We received some interesting entries for our Post Growth Challenge.  There weren’t so many as we’d have liked but, as they are all of interest, it does mean that we can share them all.

We purposely called it a challenge rather than a competition, rather like the Queen of Hearts in Alice, saying that everyone (who took the trouble of entering) was a winner, and as such they all received “our very interesting” mini-book, The Viable Economy and Society.

Nevertheless, we did say that we’d identify the one we liked best.  Four raters, two from Steady State Manchester (who submitted one rating form together), 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, with some of the entries liked more by some than others.  However, the overall best rated was the ‘zine, Degrowth in Manchester, submitted by Maddy Taylor and Neriya Ben-Dor.  We’ve already featured it on our website and you can download it here.

Two other entries were short videos.  One, from Lucy Jonas is an introduction to Doughnut Economics.  It is beautifully produced although for some the music will make the speech a bit hard to hear.  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!  So here are the two videos.

See our second post where we share the other contributions. HERE