climate
The news over the last few weeks gives us the lasting feeling that the climate crisis has accelerated and we have passed the point of no return. The flow of catastrophic footage started with the extremely unusual heatwave and wildfires in Canada and continued with the massive floods in Belgium and Germany. While Angela Merkel, who has been the German Chancellor for the last 15 years, described the destruction in Germany as “surreal”, these events are all too real and will stay in people’s minds for a long time to come.
Meanwhile, the European Commission is ...
read more "The Missing Element"
read more "The Missing Element"
A big deal for fair climate protection or just the latest version of the capitalist model?The Green New Deals are among the few specific proposals setting out how the transition to an environmentally friendly society could happen within a relatively short period without this transformation hitting the most vulnerable members of our society. While they do have their weaknesses and blind spots, they have succeeded in one thing: over the past two years, they have managed to create a new narrative which, beyond all the warnings of disaster, preserves hope based on opportunities for ...
read more "Green New Deals"
read more "Green New Deals"
Implications of the first wave of bailouts for energy and climate policiesThe European Union: new Crisis, same recipe?
The measures taken to deal with the health emergency arising from the spread of COVID-19 have led to an unprecedented economic slowdown. As a result, public institutions have activated plans, mechanisms and instruments that are intended to stop the shock, reactivate the economy and restore pre-pandemic normality. In this context, at a time of great uncertainty big business, like the banks during the financial crisis of 2008, is ...
read more "Spain Recovery Plan: What is really in it?"
read more "Spain Recovery Plan: What is really in it?"
Climate politics between direct democracy and depoliticisationOn 21 June, the Citizens’ Convention on Climate submitted its 150 recommendations to the French president, aimed at enabling France to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels, in line with the Paris Agreement target that the country signed up to at COP21 in 2015.
The establishment and outcomes of this Convention can be seen as historic in their own right. While the Convention and its final report are partly a result of and a response to the gilets ...
read more "The Citizens’ Convention on Climate"
read more "The Citizens’ Convention on Climate"
President Macron has acknowledged the link between Covid and the climate crisis, and the need for largescale measures in response. Emerging alliances demand that he move beyond lofty rhetoric, and that the French government take up the challenge of the socio-ecological transformation the moment demands.
The world is currently facing a pandemic crisis in the form of the coronavirus, and France is one of the most affected countries with more than 130.000 cases and 24.000 deaths as of this writing. The Gilets Jaunes slogan comparing the end of ...
read more "Covid crisis, climate crisis – same struggle"
read more "Covid crisis, climate crisis – same struggle"
This book is the result of a collective effort. In fact, it has been written by many contributors from all over the world – women, men, activists, and scholars from very different socio-cultural contexts and political horizons, who give testimony to an even greater scope of social change. Their common concern is to show not only that alternatives do exist, despite the neoliberal mantra of the “end of history”, but that many of these alternatives are currently unfolding – even if in many cases they remain invisible to us.
This book brings...
read more "Alternatives in a World of Crisis: 2nd edition"
read more "Alternatives in a World of Crisis: 2nd edition"
Since its election in 2015, Denmark’s rightist government had been struggling to keep control of a chaotic coalition. The liberal party Venstre, led by Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, insisted on keeping the minority government afloat by making a long range of devastating concessions to the ultra-liberalists in Liberal Alliance and the nationalists in Dansk Folkeparti. Demands for extreme measures against immigration and tax cuts for the wealthiest Danes shook the foundations of the government and caused voters to ...
read more "Outgoing government: Infighting lead to the fall of the Danish right"
read more "Outgoing government: Infighting lead to the fall of the Danish right"
About the Global Working Group
The Global Working Group Beyond Development is hosted by the Brussels Office of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung since 2016. It includes around thirty engaged researchers, activists and popular educators from all five continents which bring together knowledge and experience around the different relations of domination which we confront in actual times – class, race, gender, caste, coloniality and depredatory relations with Nature – and also from processes of alternative transformations towards greater equity, ...
read more "Global Working Group Beyond Development"
read more "Global Working Group Beyond Development"
to promote a critical dialogue on democracyGlobal Working Group Beyond Development
Under the auspices of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Brussels Office, the Global Working Group Beyond Development wants to exchange experiences of and generate knowledge about alternatives to the currently dominant hegemonic ways of life.
Background and Objectives
Contemporary way of life is defined by substantial and rapid transformations of human impact on our social, ecological and political environments: commodification of nature and accelerated ecological destruction of livelihoods ...
read more "Call for Contributions"
read more "Call for Contributions"
The ongoing mobilisation of yellow vest adherents is arguably the most enduring and significant social movement in France since May 1968. It will have profound political consequences, though it is still too early to gauge their extent. Today, one of the most pressing questions for understanding what these long-term consequences might be is the political direction taken by the movement.
This article highlights the atypical, even paradoxical political profile of this movement, which is caught in a dilemma between unifying its demands, and...
read more "Ideological divisions in the ‘yellow vest’ movement"
read more "Ideological divisions in the ‘yellow vest’ movement"