JavaScript is required
# 13

Undo the goal of economic growth

When governments pursue growth as a goal in itself, they undertake desperate and damaging measures to make it happen. They chase cheap energy and keep issuing licences for fossil fuels and opening coal mines. They say they're cutting red tape in the name of business innovation, but they end up undermining legislation that protects the rights of workers, protects communities and the health of a living world. They deregulate finance and unleash speculative bubbles. And they privatise public services and turn public wealth into private profit.

That's why it is so important to ask what are we for? Doughnut economics is a positive propositional frame: meet the needs of all people and do so within the means of the living planet. It is an overriding vision to move from a degenerative economy that runs down the living world to a regenerative one. To move from divisive economies that capture value in the hands of a few to having distributive ones that share that value and opportunity far more equitably with everybody who co-creates it, and that turns out to be the whole of society. 

Europe has the opportunity to show the leadership of what this looks like.

Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
  • What captured our attention
  • What if we tell a different history
  • What if “Nature” does not exist
  • What if we acknowledge our relations with every entity
  • What if we invent an ecosystemic economy
  • Where does Europe begin and Where does Europe end
Collections that include this source
  • Imagine an Ecosystemic Europe
  • Imagine an Altereurope
Keep exploring
  • More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think ‘transversaly’. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mut …

What if we acknowledge our relations with every entity

What does economic growth have to do with natural resources and the exploitation of the planet earth? Everything, we might answer today, economic growth is based on the exploitation of natural resources, whether it is specific metal needed for smart phones or petrol. Yet, for a long time the interdependence was not taken into account and the fixation on growth in the economy made governments and business actors resort to destructive practices like exploiting fossil fuels without ever asking themselves about the harm this would cause. A sustainable economy therefore needs to acknowledge our dependence on a healthy planet and consider the interconnectedness between a healthy economy and a healthy planet. Economic production cannot be disentangled from our environment and needs to respect the limits of its exploitation.

of our Imagination