From 17 to 20 September 2026, Policy Lab hosted the third Degrowth International Political School in Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia.
Titled New Utopias for a Dystopian World: Building Counter-Power, the school brought together more than 50 researchers, activists, policymakers and organisers to ask how, at a time of climate breakdown, deepening inequality, militarisation and rising authoritarianism, we can move social-ecological transformation from ideas into political practice.
The school opened on Thursday evening with the panel Who Builds Utopia When the Old World Is Dying: The Responsibility of Intellectuals, where Giacomo D’Alisa (ICTA-UAB), Katarina Kušić (University of Rijeka), Zarja Muršič (freelance science communicator) and Martin Valinger (Faculty of Architecture, UL) reflected on the role of knowledge and those who produce it in times of crisis.
The conversation resonated beyond Kostanjevica: Giacomo D’Alisa spoke with Špela Novak for Aktualna tema, Radio Slovenia, where he traced the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and resource scarcity back to an economic system built on the idea that a good life requires ever-increasing consumption. He argued that the growth of the past twenty years has not improved general well-being but concentrated capital in the hands of elites, pointing to the housing crisis as one example: when housing is treated as an investment rather than a home, those with money drive up prices and push people with lower incomes out.
On Friday, the panel Territories of Resistance across the Balkans brought together experiences of environmental struggle and political organising in the region, and in the evening the debate Shaping the World to Come opened a wider conversation about the futures we want to build. On Saturday, the panel Changing the System from Within explored the possibilities and limits of working inside institutional politics. The school closed on Sunday with the panel Building Counter-Power, carrying these threads from critique toward strategy.
Alongside the panels, four keynote lectures on Friday and Saturday offered deep dives into the school’s central questions. In Towards Decolonial Future, Juliana Arbeláez Gaviria (University of Lausanne) approached coloniality not as a historical legacy but as a living material structure reproduced through extraction and land dispossession, and asked what this means for movements in Europe’s semi-peripheries. In From Enclosures to AI: Work, Growth and the Politics of Productivity, Blaž P. Kosovel (Policy Lab) traced a line from enclosures to generative AI, asking who controls productivity and whether its gains lead to more accumulation or to less work and more free time. In What Does It Mean to Take Climate Science Seriously?, Matjaž Ličer (Slovenian Environment Agency) moved from the risk of AMOC collapse to extreme sea level rise and asked how to act without absolute certainty. And in Semi-Periphery and New Utopias for a Dystopian World, Mladen Domazet (Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb) reconstructed a socialist genealogy of degrowth rooted in late Yugoslavia and argued that freedom today lies not in escaping limits but in governing them collectively as bounded commons.
The keynotes also resonated in the media. Sarah Neubauer from N1 Slovenija published a feature asking how the economy could change so that GDP growth brings wellbeing to everyone rather than only elites, built around conversations with two of our keynote speakers, Juliana Arbeláez Gaviria and Mladen Domazet, alongside Ajda K. Pistotnik and Aljoša Slameršak. Together they argued that many degrowth proposals are far from utopian (shorter working hours, universal public services, housing as a right rather than an investment, progressive taxation of wealth and pollution), that despite decades of growth most people no longer feel their lives improving, and that change can be built alongside the existing system through collective power, starting as simply as sharing with your neighbour.
At the heart of the school were three parallel modules: Extraction vs. Restoration-oriented Economies, Crisis of Social Reproduction and Authoritarian Push Against Planetary and Social Limits. Each followed the same arc across three days. Friday was dedicated to diagnosis: what is happening, why, and which structures and relations of power produce the problem. Saturday turned to response: where resistance is already happening, which practices, policies, institutions and alliances exist or are needed, and what can be scaled or defended. On Sunday, participants brought all of this together in a visioning exercise, imagining a future from the ground of the previous two days and presenting it to those from the other modules before the closing panel. Short inputs were followed by long discussions, because collective political thinking needs time and space, not just a stage.
The full programme, with all panel and module contributors, is available here.
That space was also physical. Between sessions, we walked through the Krakovo floodplain forest, kayaked around Kostanjevica island, took a morning walk and a guided tour through the Forma Viva sculpture park at the Božidar Jakac Gallery, shared meals, and debated late into the night. Conviviality was not a side programme but part of the method: the relationships built in Kostanjevica are the beginnings of the counter-power the school set out to imagine.
Utopias are built collectively, in conversation and care. Over four days in Kostanjevica, we built a small piece of one together. The work of building counter-power continues in our organisations, movements and communities.
