CANSEE2025: Changing Tides

This year’s theme reflects the dynamic and transformative forces that are shaping our world today from changes in our ecological and economic systems to cultural and social landscapes. Like the tides, these changes are constant and cyclical, offering challenges and opportunities for renewal and adaptation.

CANSEE2025 will explore how we can navigate these shifting currents using our intellect, creativity, and commitment to a more just post-growth future, leveraging ecological economics as both a tool and a community of practice. Join us in rethinking how societies can live, work, and thrive together while addressing the pressing need for equitable and sustainable transitions.

In Cape Breton, where the ocean meets the land, this theme speaks to the region’s identity and history. This setting reminds us of the importance of a community’s collective ability to chart a course toward a just, decolonial, and regenerative future.

We invite you to submit abstracts that engage with our theme “Changing Tides” and the related subthemes. Whether your work directly addresses one of our listed themes or takes an innovative approach that intersects, we encourage submissions that explore new pathways, heterodox economic approaches to understanding the world, and anything that inspires change. If you’re unsure how your research fits within the themes, we suggest selecting a “best fit” based on the kind of conversation you’d like to be a part of. Our review process is flexible and convivial, ensuring that a wide range of perspectives and approaches will enrich our conference.

SUB-THEMES:

Changing Tides: A tapestry of reflections on the conference theme

The conference theme reflects the evolving nature of everything around us, including the discipline of ecological economics. As the currents of social, environmental, and economic systems change, our approaches to understanding and navigating them must change as well. This theme invites critical reflection on how ecological economics itself is adapting as well as how we can rethink existing frameworks and expand methodologies. This also encompasses broader transformations shaping our world and situations that may require post-normal governance approaches to solve them. This theme looks at the potential of change as a catalyst for renewal, innovation, and collective progress.

Rooted Communities: Identity, Culture, and Place

This sub-theme highlights the importance of context and place in research and action. We invite you to ask: what are the elements of enduring economies and territories of life, in which rooted communities have formed distinctive identities and cultures from long standing relationship to place? And how can these elements be encouraged and supported in places in which communities have been disrupted? We also encourage submissions that explore regional identity and subjectivities; engaging and communicating across differences; and community engaged scholarship.

Local Action, Global Impact: Place-Based Solutions to Global Challenges

Questions of scale permeate ecological economics and related systems-grounded disciplines. This is the sub-theme for contributions that examine local-to-global connections. Here we ask, how do activities at the local scale aggregate at regional and global scales - both in terms of their ecological harms and ecological benefits; how do global-scale metrics translate to the local in ways that enable local action that responds to global challenges; and how do inter-local or translocal dynamics figure into and respond to systems-based analyses of local-to-global socio-ecological challenges? Modeling of materials and energy dynamics across scales from economic and related perspectives is also relevant to this sub-theme.

Relational Economies and technologies: Connections Between Peoples and Planet

This sub-theme investigates economic systems that prioritize relationships, social connections, and community well-being, and the technologies that support them. Solidarity economies, cooperative, collective, and non-market practices, care work and economies of care, and ecological interdependence are areas of necessary exploration for more just and ecological futures. We also invite contributions that explore convivial technologies, regenerative ecologies, circular design, and the role of artificial intelligence, digitization, and other emerging technologies with disruptive potential.

Transitions and Transformations: Mitigation, adaptation and systems change

Exploring the political, social, and material dimensions of transitions and transformations, we invite contributions that examine the politics of systems change, mitigation and adaptation efforts, post-capitalist experiments and prefigurative politics, and tactics and strategies for transformation. This can include work on energy and sustainability transitions; modelling economic and ecological transitions; challenges related to capitalism, militarization, political polarization; degrowth imaginaries, concrete utopias, and future-oriented research.

The Difficult Century Ahead: Governance, Democracy, and Politics

We invite contributions that examine governance, democracy, and politics in navigating the profound challenges of the 21st century. We welcome studies critically explore how power, politics, and policy shape our futures, particularly in the context of energy, climate, and environment. Contributions might focus on Indigenous governance, innovative governance mechanisms, governing the commons, global alliances and geopolitics, fiscal and monetary policy, or welfare and environmental policy broadly. Topics addressing the role of markets, law, and the State in future societies are especially encouraged.

Anchoring the future: Youth, Education and Innovation

This sub-theme focuses on the transformative role of education, youth leadership, and innovation in advancing ecological economics. It explores how pedagogy can empower the next generation to challenge dominant paradigms, embrace systems change, and build futures that are rooted in decolonial and ecological sustainability. Topics could include social movements advocating for justice, innovations that decolonize knowledge systems, and discussions on curriculum.