Municipal Transformative Communities for Local Economies Beyond Growth (MUTUAL)

MUTUAL investigates the potential of progressive trans-institutional alliances to foster growth-independent development pathways at the municipal scale. The project builds on empirical and theoretical insights on the ambivalence of economic growth as principal socio-economic orientation in the Global North: while growth plays a key role with respect to the relative short-term stability of current provisioning systems, its negative effects on ecological integrity and bad performance with respect to social equality increasingly come to the fore. To date, however, post-growth scholars focus overwhelmingly on organizations and small groups or on large-scale institutional restructuring, predominantly aimed at national and supra-national scales. Against this background, MUTUAL explores in what ways the cooperation of progressive formal-institutional and non-institutional actors at the municipal scale can lead to institutional innovations that alleviate growth pressures and facilitate further pro-environmental and -social action. Through four specific case studies, MUTUAL traces how such ‘municipal transformative communities’ establish synergistic dynamics between framework conditions and alternative economic practices to decrease the dependency of individuals, organizations, and institutions on market competition, monetary profitability, and financial resources. MUTUAL, thus, counteracts the lack of city-centered perspectives in, and the general spatial blindness of post-growth research as well as the neglect of growth dynamics in large parts of municipalist and urban transformations literature. Learning from and with municipal transformative communities, MUTUAL, finally, aims to identify expedient post-growth-oriented development pathways and broker these insights to a selected partner community.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Benedikt Schmid
Tel: ++49(0)761 203-3566
Email: benedikt.schmid@geographie.uni-freiburg.de

Projektbeginn: 2024
Projektende: 2026

Schmid B, Chardon C (Team)

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Institut für Umweltsozialwissenschaften und Geographie

Schreiberstraße 20
79098 Freiburg i. Br.

Telefon: 203 - 3563
Email: humangeo@geographie.uni-freiburg.de
http://www.geographie.uni-freiburg.de/de

• Chardon C