The Green List 2021: 20 travellers protecting the planet

THE RENEGADE ECONOMIST

Mainstream economics is obsessed with growth: to expand the economy and thus, it is argued, raise living standards. But what happens when social inequality is increasing and consumption has pushed the planet to breaking point? Kate Raworth’s doughnut-shaped vision – first published as an Oxfam discussion paper nine years ago, and later a 2017 bestselling book – urges us to forget growth and instead think about survival. Raworth radically redraws the system, putting people’s needs at its heart – an inner ring of ‘social foundation’, where people aren’t falling into the doughnut’s hole due to a shortage of the essentials such as food, water and housing – with growth bound by an ecological ceiling, the outer edge of the circle, beyond which there is climate change, freshwater stress and biodiversity loss. The doughnut is the safe space where there can be sustainable development. ‘It shows us that we need to create circular economies; an ecosystem of enterprise that invests in the health and education of us all,’ Raworth explains of the theory, said to have shaped the big-picture goals set at the 2012 Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Going one giant step further, she recently launched the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, a platform aimed at encouraging communities to join the likes of Cornwall Council, which uses the framework as a social and ecological compass for decision-making, and Costa Rica, which is aiming to become regenerative on a national scale, in actioning transformative change.

doughnuteconomics.org

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