En tenant compte du contexte :

Vagabondages donnera la parole à une trentaine de poètes femmes (nous renonçons à utiliser le mot “poétesse” qui commence bien mais se termine mal).

• peut être remplacé par évitons sans aucune ambiguïté.

Avec l’irruption de la télé-réalité, nous renonçons à distinguer le vrai du faux, la vie publique et la vie privée.

• peut être remplacé par refusons avec, peut-être, une nuance plus forte (impression subjective).

Disons que renoncer à s’emploiera plus facilement dans les expressions littéraires, diplomatiques et traduit plutôt l’acceptation d’une situation qu’un rejet ou qu’une lutte contre cette dernière.

The French linguist Henri Adamczweski in Le Français déchiffré, explains this much better than Lidia.

He calls these a basic structure of/in French: V1 à V2, as in the sentence, Il s’est mis à boire and V1 de V2 as in, Il a cessé de fumer.

He has two lists of verbs:

One takes de:
Cesser, finir, accepter, refuser, éviter, empêcher, manquer, tenter, etc.

And one takes à: Se mettre, commencer, continuer, obliger, forcer, contraindre, pousser, inciter etc.
What is the difference between them? It is this: all the ones with DE have a presupposition. If you say, cesser de fumer, it pressupposes there was smoking occuring before. If you finir de parler, it presupposes there was talking. It is not that these verbs are NEGATIVE. It’s that what comes after the De existed in the MIND BEFORE the verb comes into play. So, the V2 is foremost in the mind before the V1 kicks in. I hope that is clear.

Whereas with the à list, the state of affairs to the right did not exist before: se mettre à parler, pousser à aller. It’s a bit more complicated than that but I find it is the best explanation of this aspect of French grammar.
You can read the entire article here: http://www.quivy.org/adam.pdf

In the examples cited from the internet in that article, renoncer à utiliser means they have decided not to use some thing but that thing did not have a prior existence (in their minds). They have come across it and will not use it. The idea of using did not pre-exist, it springs from the fact of running in it, as it were. They will not use the word poetess but that is something happening now. If one goes through the list making up sentences, this system is very coherent and makes sense, and doesn’t call for saying that the verbs with De are “negative”. The point to an action where what comes AFTER them is being acted upon.