David Palomera

On 19 March, I had the honour to give a talk in celebration of the 20 years since the creation of the intermunicipal social service administration in Osona, a Catalan region. In this talk, I wanted to address social care reforms that aim at addressing the polycrisis while creating a paradigm of abundance. It can honestly be frustrating to give a talk about social services and their transformative capacity in a geopolitical context as difficult as the current one. In general, the number of crises we have to face, now and in the coming decades, makes it hard to see… Read more: From scarcity to abundance: social services to face the polycrisis

The TRANSPOSE project aims to strengthen a network of scholars and practitioners working on climate change, finance, pensions and post-growth. A total of 15 people participate in this advisory committee. The first activity of the group was an on-line workshop on the 26th November that focused on how to build resilient pension systems in the context of the climate crisis. After a round of introductions, the workshop included a brief presentation of the project’s aims, basic notions of pension design, some preliminary results, and a discussion. Here is a summary of the workshop. Pension basics and early findings of TRANSPOSE… Read more: Building resilient welfare and pension systems in the context of climate crisis

In our daily lives we are constantly bombarded with news about advances in energy efficiency, the decarbonisation of the economy, and the possibility of growing without polluting. And yes, decarbonising our economy through the massive deployment of renewable energy and the electrification of production and consumption is, in the current context, a necessity. However, there is very little likelihood of achieving absolute – and (this is crucial) sufficient – decoupling of GDP growth from emissions within a timeframe that would prevent ecological catastrophe (Kallis et al., 2025). And frankly, I believe we would rather not gamble with the habitability of… Read more: Welfare without (un)economic growth

Climate change is today a reality, impacting our everyday lives. Its effects vary across the globe, but it is a global challenge that threatens both the most basic and the most complex provisioning systems that make life easier. There is scientific consensus that we need to drastically cut annual global CO₂ emissions to avoid a catastrophic rise in global temperature levels. However, CO₂ emissions remain strongly coupled with economic growth, and forecasts predict that in the short term, a strategy based solely on decoupling CO₂ emissions from growth through technological progress and energy transition will likely fail to limit global… Read more: Transitioning to a Post-Growth Welfare State