Décroissance (degrowth) as a slogan and a social movement was born with the publication of a special issue of S!lence in February 2002. Built on older ideas and concepts, like sufficiency, critiques of development, conviviality, autonomy or ecofeminism, it brought together the physical limits to growth and the cultural aspirations to diverse flourishing. Springing from activist groups, the movement quickly expanded and the main notions were soon taken up into other Latin languages.
In 2008, the first international conference was organised in Paris. The term 'décroissance' was translated into English, and Degrowth became a flourishing field of research, debates and publications.
It turned out that these large conferences, bringing together academics with activists, politicians with artists, practitioners with citizens are very effective in promoting degrowth and providing a platform for debate, creating great synergies and dynamics around degrowth actors, implementing dialogue and convergence with a large diversity of green, emancipatory and solidarity movements.
After Paris, we gathered in person in Barcelona (2010), in Montreal and Venice (2012), in Leipzig (2014) Budapest (2016) and in Malmö, Mexico City and in Brussels at the European Parliament in 2018. To attend such a conference is a unique human experience, full of great memories, meetings and experiences. To organise such an open, inclusive and impactful event is not only a great human and convivial adventure, it is also a challenging journey. How to bring together the right people, meaningfully address the key issues for degrowth, secure a budget or experiment with deliberative governance, build an event based on degrowth principles? To help, support and ensure the continuity of such conferences, and the quality of them, we decided to create a collective constituted by representatives of all the former degrowth conference organising committees: the support group (SG).
Of course the SG’s primary focus is making sure that conferences are being organised. But for historical reasons it has also taken responsibility for all some degrowth network's common tools which have been implemented and are needed for the success of conferences as a movement's physical home like communication tools, academic exchange, conference management platform, good knowledge and understanding of degrowth, its history, its actors and its challenges and also of its partners.
In 2020 three large events were planned: a regional and thematic one in Vienna, the second edition of the EU conference in Brussels, and a joint international conference with the International Society for Ecological Economics in Manchester. Because of Covid, the first finally happened online, the second was cancelled and finally postponed to 2023, and the third one postponed to 2021. Hence, in 2021 we ended up with two international degrowth conferences, Manchester, online, and The Hague, partly online and face to face.
In the meantime degrowth flourished, great and successful books were published, degrowth entered into mainstream debates and media, but the lack of face to face gatherings also proved detrimental to the degrowth networks. So, as the SG, we have been trying to fulfill our first goal: the continuity of the conferences with the EU Parliament and Zagreb in 2023, Pontevedra in 2024 and Oslo in 2025.