Degrowth.info has created the podcast series Democratic Economic Planning and Degrowth, which interviews academics on the intersections of democratic economic planning and degrowth.
In the first episode of this series, Degrowth.info member Kélian Bouhafs interviews Bengi Akbulut about democratic economic planning in theory and in practice, degrowth and decolonisation.
A summary of the episode can be found below:
What can democratic economic planning learn from the Global South? Economist Bengi Akbulut, associate professor at Concordia University, describes a plan built from the bottom up, where councils and assemblies at different scales let everyone affected by a decision shape it. She turns to the communes of Venezuela and the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, alternatives that exist alongside what she calls imperial global capitalism, and asks how they can build a front strong enough to push at different scales. Along the way, she discusses how degrowth in the North can support the visions of a just future that emerge in the South, from post-extractivism to the pluriverse, and why degrowth needs planning to decide democratically which sectors grow and which shrink. She closes with a word of hope: people develop these forms of self-governance as an answer to poverty and precarity, so we do not have to wait.
You can listen to this episode here and read the episode’s transcript here.