The results of the Post-Growth Challenge are finally here! Back in January, together with Steady State Manchester and The Manchester Meteor, we challenged you to come up with a better way to present the post-growth alternative. We purposely called it a challenge rather than a competition, and as such all participants received a copy of The Viable Economy and Society.
Nevertheless, we did identify the one we liked best. Four raters, two from Steady State Manchester, one from The Meteor and one from Systems Change Alliance, used five criteria:
A) Consistency with a degrowth / post-growth perspective.
B) Adequately captures the essence of post-growth thinking, or one or more strands within it.
C) Accessibility to a non-specialist audience.
D) Economy of expression.
E) Usability by ourselves in promoting the post-growth approach – i.e. how likely are we to make use of it?
Inevitably we didn’t agree on everything, but the overall best rated was the ‘zine, Degrowth in Manchester, submitted by Maddy Taylor and Neriya Ben-Dor, which you can read and download here.
Two other entries received honorable mentions, and those were two short videos: one from Lucy Jonas is an introduction to Doughnut Economics, and the other, from Tilman Hartley and colleagues at ICTA, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, looks at a specific challenge for post-growth, that inequality could increase when the economy stops growing. They explain the dilemma very clearly and assure us that there are policy solutions. We await the next instalment! In the meantime, you can watch both videos below:
Congratulations to the winners, and if you would like to explore some more of the entries, head to this post on SSM’s website.
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