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.
