While policies for the green transition are advancing and entering the lived realities of people across Europe and beyond, often they are contested as socially unjust and, consequently, also ecologically ineffective. Policies for urban greening can result in green gentrification or ‘islands of sustainability’, with socio-ecological impacts shifted elsewhere, e.g. the scaling up of renewable energy production leading to green sacrifice zones. This produces tensions between a clean energy techno-fix policy focus in the context of increasing social inequalities and declining ecological conditions. As a consequence, the risk of political backlash against policies for a green transition is increasing, largely as a result of mainstream green policies focusing on efficiency over sufficiency. Where efficiency means treating the ecological crisis as a technical problem to be ‘solved’, while sufficiency considers the need to secure a just distribution of resources to meet everyone’s needs within ecological limits.
These logics of efficiency are inherent in capitalist, growth-oriented economies, whereas (eco-)feminist, de- and post-growth perspectives highlight the need to center social reproduction and care as essential for both social and ecological justice. Considering the implications of these approaches on different spatial scales, we consider:
How can we extend the idea of the right to the city to become a right to the socio-ecological city – or space -, overcoming false contradictions between ecological sustainability and social justice?
Which spatio-temporal infrastructures and policies are needed at different spatial scales to design a just and socially desirable socio-ecological transformation beyond growth?
We welcome both conceptual and empirical contributions that discuss specific social infrastructures and policies such as
– social reproduction as social infrastructures
– commoning practices of care and provisioning
– collective governance and ownership of land
– public housing and public space
– solidary systems of food provisioning, e.g. community supported agriculture, fair trade
– sufficiency-oriented policies on land use and mobility and their interaction
and more
and assess their role for a just socio-ecological transformation.