About the project

The project Heterodox Planning (HP), located at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Institute of Social Sciences’ research and teaching area Sociology of Work, Political Economy and Technological Change and supported by the Einstein Foundation, investigates emerging experiments in economic planning that diverge from conventional, top-down, or authoritarian models. The project’s principal investicator is Christoph Sorg.

It defines economic planning in market economies as the active and intentional shaping of markets, and focuses specifically on the capacities, limits and contradictions of experiments with participatory, socially inclusive, and sustainable forms of planning. The project is motivated by the global rise of interventionist public planning under “new state capitalism,” alongside debates about whether digital technologies make democratic planning feasible and whether the ecological crisis makes it necessary. The project’s theoretical and empirical contribution lies in shifting attention from hegemonic planning practices to heterodox forms within actually existing capitalism, addressing the underexplored premise that “planning is already endemic in capitalism.”

Empirically, heterodox planning studies two cases: community wealth building and platform cooperatives.

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