Results from Barcelona 2010 on the topic politics of sufficiency

Politics of Sufficiency

The following are the results of the GAP at the Degrowth Conference 2010 in Barcelona that are particularly relevant for this working group

The document presents the complete results of those Barcelona working groups with some relations the current one

Working Groups from 2010 GAP in Barcelona with some connections:

How to deal with advertising

• Advertising increases consumption by creating the illusion that people can satisfy their needs – real or imaginary - through products. It is wasteful and is driven by the competitive nature of the capitalist system.

• To deal with advertising, we need a bottom-up and a top-down approach. Bottom-up focusses on changing people’s perception of advertising to recognise its manipulative nature. Top-down refers to government action to impose limits. More research is needed on freeing communications channels from advertising.

Bottom-up proposals:

• Empower people to enable them to deconstruct advertising

• Detox from the imagery of the consumption society

• Community child protection from advertising

• Debunking the myth of satisfying immaterial needs with material goods

• Reduce inequality – inequality drives consumerism

• Expose ubiquity of advertising

• Expose exploitation of values in advertising

• Direct action, ie subvertising

Top-down proposals:

• Ban everything (all ads) possible from public space

• Regulate everything (all ads) possible that affect kids/vulnerable people, health, CO2-intensive sectors, sexist messages, etc.

• Advertising should be as expensive as possible, i.e. taxes, accounting standards, etc.

Research questions:

• Do we need ombudsmen for advertising?

• How to free the internet from advertising?

• How to organise free communications financially? (i.e. What are the real costs of a newspaper?)

Zero waste

Core points:

• Responsibility to be shared in the individual, social, productive and political arena

• Proximity: production, treatment and final disposal of different wastes as local as possible

• Incentives, especially taxes as economic tools in the des-incentive of waste generation. However, reduction of waste can not be managed just with economic instruments

• Education of all social actors in order to make close not just impacts of products and kinds of treatments, but also the positive implications that zero waste initiatives have in relation to quality of life.

• Ecodesign and Cradle to Cradle, important role in the change of perspective of the waste in reuse sense.

Political proposals:

• Promotion of legal instruments to reduce waste such us taxation (on materials, in the production process) and Deposit and Refund systems enlarged to as much as possible

• Use of advertising expertise for education in reuse and reduction

• Facilitation of sharing good experiences to link good practices and good quality of life

• Encouragement of cooperative sharing to promote community based recycling and reuse methods

• Incorporation of proximity in waste regulations as a core principle

Research questions:

• Creation of an international network of agencies for life cycle analysis and waste prevention

Disagreement:

• Role to be played by corporations and private sector and how much the solutions are to be looked for in the technological and/or in the social arena

Degrowth in water consumption

• “Reapropiation of commons”: returning to public ownership and management of superficial, groundwater and desalted water at municipal level (if possible) avoiding to consider it as a commodity

• Domestic tariff systems with basic threshold for free lifeline and quota up to a ceiling threshold, established in physical blocks terms and per day per person. Heavy industrial tariff to physical parameters and thresholds

• Labelling Virtual water content (full life cycle) on all products: water points credit card

• Degrowth in water consumption is tightly related to land use planning: non-industrial agroecological approach to agrarian land and food soverignity; stop new irrigation plans and water transfer and big supply infrastructures; stop urban sprawl

• Downscaling to local sourcesmanagement which enable people's empowerment: public fountains of free drink water as a symbol against fetishism of bottled water; democratic control on economy; living the river and its ecosystems; building a new water culture starting from water as life

• In conclusion, accelerate degrowth and downshift your lifestyle

Reusing empty houses and co-housing

Research proposals:

• Encourage architectural research on alternative housing, such as collaborative design of reused / empty buildings into co-housing with residents, material reuse, etc.

• What is the ‘overconsumption of space’? Is it better to talk about ecological footprint?

Political proposals:

• Impose a large tax on unoccupied housing

• Stop urban sprawl

• State purchases houses that would be repossessed and turns them into public co-housing, empowering people

Contested proposals:

• Find instruments to stimulate the reduction of living space for households that overconsume space

• Strengthen squatter rights

• Strengthen association

In rooted in social fabric with institutional backup to match empty houses with people living in poor conditions (i.e. homeless) who would care for the properties (i.e. self-management)

Human nature and degrowth

• Human beings have biological, emotional, intellectual and spiritual potentials, and different cultures realize them differently. The social, political and economic conditions which people live in shape their values and behaviors.

• Humans seem to tend to act ‘short-term’, but now with humankind facing pressing ecological limits, there is now a need to create institutions fostering us to feel, think and act more long-term (i.e. within ecological limits).

• In the context of degrowth, it is imperative to draw upon and integrate research including but not limited to anthropology, happiness studies, experimental economics, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience for transcending the concept of homo economicus. Such research into human nature would enable us to better understand how to reshape these conditions in order to favor those values and behaviors which are socially and environmentally benign - for example to better distinguish between real needs and illusory needs/satisfiers.

• We propose to support existing and creating new experimental spaces, i.e. communities experimenting with degrowth at a local scale to investigate in practice how best to satisfy the basic needs for sharing, creating and mutual esteeming.