08/12/2025, 12:30 - 09/12/2025, 17:30, Essen
Photo: CC BY 4.0, Mauro Pimentel / AFP / picturedesk.com
Conference organised by the Center for Global Cooperation Research, Fellow Group ‘Sustainability and Democracy’
Recent years have seen a move away from both sustainability commitments and democratic governing. However, while democratic backsliding and ecological crisis often appear intertwined, they are not always mutually reinforcing. Nor are democracy and sustainability natural allies. After all, democracies’ promise of general freedom and equality itself may be at odds with proposals that current societies need to politically restrict economic growth (if and insofar as growth equals resource consumption). To engage with this possibly intrinsic tension, this interdisciplinary conference focuses on a political concept that potentially offers a framework to conceptualise necessary limitations: the idea of republican freedom, where individual freedom is limited by ‘the freedom of others’, as well as the rules and policies upon which the political community as a whole has agreed. Participants explore the relationship between republican restrictions of individual freedom and possible economic limitations, and the relationship between democratic justice and economic growth (at the level of both ideas and practices).
Please register by 30 November via e-mail: sustainability-democracy@uni-due.de
College for Social Sciences and Humanities, Essen
Center for Global Cooperation Research, Fellow Group ‘Sustainability and Democracy’
Britta Acksel, Matthias Kranke, Christian Scheper, Eva Weiler, Lisa Mereu, Sebastian Meurer
The programme is available on the website of the CGCR: https://www.uni-due.de/cgcr/conference_pol.php.