Seminar: "Political Ecological Economics and the nature of economic growth", by Giorgos Kallis

The REAL-Postgrowth project (Post-growth – REAL – A Post-Growth Deal) is excited to announce that ICTA-UAB researcher Giorgos Kallis, presents a public talk as part of our monthly public seminar series.

Seminar: "Political Ecological Economics and the nature of economic growth" 

Speaker:  Giorgos Kallis, ICTA-UAB researcher

Facilitation: Elena Hofferbert

• Date: Tuesday, Novemebr 4th 2025
• Time:  15 -16.30 (CET)
• Venue: Online- https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88547266318?pwd=Zc1UGBL8baTWlHVY59fMptfM5S9dQH.1

This seminar will sketch a Political Ecological Economics, an approach that combines the ecological insights of the Barcelona school with feminist and decolonial Marxist political economy, as well as anthropological understandings of how the very notion of economy has come into being. We will explore how economic growth is not only a question of resource throughput or productivity but fundamentally a political and material process: one driven by the extraction and reinvestment of surplus through mechanisms of exploitation, appropriation, and cost-shifting. Growth persists not simply because of its benefits, but because it serves as a powerful narrative legitimising private accumulation as a public good. The session will provide conceptual tools to understand how economies grow, why they remain locked into growth, and what it would mean to reorient them toward ecological and social sufficiency.

Giorgos Kallis is one of the three co-PIs of REAL, an ecological economist and political ecologist working on environmental justice and degrowth. He has a Bachelors degree in chemistry and a Masters in environmental engineering from Imperial College, a PhD in environmental policy from the University of the Aegean, and a second Masters in economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He is ICREA professor in Barcelona since 2010.