Conference: What Can the Market Do? What Can Planning Do?

To participate, please register here. The deadline for registrations is February 18. Prices for participation are on a sliding scale, depending which services you choose to claim. For more detailed info, see the section “Preise & Informationen” on the event website.

This conference will be in German.

The description below has beeen taken and translated from the event website:

“COORDINATING ECONOMIC PROCESSES – BUT HOW?

Market coordination and planning are no longer considered irreconcilable opposites. In light of the polycrisis comprising the climate crisis, technological upheavals, and massive trade and geopolitical interventions, the question of how collective goals can be achieved democratically and efficiently is increasingly being raised anew. Digital control instruments, demands for ecological economic planning in line with planetary boundaries, and the geo-economic orientation of global supply chains provide opportunities to reflect on the potential of markets and planning for coordinating economic processes.
At the same time, complex transformation processes—from the energy transition to industrial policy—require hybrid solutions: decentralized spaces for experimentation and central coordination, artificial markets, and decentralized mechanisms can be part of the toolbox, but they have clear limitations. How can planning and the market be combined in such a way that democratic processes become fully effective with regard to the major issues of the future that affect everyone?
How can the market and planning be combined in a complex world of transformation in which technocratic planning concepts and perfectly functioning markets are equally obsolete?
Of interest here are, on the one hand, the hybrids mentioned above—planning elements in capitalist markets—and, on the other hand, alternative concepts of democratic economic planning, as initiated by new debates in recent years. This opens up a field spanning two different yet combinable poles, whose history, variants, and theoretical foundations, as well as changes brought about by big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, offer a differentiated view of potentials and limitations in the face of transformative challenges.
Our conference offers the opportunity to take up this debate and critically develop it further, both theoretically and in terms of its practical implications. For the open part, we invite researchers from the economic, social, and cultural sciences, as well as representatives from the field, to present their research in parallel panel sessions.”

For more information on the conference, please contact this email: niedermaier[at]ev-akademie-tutzing.de

Conference Program:

Wednesday, March 4th

Arrival from 11.30
12.30 – Start of conference with snack
13.30 – Welcome & Introdcution – Prof. Dr. Ulrich Klüh & Katharina Hirschbrunn

I. Debates on market and plan yesterday and today
14.15 – Market vs. plan in the ecological transformation – Prof. Dr. Oliver Schlaudt
15.15 – Coffee, tea & cake
15.45 – Political economy of market-based criticism of community economies and socialist planning – Dr. David Mayer
17.00 – What can markets and prices do? Functions, problems, limits – Prof. Dr. Richard Sturn
18.00 – Dinner
20.00 – Biophysical limits and necessities of planning – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sven Linow
21.30 – Encounters and conversations in the salons

Tursday, March 5th
07.45 – Morningprayer in the castle chapel
08.00 – Breakfast

II. Why planning? Why now?
On the renaissance of the planning debate
09.00 – Limits of the conceptions of markets and transformationprocesses in economics – Dr. Christiane Heisse
10.15 – Coffeebreak
10.45 – After the failure of really existing socialism and capitalism: cybernetic and democratic economic planning for a good life within planetary boundaries – Dr.-Ing Walther Zeug
11.30 – Planning the transition of our heating system: the example district heating – N.N.
12.30 – Lunch
14.00 – Plenary discussion

III. Economic policy praxis of planning and critical discussion
14.15 – Economic planning and industrial policy: chinese experience and current practices – Dr. Rainer Land
15.30 – Coffee, tea & cake
16.00 – Open conference part based on the call for papers
18.00 – Dinner
19.30 – Encounters and conversations in the salons

Friday, March 6th
07.45 – Morningprayer in the castle chapel
08.00 – Breakfast
09.00 – Critique of the planning debate from a feminist perspective – Dr. Heide Lutosch
10.15 – The political-economic and political-ecological limits of planning – Prof. Dr. Ulrich Klüh
11.00 – Coffeebreak
11.30 – Concluding discussion
12.30 – Ending of conference with lunch