An exciting opportunity has risen for a new Research Associate to join the SPERI team. Details of the project can be found below. To apply, please search reference: UOS007435 on the University jobs page.
Growth & the Environmental Crisis
The contemporary global economic crisis is not just a crisis of growth – it is a crisis for growth. Yet the existing political economy literature has little to say about the relationship between growth and environmental sustainability. It is this omission that SPERI wants to rectify through a new programme of research and publication on growth and the environmental crisis.
At its core, this programme will reflect on the disarmingly simple question, ‘do we need growth and can we learn to live without it?’ The task is to consider how we start to think beyond growth and what might this entail practically. Central to this is the core question, rarely directly posed, of whether environmentally sustainable growth is actually possible. The question, we contend, haunts progressive political economy – which, for the most part, would like to think of itself as both green and yet at the same time seems decidedly (if often implicitly) pro-growth. We tend to assume (conveniently) that we can have environmentally sustainable growth and (even more conveniently), that when we talk of growth (and of the strategies to attain or restore it), this is the kind of growth that we have in mind. But this surely will not do, certainly before it has been established clearly and definitively that environmentally-sustainable growth is not in fact an oxymoron. This research project will be an important contribution to that assessment.
Quite simply, we need to decide whether it is possible to envisage environmentally sustainable growth or whether environmental sustainability entails, at minimum, permanent recession. Cast in such terms, de-growth sounds potentially very threatening to long-established orthodoxies. Can we learn to cope with permanent recession – and is that what is required to redress the planetary imbalance? What is clear is that the prolonged de-growth that we have endured since the advent of the global financial crisis has hardly been environmentally neutral. But growth (certainly the kind of growth that our economies might have achieved had they been less hampered by austerity) has a carbon footprint and a very significant one at that. Indeed, arguably, the crisis has done more to slow the pace of environmental degradation than any policy innovation consciously designed to achieve such an effect. But that is not a good reason to wish for permanent recession. The point is that, in time, we may well need to wean ourselves off growth, but that does not necessarily mean that all de-growth is good de-growth.
One potentially fruitful way to think about this is in terms of the ‘carbon footprint of growth’. If we acknowledge that all growth has a carbon footprint, then that suggests three potential types of response – each of which will be explored in this programme of research. We might seek to off-set the carbon footprint (though, of course, that cannot work at a planetary level); we might seek to reduce the carbon footprint (by making our growth less environmentally damaging than it might otherwise be); or we might strive to reduce our dependence on growth and to promote other measures of economic success.
Of these, the third may well hold out most prospect (though it is the least discussed). Growth, in a way, is a convention for measuring economic success. Indeed, it has become the global currency of economic success. And it is not difficult to see why. But, like all conventions, growth need not be the global currency of economic success – and there is a very strong moral and ecological argument for suggesting that should no longer be tolerated as the global currency of economic success. A core part of the research programme will be to assess and evaluate alternative measures of economic success and to consider the difficulty of managing the transition from growth-obsessed economic performance to more sustainable alternatives.
The researcher appointed would need to work closely with the existing SPERI team, writing research and academic papers, but also policy interventions, debate pieces and blogs. We are looking for an experienced political economist, ideally with both a PhD and a record of independent publication. We do not, however, require existing experience of research in the politics and political economy of the environment and the environmental crisis – just a passion to explore such issues and to develop them in the context of SPERI as part of its ongoing research agenda. We hope too to organise a major conference around all of these questions in the summer of 2016 and would expect the appointed research associate to become heavily involved in its planning and organisation.
How to apply
Search the job reference UOS007435 on the university jobs page and complete the application, providing the following three things as additional attachments:
1. A sample of your research work (ideally a published paper or draft);
2. An outline of your proposed approach to such a research programme;
3. A 1000 word sample blog on a topic related to the research programme described above.
Closing date: 27 November 2013