You would love a Doughnut Economy

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Are you familiar with the work of Kate Raworth on Doughnut Economics? Her best selling and highly influential book on this topic was published in 2017. She describes herself as a “regenerative economist.”

There is a fairly long tradition of thinking on regenerative economics promoting a shift towards an economic system that regenerates rather than depletes capital assets defined widely to include all goods and services derived from the natural world. In this way, natural resources and ecosystems can be sustained. That is a simplification and there is obviously a lot more to it.

Within this broader framework, Kate Raworth presents a very elegant concept of the doughnut economy described on the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website as consisting of two concentric rings (see figure).

Visualization Kate Raworth's doughnut economy

The inner ring represents a social foundation ensuring that no one falls short of life’s essentials.

The outer ring is an ecological ceiling ensuring that humanity does not collectively overshoot planetary boundaries (based on the work of the Stockholm Resilience Center) that protect Earth's life-supporting systems.

Between these rings lies an ecologically safe and socially just doughnut-shaped space in which humanity can thrive.

In her book, Raworth goes on to elaborate seven ways in which economists need to think in order to support the shift to regenerative, doughnut economics. These include changing our goals, seeing the big picture, nurturing human nature, getting savvy about systems, designing to distribute, creating to regenerate, and becoming agnostic about growth.

It is probably easier for you to grasp the idea of the doughnut economy if I share a video of Kate Raworth herself explaining it.

Doughnuts for cities and regions

It is fascinating to observe how this approach is being applied at the level of cities and regions. The spread of doughnut economics at the subnational level is being promoted by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab with close to 160 stories accessible online describing how this is working out in practice.

Some notable examples include:
The Brussels Doughnut - various approaches to the implementation of the doughnut economy have been explored from 2020 onwards.
Dublin - the city agreed a motion in 2022 to embed doughnut economy principles in the local economic community plan.
Barcelona - the city is adopting this approach as a new economic model.
Dunedin - DEAL’s city portrait approach is being applied,
São Paolo - new Ecological Economic Zoning has been inspired by the doughnut economics approach.
And the list goes on…

We covered this topic in the 2023 run of my course on Ethical and Regenerative Cities at Osaka University. At that time, I invited Ilektra Kouloumpi from Circle Economy to talk about her work promoting doughnut economics. She provided an excellent overview of the subject before focusing specifically on the experience in Amsterdam.

We were really delighted to also be joined by Jay Tompt from Schumacher College who introduced the example of the Devon Doughnut. A recording of the session is accessible online by YouTube and shared below.

Ethical doughnuts

In our 2021 book on Ethical Cities we did not include doughnut economics as one of the key ingredients of ethical urbanism (but we should have!). The final chapter of the book, however, presents key actions that could facilitate the transition towards an ethical city.

Two of these relate closely to doughnut economics in terms of how we might mediate the means of production and modes of consumption. With hindsight it would have been very interesting to explore the relevance of Raworth’s seven proposals and the approach of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab to the formulation of an ethical city. For instance, the data portrait for cities proposed by DEAL shares some similarities with the ethical city scan approach that we developed.

In addition, Raworth discusses the importance of ethics in her 2017 book and outlines four ethical principles for 21st Century economists. These are:

(1) Act in the service of human prosperity in a flourishing web-of-life;
(2) Respect autonomy in the communities that you serve by ensuring their engagement/consent and recognizing the inequalities and differences that exist within them;
(3) Be prudential in policy-making in the face of uncertainty and seek to minimize risk especially for the most vulnerable, and;
(4) Work with humility, be transparent about your assumptions and about the short-comings of your models, and recognize alternative economic perspectives and tools.

These ethical principles are relevant to almost all professions today, including urban planners and city policymakers.

They go beyond the emphasis on virtue ethics to ensure ethical leadership or professional good practice by setting a clear goal (consequential ethics) of ensuring human prosperity within a flourishing web-of-life.

Unfortunately, the norm for many professions seems to be the pursuit of growth above all else and with little or no consideration for damage done to the web-of-life.

The alternative pathway that Raworth has illuminated is one reason why I love the notion of doughnut economics. How about you?