PLUSA 2025 - Throwback

The Academy began with a focus on economic policy, transformation, and new perspectives on global challenges. Workshops and deep dives invited participants to critically engage with the roots of economic thought, to question dominant paradigms, and to experiment with alternative models of society and economy. Through interactive methods, theoretical inputs, and collaborative reflections, the first days set the stage: economics was not treated as a technical field, but as a space of politics, ethics, and imagination.

On Monday, participants explored a wide range of critical economic perspectives through seven workshops and several deep dive sessions. Topics included ecological economics and social metabolism, postcolonial theory and global inequality, and the political nature of money in the context of inflation, digital currencies, and sustainability. Further sessions addressed intergenerational justice, fiscal policy, and the contested debt brake in Germany, as well as the role of the World Trade Organization and its impact on the Global South. Participants also engaged with systems thinking inspired by Donella Meadows and discussed democratic economic planning as part of the “New Planning Debate.” The deep dive sessions complemented these workshops with insights into key texts of 21st-century political economy, neocolonial patterns in the global economy, and the challenges of making economic journalism more accessible. The day concluded with a book presentation of Dialogues for Degrowth, offering international and intersectional perspectives on post-growth futures.

On Tuesday, participants continued this journey with four further workshops. An introduction to complexity economics provided insights into systems thinking and modeling tools. A second workshop examined Isabella Weber’s analysis of price shocks, comparing China’s post-Mao economic reforms with Western inflation responses. Participants also explored European central banking, analyzing the political dimensions of monetary policy and its role in climate goals. In the Decolonizing Economics workshop, key concepts of mainstream economics were critically assessed in light of socio-ecological justice, drawing from feminist, ecological, and Marxian schools of thought. In the afternoon, on our excursion to Leipzig, participants explored the intersections of history, colonialism, and social movements in a very tangible way. Some attended a talk on climate reparations between Cameroon and Germany at Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie. Simultaneously, various walking tours explored Leipzig’s colonial history, the origins of the German women’s movement, and the city’s post-reunification economic development. Together, these experiences connected global debates with local places and struggles, reminding everyone that questions of justice and transformation are deeply rooted in lived histories.