then obviously in that way we're not replacing the safety of the state which is currently the dominant factor in the geopolitical framework, but rather adding that of human safety. That could help us change structurally the situation so that later on, because I don't see that happening in the short term, towards these post-growth models, because I remind you and I will finish that has there ever been a moment in the history of humankind where humankind has been capable of avoiding the collapse of the system knowing that what is about to come is something that is a complete disaster and have we ever changed the economic model or the safety model to avoid that collapse or rather has it been the opposite until the collapse has not arrived, has not something new arisen and something new that doesn't necessarily have to be good. Now we saw a Second World War where some rules of the game were eliminated and other rules were imposed and these rules of the game have now reached their limits that we can see now and we're saying now that we have to be ahead of the collapse of the system to try and imagine something different. Will we be capable this time? That is a great question from my point of view and all of us and the civil society have to work and it is something that is very much necessary. Thank you so much, Jesus. Before I ask the questions from the Q&A session I wanted to ask a question to all three of you to Richard, to Gaia and to Jesus and it's a question following this topic. Do you think that gender should be including gender perspective should be one first step towards an economy for well-being? You can answer in whichever order you want. It's actually a very good segue to also answer to this question because yes, we've seen that in human history where people did change their entire system and ways of organizing together in time to avoid collapse. We have also seen a cases where people did not do that so it's certainly true but we do have examples of both things. This idea that humans are absolutely incapable of changing or acting on any foresight is not true and if you go into the history then you can actually see the difference in the organizational modes that human beings had in avoiding collapse or not avoiding it and it's very interesting. Historians and our systems thinkers they analyzed these different kinds of societies and what they saw was that when there was low inequalities including gender inequalities seemed to be a very high indicator when there was a high equality between people in general. Also for example for mentally neurodivergent people and homosexual people that sort of thing when there was high tolerance and high gender equality these were almost always societies that were much better in acting on foresight you see that was called the partnership model and we have two of these models throughout human history partnership model is one and the other is called a domination model and that also organizes it's a way of organizing in societies that's much more rule-based very strong hierarchies differences between people very much interpreted in terms of quality so superior or inferior men is above women certain races certain religions are above others and you see that those were almost always completely unsustainable so they just didn't take care of their environment enough and then you saw that those are the kind of empires that we hear of that imploded they also always have this high enormous elaborate hierarchies and a lot of violence as well to maintain these so what we have to do basically is go shift more towards the partnership model and so in short, yes the answer to your question is yes that we would also have to really focus on gender equality to get that done Shall I continue? Continue to Richard Yes please Richard go on I agree with Gaia there's also a lot of research in the Global South showing that the participation of women and other disadvantaged groups in decision-making is conducive to development and conducive to peace so yes, gender inclusion is an important part of both the well-being economy and political stability and even of geopolitical stability if you look at two of the persons who are most threatening to the EU and to the world in general Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump they both display typical examples of toxic masculinity as it is called a desire to dominate others to humiliate them even a promise to restore traditional hierarchies in society men over women heterosexuals over homosexuals men over nature as well so as long as there is not enough of a counter-force to this kind of of thinking to this image of what it means to be a real man we're in trouble so yeah, I definitely agree with gender inclusion, gender equality as an important part of both a well-being economy and a more stable world thank you very much Richard and I now give you the floor before we start with the questions that the audience has asked yes, I'm going to be very short I completely agree with what has been said amongst other things because we do not have the luxury of living half of humankind aside to face the problems that we're currently facing we don't need to think about the Afghanistan or the Taliban to understand that the complete rejection and despising half of the population will allow for a well-being in that country or to have a safe safe country and on the other hand because we have we have all of the evidence especially for people such as me who work in the prevention of violent conflicts we see that where women have a space in the informal world as well as in the formal world for the negotiation of violent conflicts there are greater odds for success so if we want a more fair, just world safer world and more sustainable world then it's obvious that the participation of women is paramount so that we can once and for all achieve that equality between all of us thank you so much there are questions for Richard for Jesus and for Gaya so I'm going to start with you Gaya the first question comes from Mark Hoffman and he says your presentation seems to to be tending towards the donut theory so Kate Rohworth is saying that the degrowth is one of the many ways of doing it and mentions green growth as another way of doing it so working at Schneider's biggest competitor I find myself at a professional environment that seeks to implement green growth more than degrowth what would you say is the biggest argument to be made for the one over the other the biggest argument is probably that there's no evidence of green growth actually working I would like that too I think many of us I think it's height was dimension if you go to Ingram Google Ingram it shows the word count for in all kinds of publications and you can see that green growth really reached its peak around 2008 I believe in that still too I love that who doesn't like a win-win of course but by now you can really see that it's just not happening at all there's just no the idea behind green growth is of course decoupling there is zero decoupling in terms of anything and sustainability except greenhouse gases that's just one thing all the water, the mass biodiversity loss all those things are there's zero decoupling there is some decoupling in greenhouse gases in just a handful of countries but even that is not enough for their share of the Earth's carrying capacity so it's not anywhere near this necessary sufficient absolute decoupling that we need even in those few countries that show some decoupling let alone on a global scale our greenhouse gases are still going up so it's just not there that would be the biggest argument I think I don't want to speak for Kate Rayworth but from what I understand from her is that she has also by now let that go a bit more in the degrowth where she sees that as really the only way to do it and I'm the same way I used to think that green growth could work but anybody who looks at the data has to admit that it's just not there unfortunately if I may to be clear the well-being economy replaces its ultimate goal with something else so in that sense it's definitely different than what we currently have we have some well-being but only basically only when it's profitable and if you look at all kinds of indicators of our well-being those haven't increased for a while and in many ways they have been decreasing since the 70s especially in the US where they have really taken this whole capitalism like turbo charge and you can see that life satisfaction all kinds of health indicators have been on the decline for a while in the US so in a well-being economy those would be paramount so those would probably increase because that's your ultimate goal so it's very much is a very different thing than just having well-being as a byproduct of growth as we currently have Thank you so much Gaia Thank you so much Gaia and there is a question for Richard now who has a very long host question and he asks us how come we can destined resources to defence considering how scarce those resources are and if we are about to degrow and especially considering that there are such great social differences and this has been created on the basis of generosity so how can we do this Good question it's true that each resources as well in our report we underline the need to start decarbonising defence and making it more circular as far as it's possible but that doesn't change effect that strengthening our defence and also supporting Ukraine it will take some of the critical materials that we are already in short supply of so we really have to take a look at degrowth proposals that allow us to reduce our consumption of these critical materials in other domains as soon as possible and one domain where we can really save a huge amount of critical materials rare earth, cobalt, nickel lithium is the domain of mobility we should not try to replace every fossil fuel car with an electric car that is completely unsustainable we should really boost cycling, walking public transport and shared electric cars otherwise there will be a trouble ecologically but also given our dependence on the import of these critical materials I hope that answers the question yes, thank you very much we will now read a question for Jesus Blanca-Badgett asks does the UN have a role or the global institutions have a role or can we just be in the hands of the will of nations well we should trust in the UN since they are the legitimate representatives of the international community but obviously the UN is only the messenger of national governments and in the definition of the rules of the game there are obviously different weights given to different countries some are more powerful than other so especially with everything that has to do with peace and security it has to do with the composition and the decision making process of security council it is what I was saying previously in an implicit way those rules, that composition that decision making process derives from the collapse of the previous system by the society of nations that shows that those who feel the winners to be the winners in the Second World War are imposing some rules of the game that represent their interests and that is what we still have nowadays so although the UN is making very interesting proposals very often in the declarations their capacity to maneuver is still limited by the weight of some government especially the five big ones that have the right to veto and who are always present in the council we are seeing that in the case of the Ukraine and in the case of Israel in Gaza with those different rules and different ways of measuring the situation that is quite visible as long as that doesn't change we will have to conclude that just a few states have capacity to make decisions and they are the ones who drag everyone behind them there is a great difference when we think about an international order a different international order I think about Kofi Annan's report when he was the general secretary in 2005 there was a larger concept of freedom, of development of safety and human rights for all Kofi Annan was telling us that we cannot have development without security we cannot have security without development or security without fully respecting human rights those are the three basic pillars of any international order that is better than the one that we have had up till now have we put it in practice? No, since 2005 we have not made any progress we have actually gone backwards in some cases due to what I was saying previously we are in a scenario of competition between global powers the US wanting to maintain their hegemony and China challenging that hegemony to suffer the consequences of that challenge and others as the EU are trying still unsuccessfully up till now to find a crevice to find their own role but we are still in that same scenario and we have seen for a very long time that it's not capable of solving the current problems in the world and it is actually the one generating many of the problems that we currently have Thank you so much I have written some questions some other questions let's see so for Gaia one of the question is from Stefano Turini he says is it better to use the degrowth trend or that of well-being do you know of any good practice of governments who have used the well-being economy at the urban level? Yes so thank you for that question because that's a very useful question I answered a little bit in the chat so the difference between degrowth and a well-being economy is that a well-being economy is where we want to go currently we have a growth-based economy we want to go to a well-being economy what I just described so the policies changing the narrative that's basically what degrowth is is a pathway to work well-being economy and what that means is that we purposefully bring down our ecological footprint we do not wait for the market to do it that's not how markets work we have to purposely decide we're going to bring that down and we do it in a way that's socially just so that's the key difference between a recession and degrowth you still you bring down your ecological footprint maybe the GDP will go down as well it doesn't have to because again if we bring down our carbon emissions through renewable energy that renewable energy sector is going to grow so but we again we don't really care about that anymore if we just actively bring down our ecological footprint and we do it in a way that we protect the most vulnerable in society that's a key difference between degrowth and a recession and so and then the ultimate goal is to get to a well-being economy which will still be very dynamic a lot of people think that you need growth for progress that's not how it works but you know it's going to be an equilibrium, a dynamic equilibrium thank you so much Gaia and I will now read a question for Richard it says the EU is currently debating I'm sorry this question is from Sergio Corvalen it says the EU is currently debating once again its strategic autonomy in politics or interdependence so that they can have more resistance supply chains and a new way of thinking of competitivity what new arguments can we use to convince politicians to understand that thinking beyond growth contributes really to a greater resilience and to a better understanding of the competitiveness of the EU thank you as I mentioned earlier not longer pursuing economic growth preparing for post growth reducing our overproduction and overconsumption especially by the rich would make it easier for us in the EU to reduce our dependence on imported energy and materials including scarce critical raw materials such as the metals that I already mentioned that would boost our strategic autonomy would make us less vulnerable to economic pressure especially from China because China is dominating the supply chains of many of these critical materials so there are synergies between post growth or degrowth and strategic autonomy there are tensions as well to be expected with resource rich developing countries I already mentioned Brazil and Chile and we should really if you want to build partnerships with them take seriously their desire to develop their industries to be more than just exporters of raw materials help them add value to their metal ores for instance that also means something for European policies and European ambitions the EU has taken I started a WTO case against Indonesia when Indonesia decided that it wanted to process its nickel ores before exporting it because it's really understandable that Indonesia wants to do more with its nickel ores then just export it add value to it, build battery factories and it got these battery factories only they're built by Chinese companies instead of European companies so from a view of geopolitics it was a very stupid thing to start this WTO case against Indonesia and if we say that the global staff should be able to add more value to its raw materials have better jobs it also means that we can't have a goal of producing 90% of our electric car batteries in Europe that's not fair we import most of the the metals for these batteries so it would be more just to look at how we can diversify our supply of electric car batteries be less dependent on China partner up with more democratic developing countries like Brazil, like Chile like Indonesia so from a perspective of post growth and global justice and strengthening partnerships with global south I think we can have more strategic autonomy but not necessarily in the way it is defined right now thank you so much Richard and now a question for Jesus a question asked by Julia and she starts by making two observations she says none of you have talked about post growth would fit in an economic system that only lives from capitalism can we have post growth with capitalism considering that degrowth system will not take place tomorrow a state government should wait for the world change or can they change the discourse working in a post-capitalistic way in this case that question was not for me because I'm not an expert in post growth or in degrowth so I think that maybe Gaia Richard could provide a better answer I want to give her maybe a different question I can answer but can we have degrowth in capitalism you know that's a very I've asked myself that for a long time and I used to think that it probably it might be possible because capitalism hasn't been that narrowly defined you could do a lot with it and the implementation has differed a lot in history the Nordic countries for example Northern European countries capitalist societies but they do have different outcomes in wellbeing than for example the US so it depends a little bit on how you do it that said I fairly recently have come to realise that it will not be possible within capitalism because the ultimate thing in capitalism is that you have some people who don't work and then the rest who do the labour the idea of a private ownership that's the definition typically the private means of production and there's this sort of illusion that if you just very equally distribute all these production factors what's wrong with private property but that's not how it works the idea of capitalism is that there is a few people who own everything and the rest do not own that stuff and have only their labour to sell and they have to sever that link between our livelihoods and the dependency on growth obviously that is through jobs and that would go directly against real capitalists best interests because they wouldn't be able to just use take more than they give back basically that is what capitalism comes down to it's about enclosure of our commons our common natural because it's called it's not really capital but you know our water our air is being privatised and then sold back to us our needs are being commodified in order to make profit all of that will always keep happening within capitalism so there is some current debate going on between post-currency whether or not this can happen within capitalism so I should say that I have recently come to conclude just based on my research that it will not happen within capitalism itself okay then we will finish with just one thing which maybe Jesus you can answer as an expert in the Arab world maybe you can give us an example AMNX an answer it's Carmen Molina asking about the unbalance that inequalities is currently causing in the distribution of wealth how to interpret the association of the bricks and the assumption of the fact that global north over south colonialism can be over well one of the little things that we clearly know in the world of analyzing violent conflicts is that there is no there is no element that is as dangerous as inequalities and that is both regionally as in states or even globally so the main priority nowadays if we want to have a fairer world would be to eliminate those inequalities or at least to reduce them up down to bearable levels or manageable levels but that is not in the agenda because the reports tell us that inequalities are just going up and up and the globalization model we're in is leaving everyone behind against the principles that we have so many so many times said that we defended which was not leaving anyone behind that's the sad truth I think that the bricks right now even with the the increase that has just been approved are not thinking of an alternative model they only want to get rid of the dominion of others but they're not providing us with the ultimate they just compete in this globalized world so that they can increase and we're still talking about the growth model they just want to grow so that they can have more specific weight so it can be good for other things but I don't think that it is good for what it is that we're talking about here which is the post growth in the post growth arena so by definition and according to what we've known until now I do not think that it is a real alternative it is not advisable I don't think it is an alternative that allows us to see a difference in the horizon well thank you so much Jesus and to finish this round of questions Richard what are the next steps that we will be taking with this project thank you maybe one small remark about capitalism and post capitalism I would hate people leaving it's gotten worse we have to get rid of capitalism as well next to economic growth etc it really for me it's very helpful to see capitalism and post capitalism as a continuum a sliding scale there are different steps that you can take which bring you closer to post capitalism and which make it easier to make the change towards post growth and a well-being economy as well and one important thing in that respect is change the way our companies are managed to make sure that it's not just shareholders but other stakeholders who have a say as well to put nature at the table of the board of directors as well as some companies have already done so if you see it as a gradual shift from capitalism to post capitalism it becomes more manageable I think next steps our report is being translated right now in different languages at least six I think we're really organizing more webinars and seminars not that many between now and the European elections but because of European rules but we will definitely do a lot more activities around this theme in the second half of this year so really I would implore you to subscribe to the newsletter of the Green European Foundation then you're sure you will not miss any of these events well thank you so much and we will conclude I mean so many things have been said and all of them very important and some of them contradictory but that's the good thing about debates isn't it I'm going to try and summarize some ideas we have talked about the need to reduce over consumption and over production and the need to democratically manage the limits of growth we have talked and I think that there has been unanimity in that way about the need in any post growth economy to have gender equality and we have talked about the fact that people and the planet have to be above profit and that it is needed to to reach human and nature's well-being and we have we have talked I think all three of us have talked and at least Richard and Jesus have talked about the growth or the rise of the far right that demands for the EU to be more intolerant with regards to intolerance we have to stop it so that it won't prevent us from having a post growth Europe that really takes into account the limits of growth and we have talked about the importance of social movements and the mobilization of civil society Jesus was saying that many of the things that have been achieved such as with regards to minds was thanks to the mobilization of civil society it's not the only element but it is an important element for instance the movement against land mines, anti-personal land mines and Jesus was also saying that human kind security is about satisfying basic needs and fundamental rights and Gaia was saying that with capitalism we cannot have post growth although in that sense Gaia was not really in agreement in his last intervention it didn't seem that he was completely in agreement and what I do think is that there is an agreement with regards to reducing inequalities that are increasing year over year and what is clear is that the debate is very necessary we should have many more debates such as this one because it's clear that many ideas are floating around many expectations, many needs and we obviously require debates such as these so that we can counteract and so that we can draw conclusions so once again thank you to the Green European Foundation thank you Richard, thank you Gaia and thank you Jesus so much and I would like to thank our interpreter as well and to all the people who have participated thank you very much