Eradicating Poverty beyond Growth: A Global Roadmap for a New Economy

Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth: A Global Roadmap for a New Economy is a high-level, international policy conference organised under the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, as a contribution to the International Labour Organization-led Global Coalition for Social Justice.

Held at ILO Headquarters in Geneva, this public event will bring together leading scholars, diplomats, UN officials, policymakers, trade unions, employers’ organisations, civil society organisations, and social movements from around the world to discuss strategies to confront the intertwined crises of poverty, inequalities and ecological breakdown, beyond the limited imagination of economic growth orthodoxy.

As environmental collapse accelerates, inequalities widen within and between countries, and economic precarity becomes pervasive, the long-standing assumption that economic growth alone can reduce inequalities and end poverty is falling apart. What remains is an urgent challenge: how can societies secure social justice, economic security and human dignity without relying on a development model that deepens extraction, exclusion and ecological harm?

Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth: A Global Roadmap for a New Economy offers an important forum in which to discuss how moving beyond growth is not about bringing economic activity to a halt. Rather, it requires confronting the failures of growth as it has been pursued in practice. Leading experts will take to the floor in Geneva to articulate alternative development pathways that decentre GDP as the primary measure of progress and demonstrate how social well-being and ecological integrity can be advanced through models less reliant on continuous economic expansion.