What can democratic economic planning learn from the Global South? Economist Bengi Akbulut, associate professor at Concordia University, describes a plan built from the bottom up, where councils and assemblies at different scales let everyone affected by a decision shape it. She turns to the communes of Venezuela and the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, alternatives that exist alongside what she calls imperial global capitalism, and asks how they can build a front strong enough to push at different scales. Along the way, she discusses how degrowth in the North can support the visions of a just future that emerge in the South, from post-extractivism to the pluriverse, and why degrowth needs planning to decide democratically which sectors grow and which shrink. She closes with a word of hope: people develop these forms of self-governance as an answer to poverty and precarity, so we do not have to wait.
This episode is hosted by degrowth.info member Kélian Bouhafs.
About the series: Democratic Economic Planning and Degrowth is a four-part series on a question at the heart of degrowth: how to plan democratic post-capitalist economies? Each episode is a full-length conversation with a researcher working on planning, care, commons or art: Bengi Akbulut, Sophie Elias-Pinsonnault, Krystof Beaucaire and Julie Châteauvert. Together they explore how communities, workers, and public institutions could plan production democratically, to respect ecological limits and foster a good life for all. Produced by degrowth.info with the research group on democratic economic planning, hosted by the Research Center on Social Innovation and Transformation (CRITS) at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, Canada.
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