A PEP Review of the First INDEP Conference

Montreal played host to the very first in-person conference of INDEP — the International Network of Democratic Economic Planning (disclosure: the Participatory Economy Project is one of the founding organizations of INDEP and members of PEP are active in helping to maintain INDEP). The conference, titled Democratic Planning for the Real World, was officially organized as a track of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) — an event held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal in early July 2025.

For too long, neoliberalism has dominated political discourse, and apparently is now transitioning in some parts of the world to a nascent fascist phase. And when it comes to discussion of alternatives, there really is not much variety to be had: My impression is that thinking about different economic models ossify into either command planning or markets or some variants thereof.

So it should be a source of hope and inspiration that there’s enough interest in a genuine alternative — democratic economic planning — to form a growing and maturing network online, and especially to fill an in-person conference on the topic. It is a great achievement that a great many activists, thinkers, scholars, and organizers can gather under a shared banner of democratic economic planning — and can share four days’ worth of presentations on a wide variety of topics, plus a fifth panel day online. It’s no small feat that any conference can take seriously a topic as taboo as democratic economic planning, even so much as to part of the name. Even within the political left, which one would think would be receptive to an expansion of the realm of ideas, the topic of democratic planning does not get much of a hearing unfortunately.

What’s more, the model of a participatory economy — the focus of the work of the Participatory Economy Project, and one of the oldest and most esteemed models of democratic economic planning — had considerable time in the spotlight at the SASE/INDEP Conference. PEP members filled an entire three-person conference panel, entitled “Participatory Economics in the real world”, and PEP members also gave presentations in other panels throughout the conference, as in Ferdia O’Driscoll’s panel presentations, and the presentation I co-presented on the in-progress interactive prototype we’ve named PPIP. For those of us working on this model for a long time, which has had to work and fight for attention in any forum, getting a great deal of attention is an encouraging development and speaks highly of both SASE and INDEP.

The conference also gave expression to the variety of modes of thinking under the shared banner of democratic economic planning. There were panels on social reproduction and democratic planning, on information and informatics, on operationalization and data, on the history of thought with regards to democratic planning, on how economic democracy relates to the environment and to the climate crisis (across two panels), and on real-life cases of economic democratization. In addition, the conference did succeed in its inclusion of long-time scholars working in the vein of democratic planning, including Jan Groos, Fikret Adaman, and Pat Devine. Most of the presentations were recorded and made available online on the INDEP YouTube channel and linked to the INDEP conference page, and they’re worth your time and attention.

For me, there was one omission in the conference, and I do not think this is the fault of the conference organizers. Namely, I felt that there was a dearth of other democratic planning models to discuss, to consider, to test, and to debate. To mention one prominent example: there’s the “Scottish” model (as Robin Hahnel termed it) of Cockshott and Cotrell. There were no panels about the “Scottish” model, no advocates of their work to give presentations of research and thinking of their work, and only a handful of mentions of that model throughout the conference. And that’s just a single model, never mind the assorted other proposed models of democratic planning which got no hearing, not even a mention, for which INDEP would make for a perfect forum. (There’s an appendix of the book Democratic Economic Planning written by Robin Hahnel, and which I contributed to, which listed five other proposed models of democratic planning, the “Scottish” model being one of them.)

To be sure, I do not regard this omission to be the fault of the INDEP conference organizers. The organizers — most notably Simon Tremblay-Pepin — undoubtedly did quite a lot with the presentations submitted, a mighty impressive achievement for an inaugural conference. INDEP as an organization is quite new, with considerable room to grow, and I hope that future INDEP conferences will correct this oversight, presumably by expanding its reach to other advocates and thinkers of democratic planning, and inviting them to present and discuss their work.