Ajda K. Pistotnik is director and the co-founder of Policy Lab, a think-and-act organisation advancing degrowth and post-growth transformations in Slovenia and beyond. Her work focuses on building political, research, and community infrastructures that challenge growth-dependent economies and open space for more just and ecologically grounded alternatives.

She is also a member of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) for the 2025–2030 mandate, where she represents Slovenian civil society organisations at the EU level.

She leads Policy Lab’s Beyond GDP project and contributes to the Horizon Europe GreenPaths project, a knowledge hub for green and just transitions. Her research and advocacy focuses on land politics, governance, doughnut economies, and the role of financial system, debt, and global inequalities in shaping ecological and social outcomes. Currently, she works on reframing land as a political question—linked to power, access, and justice—as reflected in Policy Lab’s work on land and the just transition.

Ajda is a organiser of the International Degrowth Political School, a space for building political capacity and alliances across Europe. She has contributed to the degrowth movement through research, translations, editorial work, and organising, including her involvement in the 2016 International Degrowth Conference in Budapest.

Her earlier work on debt politics led her to advocate for debt audit and cancellation at international forums such as the G20 in Hamburg, UNCTAD in Nairobi, and the IMF Annual Meetings in Lima. Today, her work connects these systemic questions with concrete policy processes, participatory governance, and grassroots organising.

Aljoša Slameršak, PhD, is a co-founder and consultant at Policy Lab, working at the intersection of degrowth, energy systems, and ecological economics. His work focuses on the biophysical limits to growth and their implications for a just and low-carbon transition.

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ICTA-UAB and part of the European Research Council–funded REAL project, which develops policy and modelling frameworks for post-growth transformations that enable well-being within planetary boundaries. He also serves as Secretary of Research & Degrowth International, a global network advancing research and advocacy on post-growth transitions.

His doctoral research, The end of energy abundance: Embracing biophysical limits to a low-carbon energy transition, examined how declining energy availability and material constraints reshape the possibilities for decarbonisation. Building on this, his research explores pathways that combine rapid emissions reductions with lower energy demand, global justice, and improved human well-being.

Aljoša has published in leading international journals, including Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, One Earth, and The Lancet Planetary Health. His work challenges dominant assumptions in climate modelling by foregrounding sufficiency, reduced energy use, and equitable North–South convergence as central conditions for a viable transition.

Beyond academia, he contributes to public debate through media, commentary, and podcasts, engaging with the political and social dimensions of the climate crisis and post-growth transformation.