Agroecology advances environmental sustainability and revitalizes the economy and culture of rural communities. How does it achieve this?
Javier Pardo Torregrosa
Can a crop represent action for change? Or a cow, grazing, an instrument against climate change? In a world where fields are often reduced to statistics, chemicals or massive harvests, there is another way to farm. It is not only about eliminating pesticides and rendering the soil fertile once more, but connecting ancestral knowledge with science, countryside with culture, production with dignity. And also with flavors!
Change in the agro-food sector toward production that is respectful to the environment has become fundamental in achieving climate neutrality and a more sustainable world. Ecological agriculture contributes a much deeper and more integrated view of how to do this, with its own implications and needs.
What is agro-ecology and why is it key to a sustainable future?
But what exactly is agro-ecology? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, agro-ecology is a way of connecting traditional and scientific knowledge with the aim of producing food in a more sustainable way. It is based on, says the FAO, the three pillars of sustainable development, so that, through the economic, social and environmental aspects, countries can increase their food production at the same time they protect the environment and promote social inclusion. In other words, as a practice, agro-ecology pursues the optimization and stabilization of production through less-polluting techniques, biodiversity conservation and the protection of animal well-being. But, also, through social movement, it aims to improve social justice, nourish rural identity and culture, and reinforce the economic viability of rural areas.
Agro-ecology pursues the optimization and stabilization of production through less-polluting techniques, biodiversity conservation and the protection of animal well-being
Biological control to chemical-free farming
Food systems face enormous challenges, from soil degradation to biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. Agro-ecology is not just the most viable option, but also the most urgent. More than a technique, it is a way of thinking and relating to the land, a view combining tradition, science and innovation to produce food sustainably, respecting ecosystems and those who live in them.
For agro-ecology to begin to become a reality, we need to forget all kinds of pesticides, herbicides and chemical and synthetic fertilizers, and control infestations biologically. Europe, for example, has spent years introducing the parasitic wasp Encarsia formosa into greenhouses for tomatoes and peppers, with the aim of controlling whitefly populations while significantly reducing the use of chemical pesticides.
Although the emphasis is often on applying innovative techniques, sometimes it is enough to look back to the past. We can achieve soil regeneration, for example, by using traditional historical and cultural practices such as organic fertilizers and incorporating livestock into the farming cycle. Or find the response in respecting nature’s cycles and its inherent way of doing things. This way we can imitate natural ecosystems through a seasonal crop and varied natural environment integrating autochthonous trees, plants and animals, which helps in the capture of carbon and, simultaneously, biodiversity conservation.
Although the emphasis is often on applying innovative techniques, sometimes it is enough to look back to the past
Technology and agro-ecology, an alliance for sustainable farming
Agro-ecology also requires us to steer technological and scientific advances toward better efficiencies in farming, always maintaining a position of respect toward nature. This is what the project, AgriBIT, financed by European funds, aims to do. Its researchers have developed a series of services using AI-based precision technologies for remote, real-time detection of plagues and bacterial infections in crops such as industrial tomatoes, using satellites and ground-based sensors. These kind of technologies can also serve systems for monitoring, harvesting, irrigation and soil regeneration. Also key is the implementation of solar photovoltaic systems and wind turbine generators, and the use of biomass derived from farming and livestock waste, to increase energy independence and reduce carbon emissions.
Social and economic benefits of agro-ecology
But the agro-ecological movement is not limited to a series of farming techniques focused exclusively on caring for the environment, it also pursues economic, social and cultural benefits.
Agro-ecology results in better soil fertility and increased regularity in production, as well as diversifying the risk in cultivating different foods. It contributes to economic dynamism and job creation in rural communities, and involves civil society in the re-activation of areas.
One inspiring example of agro-ecology as an engine of social change is the Agroecology Action Research Network (AARN) in Australia. The network connects researchers, farmers and educators to promote the transformation of food and agricultural systems in the country through the co-creation of knowledge and the implementation of agro-ecological practices adapted to local needs.
Among the specific initiatives developed include so-called Agro-ecology Farmer Field Schools, spaces where farmers demonstrate and validate the techniques they are using to manage plagues, diversify crops and reduce synthetic inputs. The network also explores new research fields, such as the organic management of disease, agriculture without ploughing, and carbon sequestration on farmland.
The role of the community
Often when we fill the basket full of shopping, we ask ourselves why some products are so expensive. Meanwhile, small farmers are complaining that sometimes they are forced to sell below the cost of production. Agro-ecology looks for mechanisms to improve direct sales to consumers and consumer groups, as well as establish principles underpinning better balance in supply chains. It also calls on communities to buy locally directly from the farmer or small shops, also reducing pollution from transport. In Spain, the project Roots: Women, Agro-ecology and Local Consumption, for example, seeks to establish producer networks that come together to distribute their products, generating short distribution channels, organizing eco-markets with producers, and certification marks for participants. The program also takes into account the special role of women in rural areas.
The human species has been recognized as a new force that has pushed the Earth’s system into a new geological epoch referred to as the Anthropocene. This human influence was not conscious, however, but an unintended effect of the consumption of fossil-fuels over the last 150 years. Do we, humans, have the agency to deliberately influence the fate of our species and the planet we inhabit? The rational choice paradigm that dominated social sciences in the 20th Century, and has heavily influenced the conceptualization of human societies in global human-environmental system modelling in the early 21st Century, suggests a very limited view of human agency. Humans seen as rational agents, coordinated through market forces, have only a very weak influence on the system rules. In this article we explore alternative concepts of human agency that emphasize its collective and strategic dimensions as well as we ask how human agency is distributed within the society. We also explore the concept of social structure as a manifestation of, and a constraint on, human agency. We discuss the implications for conceptualization of human agency in integrated assessment modelling efforts.
1. Introduction
The Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement set very ambitious goals that, if taken seriously, would result in a rapid transformation of human-environmental interactions and decarbonization of the global socio-economic system (United Nations, 2015a, United Nations, 2015b). What the agreements do not specify, however, is how the transformation should be achieved and who the transformation agents would be. In most modern scientific assessment of global human-environmental interactions, including Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), alternative futures do not evolve from the behavior of the population in the simulated region or market, but are externally chosen by the research teams (e.g. Moss et al., 2010). The human agency that can be broadly understood as the capacity of individual and collective actors to change the course of events or the outcome of processes (Pattberg and Stripple, 2008) is only weakly represented in the commonly used global system models. For example, Integrated Assessment Models are not capable of modelling abrupt changes and tipping points in both natural and human systems (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012) that may imply severe and non-linear consequences for the Earth system as a whole (Lenton et al., 2008). There is, however, a relatively rich body of literature in social sciences, primarily in political science and institutional theory, that conceptualizes human agency in the governance of social-ecological systems (e.g. Ostrom, 2005; Kashwan et al., 2018) and in Earth system governance (e.g. Biermann et al., 2012, Biermann et al., 2016). The aim of this paper is to assess the representation of human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling efforts and to examine how the rich body of literature on human agency in social sciences could be used to improve the modelling efforts.
The cornerstones of social sciences are built on the tension between agency and structure in social reproduction – the force of self-determination versus the embeddedness of social institutions (Dobres and Robb, 2000). Just as bio-physical laws determine the coupling between chemical and mechanical processes, social structures, including norms and institutions, impose constraints on the shaping of human interactions (North, 1990); they specify what people may, must, or must not do under particular circumstances and impose costs for non-compliance (Ostrom, 2005). Social institutions also have a function in expressing common or social interest and in channeling human behavior into what is socially desired (Coleman, 1990). Unlike bio-physical laws, however, social institutions are man-made structures and they are constantly being transformed by human action. In general, the smaller the social entity the less durable it is. The size, scale, and time-frame of the social entity push it towards a durable structure and stability (Fuchs, 2001). Numerous authors have contributed to this long and fruitful debate on micro- and macro-level social structures and interactions within social sciences. However, very little of that knowledge has so far been applied by the global environmental change modelling community. To give an example, the IPCC Report on Mitigation of Climate Change underlines the role of institutional, legal, and cultural barriers that constrain the low-carbon technology uptake and behavioral change. However, the diffusion of alternative values, institutions, and even technologies are not incorporated in the modelling results (Edenhofer et al., 2014). Little is known about the potential for scaling-up of social innovations, let alone the possible carbon emission reductions they could drive if applied on a larger scale. How quickly would such innovations diffuse into virtual and face-to-face social networks, and what would the agency of different actors, and groups of actors, be in such a diffusion process? The purpose of this work is to analyze how social theory could be better integrated into the global environmental change assessment community, and how relevant social theory could be incorporated in modelling efforts.
The paper is structured as follows. We start by reviewing how human agency has been incorporated within Earth system science and integrated modelling efforts so far. We then move to the exploration of the concept of human agency and social structure and review the relevant social stratification theories. We propose how the concept of human agency could be incorporated in global human-environmental system models, and finally we conclude.
2. Human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling
The recognition of the human species as the driving force of modern global environmental challenges, occurring at the end of the 20th Century, brought a new perspective to environmental and Earth system sciences. Lubchenco (1998) called directly for the integration of the human dimensions of global environmental changes with the physical-chemical-biological dimensions. In this context, Crutzen (2006) proposed the distinction of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, where the human species becomes a force outcompeting natural processes. As one possible framework to assess human agency in the Anthropocene, Schellnhuber (1999) developed the notion of “Earth System” analysis for global environmental management in which the human force has been conceptualized as a “global subject”. The global subject is a real but abstract force that represents the collective action of humanity as a self-conscious force that has conquered the planet. The global subject manifests itself, for instance, by adopting international protocols for climate protection.
The conceptualization of the human species as the global subject has been applied in Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IAMs refer to tools assessing strategies to address climate change and they aim to describe the complex relations between environmental, social and economic factors that determine future climate change and the effects of climate policy (van Vuuren et al., 2011). IAMs have been valuable means to set out potential pathways to mitigate climate change and, importantly, have been used in the IPCC’s assessments of climate change mitigation (Clarke et al., 2014). However, the development of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) coincides in time with the supremacy of the rational choice paradigm. Rational choice theory emphasizes the voluntary nature of human action and the influence of such actions on decisions, assuming human beings act on the basis of rational calculations of benefits and costs (Burns, 1994). According to this paradigm, rationality is a feature of individual actors and the world can be explained in terms of interactions of atomic entities. Humans are rational beings motivated by self-interest and consciously evaluate alternative courses of action. Markets are seen as the mechanisms linking the micro and macro levels and allow the combination of the concrete actions of individuals, e.g. buyers and sellers (Jaeger et al., 2001). The rational choice paradigm is reflected in welfare maximization assumptions underpinning the development of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models that are widespread in IAMs. CGE models are computer-based simulations which use a system of equations that describe the whole world economy and their sectoral interactions. The analysis of scenarios in CGE models compares a business-as-usual equilibrium with the changes introduced by one or several policies and environmental shocks — e.g. a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme under several climate scenarios — which generate a new equilibrium (Babatunde et al., 2017). It is important to understand that the policy shock in such models is introduced externally; it does not evolve from the model and does not consider the dynamics behind the agency of different actors and groups of actors. In fact, human societies in CGE models are only reflected in aggregated population numbers by world region. The institutional settings within the human societies operate are given and cannot be endogenously changed. CGE models place a strong emphasis on the market as a solution to all kinds of problems including environmental and social issues (Scrieciu, 2007). Furthermore, state-of-the-art IAMs model aggregate datasets of sub-continental size. For instance, the IAM known as REMIND considers just 11 world regions, while the energy component of IMAGE considers only 26. The order of magnitude of the population of each of these regions is between 287 M and 680 M inhabitants (ADVANCE, 2017). Similarly, in the global land use allocation model MAgPIE, the food energy demand for ten types of food energy categories (cereals, rice, vegetable oils, pulses, roots and tubers, sugar, ruminant meat, non-ruminant meat, and milk) in ten world regions differentiated in the model is determined exogenously by population size and income growth, assuming that, for example, higher income is related to a higher demand for meat and milk (Popp et al., 2010). The impacts of changing lifestyles and the implications of demand-side solutions can be explored only manually by varying the underlying assumptions.
In context of the definition of human agency used above, IAMs reflect an agency of a rational consumer who decides on the choice of an optimal action having access to perfect information about the alternatives. By analyzing energy, land use, and their implications on global emissions (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012; Hibbard et al., 2010) IAMs can compute an economic setup to maximize welfare functions. Nevertheless, the welfare functions do not cover the diversity of human preferences. Complex distinctions of qualitative aspects, such as networks or influencers that can drive these processes, do not exist.
This drawback has been noted by the IAM community and attempts have been made to integrate human agency related behavior towards the political economy, social behavioral and interaction patterns (Riahi et al., 2017), or regimes of effort sharing (van den Berg et al., 2019) have been made. Some models also consider inequality and a diversity of consumption patterns (Hasegawa et al., 2015; McCollum et al. 2018). However, these approaches are still driven by exogenous quantifications and are unable to sufficiently inspect dynamics of human agency. Although IAMs are able to design pathways combining multiple strategies to achieve the 1.5 °C target of the Paris Agreement, which include human agency related actions such as lifestyle changes (van Vuuren et al., 2018), many questions remain. For example, how can human agency be triggered to achieve the lifestyle changes, at an individual level, necessary to achieve the 1.5 °C target? Also, how can the necessary institutional dynamics be brought into play? So far, these aspects are rarely considered in IAMs.
Novel and promising modelling approaches to incorporate human agency are being developed in complex network science (Borgatti et al., 2009) and social-ecological system modelling (Pérez et al., 2016). Complex networks usually consist of a set of nodes representing individual agents or representative aggregations thereof (such as business parties, geographical regions or countries) which are connected by different types of linkages, such as business relations, diplomatic ties, or even acquaintance and friendship (Newman, 2018). This type of framework has been developed in the past, and applied successfully to describe heterogeneous datasets from the social sciences, and to establish conceptual models for socio-economic and socio-ecological dynamics (Filatova et al., 2013). Nevertheless, most of such models are still based on theoretical assumptions with weak links to empirical data. A closer link with empirical data has so far only been achieved at case study level, focusing on particular local socio-environmental phenomena such as fishery or water management with agents representing local resource users or managers (e.g. Suwarno et al., 2018; Troost and Berger, 2015). The questions driving this work are: (i) how can similar models be conceptualized in order to represent the whole World-Earth system of human societies and their bio-physical environment (Donges et al., 2018) and (ii) how can they be linked with empirical data?
3. The concept of human agency in social sciences
Dellas et al. (2011) refer to agency in the governance of the Earth system as the capacity to act in the face of earth system transformation or to produce effects that ultimately shape natural processes. Agency in Earth system governance may be considered as contributing to problem solving, or alternatively it could include the negative consequences of the authority to act. Lister (2003) and Coulthard (2012), in their research on agency related to environmental and citizenship problems, distinguish two dimensions: (i) ‘everyday agency’ being the daily decision-making around how to make ends meet, and ‘strategic agency’ involving long-term planning and strategies; and (ii) ‘personal agency’ which reflects individual choices and ‘political and citizenship agency’ which is related to the capacity of people to affect the wider change (Lister 2003). Personal agency varies significantly across human individuals. However, there are powerful examples of social protests and movements demonstrating that even individually disempowered people can have a strong voice if they act collectively (Kashwan, 2016). In the context of natural resources and environmental management, there are empirical examples of self-organized local and regional communities and grassroots movements crafting new institutions that limit the control of national authorities (García-López, 2018; Dang, 2018). To give an example, civil society groups in Mexico managed to shape the REDD+ policies to protect the rights of agrarian communities (Kashwan, 2017a). In this context, Bandura (2006) proposes the differentiation of individual, proxy and collective agency (2006: 165). Individual agency refers to situations in which people bring their influence to bear through their own actions. This varies substantially from person to person with respect to individual freedom to act and the consequences of action. Individual agency is influenced by a whole set of socio-economic characteristics including gender, age, education, religion, social, economic and political capital. In many cultures, the individual agency of women is limited, for example, by inheritance law or by informal norms restricting their mobility or educational opportunities (Otto et al., 2017). However, individual agency also varies with an individual’s ability to change the system rules. For example, very wealthy or influential people might find it easier to set new market trends or influence public decision-making processes than those with fewer resources (Otto et al., 2019). Proxy, or socially mediated agency refers to situations in which individuals have no direct control over conditions that affect their lives, but they influence others who have the resources, knowledge, and means to act on their behalf to secure the outcome they desire. Collective agency refers to situations in which individuals pool their knowledge, skills, and resources, and act in concert to shape their future (Bandura 2006: 165). These dimensions of agency are visualized in Fig. 1.
The dominant view of human agency in Earth system science and integrated modelling approaches has so far focused on the left upper corner of Fig. 1, i.e. on the everyday agency of individual human agents. This would correspond to, for example, modelling the effects of food consumption on land use patterns (e.g. Popp et al., 2010). Interestingly, although opinion formation and election models are well advanced in game theory (e.g. Penn, 2009; Ding et al., 2010), they have not yet been applied to the formation of international environmental policy in IAMs. At the same time the recent so-called protest voting shows that a small fraction of voters can push public policy down a radically different pathway. Some studies link the protest voting and rising populism with increasing inequalities and the political and social exclusion of the poor and underprivileged (Becker et al., 2017). In some cases, radical policy changes might also be achieved by individual acts of civil disobedience and, in a destructive manner, by terrorist attacks. Civil disobedience represents the peaceful breaking of unjust or unethical laws and is a technique of resistance and protest whose purpose is to achieve social or political change by drawing attention to problems and influencing public opinion. Terrorism is defined as an act of violence for the purpose of intimidating or coercing a government or civilian population.
Furthermore, radical policy changes and social tipping points can emerge due to changes in the collective behavior and preferences. The term ‘tipping point’ “refers to a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system” (Lenton et al., 2008), hence the mere existence of tipping points implies that small perturbations created by parts of such a system can push the whole system into a different development trajectory. Examples of tipping-like phenomena in socio-economic systems include financial crises, but could also include the spread of new social values, pro-environmental behavior, social movements, and technological innovations (Steffen et al., 2018). To give an example, social movements and grassroots organizations played an important role in the German energy transition that was initiated in 2011 as a reaction to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in Japan. It was, however, preceded by about 30 years of environmental activism (Hake et al., 2015). Finally, tipping-like phenomena can also be achieved by consumer boycotts and carrotmob movements. Consumer boycotts coupled with environmental NGO campaigns led, in Europe, to changes in the animal welfare regulations and the implementation of fair trade schemes (Belk et al., 2005). Carrotmobs refer to consumers collectively swarming a specific store to purchase its goods in order to reward corporate socially responsible behavior (Hoffmann and Hutter, 2012).
At the same time, cultural values and the ethical interpretation of behavior might vary in some respects across different countries and world regions and will lead to different manifestations of agency. Cultural values provide a strong filter of the actions perceived as good or responsible, as well as the consequences of violating norms (Belk et al., 2005). In the climate change context, some authors link the public acceptance of climate policy instruments to the belief and value systems in place, and the perceptions of the environment (Otto-Banaszak et al., 2011).
4. The manifestation of human agency: the layers of social structure
Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009) propose a distinction between actors and agents in Earth system governance. Actors are the individuals, organizations, and networks that participate in the decision-making processes. Agents are those actors who have the ability to prescribe behavior. The collective prescriptions and constraints on human behavior are usually referred to as the social structure (Granovetter, 1985; Dobres and Robb, 2000). The social structure is composed of the rule system that constitutes the “grammar” for social action that is used by the actors to structure and regulate their transactions with one another in defined situations or spheres of activity. The complex and multidimensional normative network is not given, but is a product of human action; “human agents continually form and reform social rule systems” (Burns and Flam, 1986: 26). The social rule system can also be framed as social institutions that are involved in political, economic, and social interactions (North, 1991). Similarly, Elinor Ostrom defines institutions as “the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions. Individuals interacting within rule-structured situations face choices regarding the actions and strategies they take, leading to consequences for themselves and for others” (Ostrom, 2005: 3). Social norms are shared understandings of actions and define which actions are obligatory, permitted, and forbidden (Crawford and Ostrom, 1995). Social order is only possible insofar as participants have common values and they share an understanding of their common interests and goals (King, 2009). Williamson (1998) proposes differentiating different informal institutions such as norms, beliefs and traditions, and formal institutions that comprise formal and written codes of conduct.
The process of shaping of the social rule system formation is not always fully conscious and intended. Lloyd (1988: 10) points out that a social structure is emerging from intended and unintended consequences of individual action and patterned mass behavior over time “Once such structures emerge, they feedback on the actions” (Sztompka, 1991: 49). For Giddens (1984) human action occurs as a continuous flow of conduct and he proposed turning the static notion of structure into the dynamic category of structuration to describe the human collective conduct. Human history is created by intentional activities but it is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction (Giddens, 1984: 27). As pointed out by Sztompka (1994), Giddens, embodies human agency in the everyday conduct of common people who are often distant from reformist intentions but are still involved in shaping and reshaping human societies. This process of the formation of social structure takes place over time; the system which individuals follow today have been produced and developed over a long period. “Through their transactions social groups and communities maintain and extend rule systems into the future” (Burns and Flam 1987: 29).
Another element of the social structure that is identified by several authors corresponds to the network of human relationships that, just like the shapes in geometry, can take different forms and configurations (Simmel, 1971). The network of relationships among the social agents is also referred to as governance structures, or sometimes as organizations. North (1990: 73) defines organizations as “purposive entities designed by their creators to maximize wealth, income, or other objectives defined by the opportunities afforded by the institutional structure of the society.” Williamson (1998), focusing on the types of contracts, distinguishes three basic types of governance structures: markets, firms, and hybrids. In markets, transaction partners are autonomous; in firms, partners are inter-dependent and integrated into an internal organization. Hybrids are intermediate forms in which contract partners are bilaterally dependent but to a large degree maintain autonomy (Williamson 1996: 95–98). Studying communication networks and social group structures allows us to distinguish more social network relationship patterns (Sztompka, 2002: 138).
Finally, the social structure is also shaped and influenced by large material objects such as infrastructure and other technological and industrial structures, that some authors call the technosphere (Spaargaren, 1997: 78). Herrmann-Pillath (2018) defines the technosphere as the encompassing aggregate of all artificial objects in opposition to the natural world, and more specifically, establishes the systemic separateness of the technosphere relative to the biosphere. Just as social norms impose on one hand certain constrains on human behavior, however, on the other hand, structure the human interactions and also provide certain opportunities, the technosphere can be viewed as a humanly designed constructs that provide certain opportunities as well as they limit certain choices of individuals operating at different geographical and time scales (Donges et al., 2017a).
The system is fully interconnected, and the social structure layers are interrelated. The slow changing layers of social structure impose constraints on the layers that change more quickly. The faster changing layers of social structure, however, are also able to change the slow slayers through feedback mechanisms (c.f. Williamson, 2000). Human agency is manifested through the maintenance, reproduction and modifications in the social structure layers (Burns, 1994). Interestingly, infrastructure objects in the technosphere layer show a similar order of change as the informal and formal institutions, and thus might constrain the social change in the faster changing levels. Thus artefacts become co-carriers of agency (Herrmann-Pillath, 2018). Nevertheless, sharp brakes from the established procedures rarely happen. Such defining moments are an exception to the rule and usually emerge from massive discontents such as civil wars, revolutions, or financial crises (Williamson, 1998). Institutions can also lock the society into a path-dependence (Beddoe et al., 2009). The capacity to undergo a radical restructuring, however, is a unique feature distinguishing social systems from organic or mechanical ones. Restructuring the social structure is a product of human agency and is grounded in the interaction between structures and human actions that produces change in a system’s given form, structure or state (Archer, 1988: xxii). However, the transition of institutions is frequently driven by crises (Beddoe et al., 2009).
Burns (1994: 215-216) introduces the notion of ‘windows of opportunity’ that are very relevant for analyzing social transformations. Interactive situations lacking social equilibria, which typically occur after catastrophes and other shocks, usually give rise to uncertainty, unpredictability, and confusion, and motivate actors to try, individually or collectively, to restructure the situation. In such restructuring activities, actors typically engage in reflective processes and make “choices about choice” and participate in meta-games (Burns 1994: 208). The actors may structure and restructure their preferences, outcomes, and outcome structures, and occasionally also the entire decision and game systems in which they participate. Through such structuring activity, human agents also create, maintain and change institutions and collective or organized agents such as movements, the state, market and bureaucratic organizations (Burns and Dietz, 1992; Burns, 1994: 215–216).
Transformations are the moments in history when the meta choices – “choices about choices” are made. The outcomes of such choices and the new type of system depend largely on the agents that get involved in the collective process of designing the new system. This process could be exclusive and incorporate only a narrow group of decision-makers as frequently happens in “quiet” transitions to authoritarian regimes. Alternatively, they can be more open and include representatives of various social groups, as happened in the political and economic transformation in Eastern Europe. Taking this example, Burns (1994) proposes that transformations are a co-evolutionary process sometimes driven by contradicting actors’ interests. Transformations might entail shifts in core societal organizing principles and systems of rules. As a result, agents with vested interests may struggle to maintain established systems or to limit the changes within them. Other agents act openly or covertly to modify or transform the system. Table 1 summarizes the above discussion and tries to link the social structure layers to the dominant type of human agency that can to be used to transform them.
Table 1. The layers of social structure, the dominant type of agency and the order of change.
Even in periods of radical change, however, the actors never start from scratch. They cannot choose a completely new system and they always depart from the ongoing social order in which they are embedded. The future evolves from practical activities, experiments, learning, conflict and struggle (Burns, 1994: 216). A similar point of view is presented by evolutionary institutional economists, in which transformations are seen not as a simple replacement of old institutions by new ones, but as a recombination and reworking of old and new elements and groups of actors (e.g. Stark, 1996; Bromley, 2000).
5. Distribution of human agency: differentiating socio-metabolic agent classes
Following the rational choice paradigm could lead us to a conclusion that the society is a sum of individuals (Burns, 1994) and that any forms of agency should be equally distributed among the individuals in the society. Such an approach is typical for integrated assessment models in which human systems are usually separated into population and economic sectors. The parameters that describe population are usually mainly population number, and economic production determines the use of resources and pollution emissions in the model (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012).
It is, however, enough to observe the world to know that such assumptions are very simplistic. People’s resource use and pollution emissions differ according to income, place of abode, type of occupation, and possessions. Moreover, their goals and interests, and the likelihood of them being fulfilled also differ. There are powerful individuals and groups in society who successfully strive for their interests, and there are individuals and groups who, despite struggling, never achieve their objectives. There are also masses of individuals who just strive to make ends meet. The questions are what types of agents or organizations can be incorporated in the models and what sort of agency do they have? Is there a need for a new social class theory taking access to energy and related carbon emissions as the base of social stratification?
Most social differentiation theories follow either the Marxist distinction between physical and capital endowments or the Weberian approach which differentiates classes through inequalities in ownership and income (Kozyr-Kowalski, 1992: 53). Some class theorists also highlight the development stages and inequalities across different countries and world-regions (Offe, 1992: 122). One more dimension that has not been discussed so far by social differentiation theories is the socio-metabolic profile of social classes, which constitutes the common ground for social and natural sciences. Social metabolism refers to the material flows in human societies and the way societies organize their exchanges of energy and materials with the environment (Fischer-Kowalski, 1997; Martinez-Alier, 2009). Social classes can be differentiated based on their metabolic profiles (Martinez-Alier, 2009). The use of energy by human beings can be divided into two main categories. The first one refers to the endosomatic use of energy as food, and the second one refers to the exosomatic use of energy as fuel for cooking and heating, and as power for the artefacts and machines produced by human society. Thus one person a day must eat the equivalent of 1500 to 2500 kcal to sustain their life functions, which is equivalent to about 10 MJ (megajoules) of energy per day or 3.65 GJ per year (Martinez-Alier, 2009). This amount varies only slightly among human beings. A rich person physically cannot eat much more, and even poorer individuals need the equivalent energy in the form of food to survive. Dietary composition and the amount of waste produced, however, will differ across the social strata. Nevertheless, there are still people suffering from hunger, unable to meet their basic needs.
The exosomatic energy use varies to a greater degree. The poorest social groups, who have no permanent access to electricity in their homes, who obtain energy for cooking and heating from the combustion of biomass products, who use overcrowded buses and trains to travel, use in total about 10 GJ of energy per person per year (Martinez-Alier, 2009) and constitute the lowest, socio-metabolic underclass. A more detailed picture can be derived by comparing the carbon footprint of different socio-economic groups. Personal CO2 emissions are released directly in fuel combustion processes in vehicles, airplanes, heating and cooking appliances, and indirectly through electricity use and consumption of products that generated emissions in the upstream production processes. The authors include CO2 emissions from energy used directly in homes (for space heating, lighting, etc.), for personal transportation (including personal vehicles and passenger aviation), and from the energy embedded in the production of goods consumed. Kümmel (2011) proposes the term “energy slaves” to describe the exosomatic energy use from fossil fuels by modern human society. On average, the daily energy consumption of a human being is equivalent to the men power of 15 people. Inhabitants of the most energy intensive Western Societies (i.e. the U.S.) consume, per person, the equivalent of the work of 92 people every day.
The results from UK households show that CO2 emissions are strongly income, but also location, dependent. The highest emissions can be generated by people living in suburbs, mostly in detached houses, and having two or more cars. Emissions of such households equated to about 26 CO2 tonnes in 2004. This amount was 64% higher than the emissions of the group with lowest emissions of 16 CO2, which comprised mostly of older and single person urban households as well as the unemployed living mostly in urban areas (Druckman and Jackson, 2009). UK household emissions can be compared with emissions from households located in less developed countries. For example, household emissions in Malaysia, as in the UK, are strongly dependent on income and location. However, Malaysian households with the lowest emissions were found in villages as well as in low-income urban squatter settlements. The urban squatter settlement households emitted on average 10.18 CO2 tonnes. The village households emitted on average 9.58 CO2 tonnes per year. Households with the highest CO2 emissions were located in high cost housing areas and they were responsible on average for 20.14 CO2 tonnes per year (Majid et al., 2014).
On the other end of the social ladder, there are super-rich hyper-mobile individuals with multiple spacious residences, and whose live-styles are characterized by conspicuous consumption patterns. They are less than 1% of global population and their consumption related greenhouse gas emissions could be over 170 times higher than the world’s poorest 10% (Oxfam, 2015). They can be characterized by extremely high levels of all types of agency. The influence and roles of many super-rich in the world of politics, media, culture, business and industry are often inter-related. In contrast to the super-rich in pre-industrial societies they have almost unlimited mobility, owning properties in different counties, with their homes being guarded and fortified. They have the ability to switch countries of residence, taking the advantage of ‘nondomiciled’ tax status, i.e. being the national of a certain country while not actually living there (Paris, 2013). Table 2 presents a first attempt to stratify the global population according to their socio-metabolic profiles that is based on disaggregated data on consumption related carbon emissions (Oxfam, 2015; Otto et al., 2019).
The proportions in Table 2 are striking. The top 10% of the global population is responsible for almost 50% of global consumption related greenhouse gas emissions. The wealthiest 0.54% of the human population is responsible for more lifestyle carbon emissions than the poorest 50% (Otto et al., 2019).
Energy use, as well as carbon dioxide emission, can also be used to analyze the socio-metabolic profile of economic sectors, companies and other organizations. From 1854 to 2010 12.5% of all industrial carbon pollution was produced by just five companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Shell and Conoco Philipps (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2018). To give an example from a different sector – in 2015 Saint-Gobain, a French multinational building materials manufacturer emitted 9.5 million metric tonnes CO2e (Carbon Disclosure Project, 2016: 22). For a comparison, emissions from industrial processes in France in 2013 equated to 17.6 million tonnes CO2e (General Directorate for Sustainable Development, 2016: 25) (GTM, 2018).
The socio-metabolic profile of social classes, nations, and organizations can be directly linked with their agency in the Earth system. The global socio-metabolic underclass is obviously characterized by a very low degree of agency. There are rare exceptions of mass protests initiated by the poorest social groups that can collectively influence formal institutions and change their governance (Kashwan, 2017b). However, these people are mostly occupied with making ends meet and have low organizational capabilities. In contrast, the global socio-metabolic upper classes are those who are characterized by a high level of individual agency as well as having the organizational capabilities to actively exercise their agency. Due to their resource incentive life-style they also have the moral obligation to be the agents of a transformation in global sustainability.
6. Improving the representation of human agency in integrated assessment modelling
In this section we ask how the above conceptual discussion could be summarized into guidelines improving the operationalization of human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling. In order to incorporate the different aspects of human agency as discussed in the previous sections, there is a need to introduce agents with heterogeneous goals, opinions and preferences into the models. The agents should be able to form networks that represent their mutual interrelationships and interactions between them. These system interaction rules should ideally refer to the social structure layers differentiated in Table 1, forming a nested hierarchical embeddedness of each agent.
Conceptual models, that incorporate the above requirements have been successfully developed and studied in the recent past. Their core properties might thus form a proper basis for extending IAMs to include heterogeneous agency on the level of (representative) individuals. Such models have been utilized to study opinion, and the associated consensus-formation specifically under the assumption of heterogeneous agents. Most of these works are based on the voter model in which agents exchange discrete (sets of) opinions in order to reach some consensus on a given (possibly abstract) topic or problem (Clifford and Sudbury, 1973; Holley and Liggett, 1975). Acknowledging that in its standard version the voter model considers all agents to have identical agency, extensions have been based on social impact theory (Latane, 1981) that specifically include heterogeneous relationships between single actors or groups (Nowak et al., 1990). Such extended models generally account for proximities between agents in some abstract space of personal relationships which is commonly modeled by assigning agents unique values of persuasiveness and supportiveness, describing their agency with respect to influencing as well as supporting others. While being of generic nature such classes of models can be easily modified to account for various kinds of processes related to social behavior, such as social learning (Kohring, 1996) or leadership (Holyst et al., 2001), which are again directly related to the notions of (heterogeneous distributions of) human agency. Certain models include additional layers of complexity by also accounting for the heterogeneous distribution of different group sizes (Sznajd-Weron, 2005) and certain majorities within those groups (Galam, 2002) when determining criteria for consensus in opinion dynamics.
One particular model of general cultural dynamics that has attracted great interest in the social science community, and that should be highlighted here, is the so-called Axelrod model (Axelrod, 1997). In its core, it accounts for two commonly observed tendencies in large groups of individuals or aggregations thereof: social influence (i.e. agency) and homophily (a process that dynamically influences each individual’s agency over time). The Axelrod-model not only specifically accounts for heterogeneity in the different agents but also (and to some degree unintuitively) allows emerging cultural diversity to be modeled in its convergent state. In general, such flexible approaches allow incorporating individual human agency in terms of the different ties an agent might have with others (Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994; Granovetter, 1977). Additionally, each tie can be associated with different strengths, thus also incorporating heterogeneity in the human agency (Castellano et al., 2009). Network modelling approaches further allow us to explicitly resolve the associated social structure (as well as the temporal evolution thereof) through an evaluation of the overall topology of the network on the meso- or macroscale (Costa et al., 2007).
A necessary step in operationalizing human agency in IAMs includes differentiating global socio-metabolic agent classes with heterogeneous metabolic profiles linking them with the material and energy flows in the bio-physical environment as well as heterogeneous social profiles that specify their preferences, opinions, and positions in social networks. Such efforts could be linked to the emerging research on downscaling planetary boundaries (Häyhä et al., 2016) as well as the established research on differentiating social milieus (e.g. Bauer and Gaskell, 1999). Some authors also propose model co-development, together with citizens and citizen groups (Figueres et al., 2017). Some authors also recommend abandoning the search for one gold-standard model, and instead explore future pathways based on a multitude of different concepts and representations of people and human agency (Donges et al., 2017b). For example, Donges et al. (2018) propose a modelling framework allowing incorporation of large sets of different models and concepts, in a standardized form, in order to assess and compare different future trajectories.
7. Conclusions
The Anthropocene has emerged unintentionally as a side effect of the industrialization of human societies (Crutzen, 2006). There are only a few examples of the human ability to internally interact with planetary geological forces, with the Montreal Protocol being the most often referred to example (Velders et al., 2007). At the same time historical examples show that there are instances of rapid transitions in societies (Bunker and Alban, 1997). Achieving policy challenges as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals require a certain degree of societal transformation. The concept of agency is central to implementing transformations needed to limit global warming and achieve the SDGs. Most of the IAMs that dominate the scientific assessments of global environmental changes do not include a representation of human societies that would have a capacity to undertake system transformations. At the same time, there is a relatively rich social science theory that can be used to improve the operationalization of human agency in integrated assessment modelling efforts.
In this paper we show that human agency can actively shape the World-Earth system (c.f. Donges et al., 2018) through interventions at different layers of social structure. Human agency, however, is not evenly distributed across all human individuals and social groups. We postulate a differentiation of socio-metabolic agent classes that could be integrated into integrated assessment modelling efforts. More socio-economic sub-national and sub-population group data is needed for this purpose (c.f. Otto et al., 2015). Social institutions for sustainable management of global, regional, and local ecosystems, however, do not generally evolve spontaneously, but have to be consciously designed and implemented by the resource users (Gatzweiler and Hagedorn, 2002; Kluvankova-Oravska et al., 2009). Each social transformation contains a disruptive component that implies a destruction of existing patterns of social interaction and institutional structures, and creation and emergence of new patterns and structures. Introducing more dimensions of human agency into IAMs, and co-creating scenarios and pathways for modelling exercises together with citizens and institutions, would help break the barriers that disconnect peoples’ actuality and agency with models, a discourse which has been gaining weight among policy makers (Figures, 2016). This disconnection can be broken by co-developing with citizens and various resource users the elements of global human-environmental system models, and by considering the people behind the numbers and the possible ways of funneling their agency. We encourage the integrated modelling community to work more closely with social scientists as well as we encourage social scientists to explore the methods and concepts applied in natural sciences.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their feedback that helped them to improve the paper. I.M.O., J.F.D., and R.C. are grateful for financial support by the Earth League’s EarthDoc programme. I.M.O. is supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 821010. J.F.D. is grateful for financial support by the Stordalen Foundation via the Planetary Boundary Research Network (PB.net). M.W. is financially supported by the Leibniz Association (project DominoES). This research has been carried out within the COPAN – Co-evolutionary Pathways Research Group at PIK.
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To most conservationists and many parents, it seems obvious that it is a good thing to teach children to value the natural world. Not only does connection with nature support their development and well-being, but it also supports ongoing efforts by humans to sustain the natural world.
However, there are incontrovertible trends towards a diminution of the state of nature as a consequence of human activities.
In this context, as a thought experiment, we address a rather grim question: Should we still encourage children to be connected to nature, to care for it and be concerned about it?
We first consider the meaning of connection to nature in the Anthropocene, and then turn to a consideration of several ethical dimensions of this problem, including the potential trade-off between well-known health benefits of time in nature and the long-term psychological impacts of loss of nature (e.g., ecological grief and solastalgia).
While there is no simple answer to our question, our analysis does highlight underappreciated ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene as well as the value of the local, urban forms of nature to which children around the world are increasingly exposed and engaging with in unprecedented ways.
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
The end of nature probably also makes us reluctant to attach ourselves to its remnants, for the same reason that we usually don’t choose friends from among the terminally ill. I love the mountain outside my back door … But I know that some part of me resists getting to know it better—for fear, weak-kneed as it sounds, of getting hurt. … There is no future in loving nature (McKibben, 1989).
1 INTRODUCTION
On an evening in early spring, one of us (BL) brought his 5-year-old son to see two species of mole salamanders crossing a small road to travel from a woodland, where they overwinter underground, to a breeding pond. It was cool and rainy, so the conditions were salutary for salamanders, and father and son observed about 30 of them make their way. From our perspective as environmentalists and parents, this scene is a positive one because a member of the next generation was learning to value living beings and the natural world. At one point in the evening, however, upon finding a dead salamander that had been crushed by a car, the child broke down in tears. We cannot help but wonder whether his sorrow was outweighed by the benefits of this excursion, by the pleasures and wonder of a first-hand connection with these beautiful creatures (see Carson, 1998).
Our aim here is to pose a related question, although at a much larger scale: whether, in this era of mass extinctions and environmental degradation, children should still be encouraged to be emotionally invested in the natural world (and if so, why).
The prevailing view is not only that parents should encourage connection with nature, but that it is critical that they succeed. In his classic book, Richard Louv (2008) documented the growing disconnection of children from nature, with increasingly urban children spending less time outside and more time looking at screens (or capturing virtual Pokémon creatures outside; Dorward et al., 2017), and argued that it is essential to overcome ‘nature-deficit disorder’.1 More recently, Soga and Gaston (2016) reviewed the causes (i.e. loss of opportunity and orientation) and consequences (i.e. changes in health/well-being, emotion, attitude and behaviour) of the resulting ‘extinction of experience’, and proposed ways to reverse it. Accordingly, Abson et al. (2019) consider reconnection with nature to be one of three ‘transformational “sustainability interventions”’. This growing body of research has contributed to a veritable parenting movement to get children outdoors.
There is a curious disconnect, however, between this invocation to connect children with nature and the state of said nature.2 Nature has changed dramatically over the past several decades, and it continues to change, with many indicators revealing seemingly inexorable declines wrought by human activity (e.g. IPBES, 2019). It is the sum total of these human impacts, evidenced by certain geological markers, which has given rise to the proposal that humans now inhabit the Anthropocene epoch (Corlett, 2015).3 Although diverse commentators, poets and scholars are asking hard questions about how to face up to the Anthropocene (e.g. Bringhurst & Zwicky, 2018; Ghosh, 2016; Major, 2018; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2019; Wapner, 2010), most people generally proceed as though humans will figure things out and reverse the trends, despite the evidence of the growing challenge to doing so (e.g. IPCC, 2021; Jewell & Cherp, 2019; UNEP, 2019). People behave as if it were not the case that ‘around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history’ and the ‘average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900’ (IPBES, 2019). These changes are already creating sadness and anxiety among children (Chawla, 2020). Despite recognition that nature’s ‘baseline’ is changing (Soga & Gaston, 2018), parents go on parenting as though their children will inherit a world that looks much like the one they have known.4
Assume, for the purpose of this thought experiment,5 that dramatic climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental harms are largely irremediable, so the state of nature will continue to precipitously decline. We strongly hope this assumption is false, yet we are interested in exploring its implications. In particular, we ask an important—albeit unsettling—question for anyone invested in raising and educating children6: Should we continue the common practice of trying to connect children to nature? If so, why? The environmental crisis is likely to impose all sorts of costs on children already. Should we at least minimize the emotional burdens associated with the decline of nature?7
We approach these questions as nature-loving parents ourselves, parents who feel that the lives of our children would be much, much diminished with fewer connections to the natural world. We cannot help but recoil in raising this question. Nonetheless, insofar as views about raising children have been shaped by prior, pre-Anthropocene ways of thinking, conventional wisdom may need to be overturned in the Anthropocene (e.g. Hamilton, 2017; Head, 2015; Latour, 2018; Lövbrand et al., 2015). For example, although some readers might consider our argument to be anthropocentric given its focus on human well-being rather than the well-being of other species, our thought experiment begins with the assumption that it is too late for many of those other beings—and the very concept of anthropocentrism is being challenged giving the prevalence of human impacts in the Anthropocene (see Hamilton, 2017). We approach these questions in the spirit of promoting better dialogue among conservationists and naturalists, parents and educators, all of whom are wrestling with questions about how to raise children and teach them about nature and its value in this new epoch.
Ultimately, we argue that several of the reasons people might offer for connecting children with nature are weaker than many might be inclined to suppose, at least given the assumptions we make here. Still, some notable reasons remain: first, as a way for people to connect with their children; second, as an attempt to slow the inevitable; and third, as a way to live out our own love for nature.
2 CONNECTION TO NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
We begin by clarifying the meaning of ‘connecting to nature’ in the Anthropocene.8 Connection to nature is generally considered to include an emotional and a cognitive component. The emotional component is something like loving nature, which comprises both deep appreciation and affection for the object of love. The cognitive component involves developing a self-concept that incorporates an interdependence with the natural world—by locating oneself in relationship to nature. A visual analogue can be seen in the ‘inclusion of nature in the self scale’ developed by Schultz (2001). It asks people to rate their connection to nature by identifying the appropriate distance between two circles, one of which represents the self and one of which represents nature.
But what, exactly, is it that environmentalists want their children to connect to? The idea of connecting to nature is contentious (Fletcher, 2017; Zylstra et al., 2019), mainly because a number of scholars have argued that it is untenable to define nature as a realm distinct from human influence (e.g. Clayton et al., 2017; Fletcher, 2017; Hamilton, 2017; Lorimer, 2012). Consequently, we are not focused here on nature in terms of a wilderness ideal, but on nature in its diverse manifestations, from more or less urban regions through to more ‘wild’ landscapes (e.g. Caro et al., 2011). It is important to recognize that—although connection to nature can be both activated or suppressed among adults—the foundations for connection are laid in childhood, and children who have early experiences with wild nature are more likely to experience that connection (Chawla, 2020; Hosaka et al., 2017).
As this last point suggests, connection to nature occurs along a continuum. At one extreme, imagine a child who rarely leaves the center of a metropolis, whether Mexico City or New York or Tokyo, a child whose connection to nature is largely limited to interactions with a few trees, the occasional bird and glimpses of sky. Soberingly, on a global scale, such a child would often inhabit a slum, whether Khayelitsha in South Africa or Neza in Mexico City, and the visible parts of nature would be filtered through smog. Moving towards the other extreme, a child may be commonly immersed within a natural space (whether a lakeshore, a savannah, or a forest), although these landscapes will vary in the degree to which they have been impacted by humans. Obviously, not all families live in places that have been damaged equally in the Anthropocene—nor are their abilities to connect to nature equitable. For simplicity’s sake, we focus on children raised in relatively urban locations, as this will be the normal experience for children given global trends (UN, 2018).
Connection to nature is also both particular and selective. It is particular in the sense that, at least when children are young, they do not connect with something as abstract as the entire natural world, but instead with particular flowers, trees and charismatic megafauna—or even bees, snakes and worms. They may also have little concern for abstractions that matter to adults. Genovart et al. (2013), for example, found that Spanish adolescents are better able to recognize exotic species of mammals and fish than native ones, probably because they encounter them more frequently.
Connection to nature is selective in the sense that positive emotions are not typically linked to all parts of nature equally. Nature, of course, is not all beautiful vistas and majestic megafauna.9 It is, in addition, hurricanes and cancer and animals dying of thirst during droughts. Additionally, it is extinction events and climate change—both of which can have natural causes, although the recent examples of concern are obviously anthropogenic. The point is just that when people talk about wanting their children to connect to nature, they generally have in mind the parts of nature that somehow serve their interests, whatever those interests may be—aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and material. They are less keen on the parts that are actively harmful; children who became overly concerned that coronaviruses were going to be eradicated might be a cause for concern. Most people have no objection to their children being attached to nature selectively; indeed, it seems like a good thing. Appreciating the selectivity matters, though; in order to inculcate connection to nature, we must be more precise about what, exactly, children are being connected to.
Returning to the main thread: Parents may have several motivations for wanting to connect their children to nature. On the face of it, this seems reasonable, both relative to the values of individual parents and from a more general environmental perspective. If parents do not connect their children to nature, those children will likely care less about it and be less aware of its continued deterioration, and thus be less likely to pass along these values to their own children, etc. This could undermine the basis for conservation efforts. As Kahn et al. (2009) observed, ‘It is hard enough to address environmental problems, such as global climate change, when people are aware of them; it is all the harder when they are not. Thus, the problem of environmental generational amnesia may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime’. Psychologists have indeed found that parents’ environmental values have a strong influence on those of their children (e.g. Casaló & Escario, 2016) and that time in nature as a child (rather than knowledge per se) is one of the strongest predictors of ‘environmental citizenship’ as an adult (e.g. Asah et al., 2018).
Nonetheless, adults have to consider the extent to which our reasons for connecting children to nature, including the desire to share our values with them, hold up in the Anthropocene. Our argument here turns on recognizing that nature is no longer stable in the way we have come to assume in the Holocene, and that it will continue to change—perhaps more and more rapidly—even under the most optimistic scenarios. Strikingly, for example, children are currently receiving education about a world that is arguably fading away: a world with polar bears and orangutans and rhinos. The pioneering work of Glenn Albrecht et al. (2007) was the first to describe a new form of psychological distress people may suffer: ‘As opposed to nostalgia—the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home—solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’. This is a particular form of distress for those who are connected to nature—one echoed in the quotation from Bill McKibben that opens this paper and in the commonplace observation that environmentalists inhabit ‘a world of wounds’. And it merely compounds more widespread versions of environmentally inflected psychological burdens, such as climate change depression, climate change anxiety and ecological grief (see Burke et al., 2018; Clayton, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).
Perhaps, then, promoting a love for nature is a bit like promoting a yearning for the Roman Empire. There is no real possibility of recovering that world, and a child who values it may be both dissatisfied with, and unfit for, modern society. Likewise, if there is no real possibility of recovering the natural world that people have so long valued, a child who acquires those values may simply inherit a nostalgia for a world that is no longer available.
With all that in mind, perhaps it is better to prepare children for a future that is increasingly likely rather than for a past for which adults feel nostalgia. Again, we say this not as technophiles who wish to escape to the stars, but as nature-loving parents who are considering how best to navigate our unfortunate present.
3 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Does it make sense to raise children differently given the severity of the environmental crisis? How might this question be addressed? The most obvious way to approach it is to ask whether it is good for children to have certain values. This leads us to examine the nature of human well-being. There are several theories that philosophers have developed about what makes human lives go well—that is, about what is good for individual human beings, rather than what is good for society, the environment or anything else. Two of the most prominent theories are hedonism and the objective list theory. We consider their implications in turn.
3.1 Hedonism
Hedonism is not the view that people crave sensual pleasures. Rather, it is the view that positive and negative affective states—pleasures and pains, happiness and unhappiness—are the only things that contribute to someone’s well-being. All else equal, hedonism says that your life goes better insofar as it has more positive affective states; it goes worse insofar as it has more negative affective states. Given this theory of well-being, the question of whether it is good for children to have certain values boils down to this: does having those values produce more positive versus negative affective states?
Insofar as a child who is connected to nature values experiences in nature and thus is more likely to pursue those experiences, it is possible that the experiences do indeed produce more positive versus negative affective states. After all, there appear to be many important benefits to such experiences (see Children & Nature Network, 2021). Consider this summary from Kuo (2015):
Contact with nature has been tied to health in a plenitude of studies. Time spent in and around tree-lined streets, gardens, parks, and forested and agricultural lands is consistently linked to objective, long-term health outcomes. The less green a person’s surroundings, the higher their risk of morbidity and mortality – even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other possible confounding variables. The range of specific health outcomes tied to nature is startling, including depression and anxiety disorder, diabetes mellitus, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), various infectious diseases, cancer, healing from surgery, obesity, birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal complaints, migraines, respiratory disease, and others … Finally, neighborhood greenness has been consistently tied to life expectancy and all-cause mortality.
However, we caution against drawing unduly optimistic conclusions from these studies. Insofar as children have limited access to nature, valuing and enjoying it may be a source of frustration rather than various benefits. This is, of course, the main concern that drives our paper. Promoting love for nature makes sense if children will have access to what they love. But if the object of love is lost, promoting love of nature seems like a way of making children vulnerable rather than happy (Chawla, 2020).
There is also a risk of overstating the significance of the research on connection to nature and various health outcomes. What many of these studies show is that there are appreciable benefits associated with being around trees and running water; they do not necessarily show that human beings benefit from extensive wild nature per se, and certainly not the kind required to, say, conserve many of the species that are currently being lost. Although some research has demonstrated the importance of greater biodiversity for human mental health and a great deal of research shows the importance of healthy ecosystems for physical health, much of the research on nature’s psychological benefits uses fairly minimal standards for nature—a view out a window, a plant in an office, or even a painting on a wall (Aerts et al., 2018). It seems plausible that some of these health benefits could be explained by factors not inherently tied to nature, much less to the kind of nature that is at issue in the environmental crisis. One can imagine, for instance, creating artificial environments that are less stressful and have superior air quality, which may well have the same effects as the natural environment. It is also the case that greenspaces can be preserved without our managing to preserve polar bears or coral reefs; even if there are benefits from being around trees per se, that does not necessarily mean being around native trees, or extensive biodiversity, or what have you (although see Lev et al., 2020).
So, while there may be a sense in which experiences of nature benefit children, it would be cold comfort to environmentalist parents if the ‘nature’ they experience is simply a manicured park. This strongly suggests that while environmentalist parents probably do want to benefit their children by teaching them to love nature, it is a particular sort of nature they want their children to value. The target is not ‘whatever provides certain psychological and health benefits’, but rather the rich biological and ecological diversity that, of course, is now so severely threatened.
3.2 The objective list theory
Consider a second theory of well-being. Objective list theorists say that some things are good for you even if they do not produce more happiness. For instance, it may be good to know certain truths about the world, even if they are not comfortable or encouraging. In the current context, for instance, there are the truths about the ways in which people are damaging the natural world: on balance, any particular individual might not get any pleasure (and indeed, might experience some significant psychological discomfort) when staring down the fact that they may soon live in a world with no Great Barrier Reef. Still, you might think that it would be bad for that person to put their head in the sand—not just because they thereby ensure that they will not be some small part of broader solutions, but because they are less in touch with reality as a result of not knowing. It is bad for them, not just bad for the world.
This view is sometimes developed by appealing to the idea of eudaimonia or flourishing. According to ancient Greek thought, beings achieve eudaimonia when they are operating as they ought to operate, when they are living out their natures and being the best versions of the kinds of things they are. On such views, things can be good for you without affecting your affective state. It is often thought that when humans achieve eudaimonia, they will have a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as personal autonomy and feelings of connection (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a sense of connection to nature is associated with this particular approach to well-being (Cervinka et al., 2012).
Even if we grant the objective list theory of well-being, though, we do not yet have an argument for the importance of loving, or connecting to, nature, but only for knowing things about nature. To get that stronger claim, someone might insist that it is good for us to love things that are valuable; and, since nature is valuable, it is good for us to love nature—even if it is sometimes costly, in hedonic terms, for us to do so.10 This is sometimes how people think about appreciating art. The view is something like: it is good to be the sort of person who experiences awe in front of masterpieces, as that means you have developed the ability to be sensitive to—and richly appreciate—certain forms of value.
Note, however, that there are at least three problems with this argument. First, even if it is good for us to love things that are valuable and nature is indeed valuable, the objective list theory does not imply that it is good for us to love nature all things considered. After all, the objective list theory agrees with hedonism that happiness and unhappiness are relevant to well-being; it simply disagrees with hedonism that they are the only things relevant to well-being. If the hedonic costs of loving nature are high enough—as, we worry, they will be for many children—then it is not good for them to love nature all things considered, even if it is good for them in one respect.
Second, while it may be good to love things that are valuable, it does not follow that it is good to love everything that is valuable. It may be that there is only so much room in a life to devote attention and effort to the things that are loved. This suggests the need to be selective in terms of the values that adults promote in our children. Additionally, there is a significant difference between loving nature and appropriately appreciating its value. We are raising the possibility that adults should not teach children to be enamoured with nature, not that they should not teach them to see its worth. This is akin to discouraging children from being enamoured with Jackson Pollock’s paintings, although it may still be important for them to see why they are valuable as works of art. You can appreciate the value of a thing without being depressed by its loss, as demonstrated by most people’s ability to watch the news without descending into despair. Again, promoting love for nature may be a bit like promoting love for the Roman Empire, rather than an appreciation for the way it advanced some people’s interests at the time.
Third, this argument for loving nature depends on nature having intrinsic value. For those already enamoured with the environment, this may be an attractive view. But it is worth wondering how it could be defended. After all, it is notable that many environmentalists retreat to instrumental defences of nature in public fora: they appeal to ecosystem services (but see Dempsey & Robertson, 2012). This may be some indication that the arguments for the intrinsic value of natural systems are less persuasive than they may at first appear (see Newman et al., 2017). Moreover, even in private, conservationists would likely acknowledge that the view that nature has intrinsic value has some unpalatable implications if not carefully qualified: recalling the earlier points about coronavirus extinction, very few of us want to say that all dimensions of nature are valuable.
3.3 What is good for parents?
Perhaps we have taken too atomistic of an approach. We are writing as environmentalists, so our reasons for wanting our children to love nature are not simply about promoting the good for our children. Compare: if we love classical music, we might want our children to love it as well simply because we think that classical music is worth valuing. But we also might want our children to love classical music because having shared values makes them people to whom we can relate. Shared values can enhance our relationship in a way that divergent values may not. It is like passing along a culture, and thus extending our legacy. Many Indigenous peoples, for example, describe relationships with the natural world and experience this as a component of health and well-being. If children were to reject this worldview (as they were sometimes forced to do by colonizing forces), it might be seen as a disturbing rejection of those cultural values.
Granted, people often fail to pass on their values. When these values are not central to our identity, the differences between us and our children can be occasion for celebration—we learn their unique contours as individuals. But when these values are more central to who we are—when our children reject our religious tradition (or our lack of one), when they are not concerned about the causes we hold dear—such differences can create distance. In many cases, that is not the end of the world. But the gulf is no less real for that.
In any case, some people may find themselves emotionally constituted such that, if their children were not to have certain values with respect to the environment, they would find it hard to relate to their children. So, even if it is not good for our children to have certain values with respect to the environment, we may well find ourselves determined to pass these parts of ourselves along. In so doing, are we acting selfishly? Very possibly. And yet it is hard to criticize selfishness in this context, as it is in service of sustaining the relationships that are most central to our lives. Many people would find it difficult to shrug off their values with respect to the environment as simply one of the many differences between generations. To the contrary, these values feature prominently in their identities as environmentalists and nature lovers. So this may be one of many cases where who we are has an enormous influence on what it makes sense to do.
Obviously, this is a far cry from the defence of environmental parenting we might have wanted. If the best we can say is that we are trying to connect our children to nature so that we can connect to our children, then while we will have a perfectly understandable rationale, it is no longer a rationale that is really about nature. Nature is, on this view, just one more means to an end—an attitude that, of course, is part of what led to the environmental crisis in the first place. Obviously enough, this charge could be levelled just as fiercely against the previous attempted justification, the one that tried to explain the aim of connecting children to nature in terms of their own well-being. Still, we have indeed found a reason to encourage our children to love nature, and that is notable. Can we, perhaps, strengthen that reason with some additional considerations?
3.4 What is good for nature?
At this juncture, the obvious move is to revert to more traditional arguments about creating the next generation of environmentalists for nature’s sake—not ours or our children’s (even if they also benefit). The thought might be that teaching children to love nature is the best protection against the myriad cultural and economic forces that promote a purely instrumental view of nature’s worth.
There are two problems with this. The first is that if this really is an era defined by foregone environmental conclusions—if humans are past the point of being able to prevent numerous species losses, climate change and the loss of various ecosystems—then it will be harder to defend teaching children to love nature for nature’s sake. Many of the valuable things people would hope to preserve simply cannot be preserved. Likewise, it will be difficult to defend teaching children to love nature for society’s sake. After all, the ultimate reason why conservationists want certain values to be common in society is because those values can, in the aggregate, make a difference to the environmental crisis. If humans can indeed avert that crisis, then it makes sense for parents to do their part and raise their children accordingly. But under the assumption that this crisis cannot be averted, then parents’ reason to do their part evaporates.
Second, and rather bleakly, it is not clear that children would be making a mistake in having a more instrumental view of nature’s worth—or, at least, an instrumental view of the worth of the nature that they will inherit. To appreciate this point, imagine a beautifully maintained classic car, perfectly detailed and lovely in all the ways such a vehicle can be. Now suppose that this car is used and abused to the point where all its aesthetic virtues have been lost; it is only good for short trips to and from the grocery store. In such circumstances, there is no mistake in having an instrumental view of the car, even if it would have been a mistake not to have appreciated it differently in its former glory. Likewise, if much of nature’s value is bound up with its beauty, diversity and complexity, then it may not be a mistake—or much of one—to devalue an uglier, more homogenous and flattened natural world.
3.5 What is good—Revisited
There may, however, be some better arguments for encouraging children to love nature. First, from a nature-centric perspective, it is generally accepted that people who feel connected to nature are more likely to act on its behalf. While it is certainly true that humans cannot completely prevent species loss and ecological degradation at this point, we recognize that it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Even given the assumption that radical change is inevitable, people may still be able to slow it, thereby increasing the longevity of what evolution has wrought—both for its own sake and for those who will be able to enjoy it. Teaching children to feel a connection to the natural world will, we hope, make it more likely that larger steps are taken to protect it. This pushes the problem back, of course: our children may not be able to run this argument for their children, or at least not for their grandchildren. But we are not looking for reasons that will last until the end of time; we are looking for reasons that can guide parents making choices in the present.
Second, from an anthropocentric point of view, connecting to nature does seem to have benefits for people. The biophilia hypothesis proposed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (1984) suggested that people have an instinctive tendency to connect to the natural environment. Ecopsychologists and others have interpreted this to mean that such a connection is necessary for mental health (Kahn & Hasbach, 2012). As stated above, there is evidence that a connection to nature is associated with indicators of psychological well-being; and exposure to natural scenery appears to enhance people’s social relationships and not just their individual well-being (Castelo et al., 2021; Cervinka et al., 2012; Olivos & Clayton, 2017). It is unclear how much nature, and what kind of nature, is necessary to establish a connection, but establishing a connection to nature appears to have benefits beyond merely a positive mood.
Finally, promoting love for nature can be important as an expression of our own love for nature, where the odds of success are largely irrelevant to whether we act on its behalf. For those of us who are already environmentalists, the destruction of the natural world is a vision of hell. Accordingly, we continue to raise our children to love the natural world in the hope that our actions will make a difference, even if the odds are very long (e.g. Bain & Bongiorno, 2019; Ojala, 2017; Pihkala, 2017). This is the view that is expressed powerfully in an arresting exchange in Barbara Kingsolver’s (2012) novel, Flight Behaviour, between Ovid, a scientist studying monarchs and Dellarobia, the protagonist:
Ovid: ‘Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction’.
Dellarobia: ‘So you’re one of the people that can? … Watch an extinction’.
Ovid: ‘If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?’
Dellarobia: ‘You do everything you can … And then, I guess, everything you can’t. You keep doing, so your heart won’t stop’.
4 CONCLUSION
These arguments are tentative, and leave out a great many important issues. For instance, even if adults should try to promote connection to nature, there remain difficult questions about methods. Our children may connect to nature quite differently than past generations, not only because of the shifting-baseline syndrome (Soga & Gaston, 2018), but also because their lives are caught up in swirling socio-cultural and technological changes that remain (and will remain) foreign to most parents (Clayton et al., 2017). It is possible, for example, that digital games and screen time may help connect children to nature, although that is hardly clear (e.g. Edwards & Larson, 2020; Fletcher, 2017). There are also hard problems about how children’s connection to nature should be informed by the need to engage with issues of justice. How can children engage in conservation that ‘takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics’ (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019)? As children engage with nature in the ways of the future, it may be even more important for parents, and other involved adults, to facilitate other ways of knowing and to actively encounter ‘the paradoxical tension between endings and possibilities’ (Moser, 2019) and the mourning (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017) demanded by the times. As parents and also as teachers and as a society, we need to investigate ways to provide children with the tools that will give them emotional resilience in a time of existential crisis (Baker et al., 2021; Ojala, 2017; Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019).
Our aim here has not been to provide definitive answers to fraught questions about whether and how to promote connection to nature among children. Obviously, individual parents will have to apply their own wisdom to the unique experience of raising each particular child. We have instead tried to prompt a more systematic conversation about these questions — a conversation that, as parents and environmentalists, we hope our children will eventually join.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We appreciate comments on the draft manuscript from Rachael Edwards and Clare Palmer and from the editors and reviewers, including Thomas Beery and Dave Kendal.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS
B.M.H.L. conceived the project; B.M.H.L. and B.F. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All three authors contributed to revisions and have approved the manuscript for publication.
ENDNOTES
1Our edition of Louv’s book concludes with a ‘field guide’ containing ‘100 actions we can take’.
2Although it is perhaps not such a curious disconnect if one recalls the proportion of humanity that has little regard for nature and its value; for a brilliant satire on this point, see Chapron et al. (2018).
3We adopt this term with awareness that it is controversial; for discussion, see Bilgrami (2020), Hamilton (2017), Haraway (2016) and Tsing et al. (2017), among many other commentators. We are also wary of our question being interpreted as an apologia for the destruction of nature, which we wish to unequivocally declare that it is not.
4Other scholars have considered the reasons for our denial and inaction as well as the inertial and psychological reasons we assume for the best (e.g. Hulme 2009; Hamilton 2010; Norgaard 2011).
5For a related, entertaining and thoughtful engagement with ‘despair’, see McMurry (2018).
6One might think that this would be all of us, although many commentators take a decidedly less optimistic view of the human race–not to mention the decision many couples have made to not have children.
7Someone might object to the very question. They might say that if we are going to change the way we encourage our children to relate to nature for the sake of their well-being, then why would not we change the way we encourage them to relate to other things for the sake of their well-being? For instance, it is awful to lose pets and romantic partners. Should we discourage our children from loving pets and people, in the interest of preventing them from suffering loss? By way of reply, we should note that parents sometimes do discourage children from loving too much; they recommend maintaining perspective on the objects of their affection. For example, some parents may have had pertinent conversations with their teenagers about high school relationships. Accordingly, something similar may be good advice when it comes to nature. The obvious difference is that, at some point, we hope our children will form lasting bonds with people (and perhaps other organisms, too). If that is the aim, then there comes a time when reserve is inappropriate. At some point, most romantic relationships require you to be ‘all in’. Our partners expect us to invest in our relationships in ways that assume their longevity. But your relationship with nature is not like that: nature itself has no expectations.
8Although we focus on the concept of ‘connection to nature’, our argument could alternatively be couched in terms of the ‘extinction of experience’. Using the classification of Gaston & Soga, 2020, we are considering whether, to some extent, reduced childhood interactions with nature may be adaptive at this point in human history. Note that we are not promoting the absolute extinction of these interactions, although perhaps shift emphasis to interactions with living organisms as opposed to wild nature [which Gaston and Soga (2020) refer to as a ‘broader’ view].
9E. O. Wilson’s (1984) biophilia hypothesis, notably, implies that a negative emotional response to some aspects of nature can also indicate a connection, albeit not the kind most relevant here.
10We can get a similar result via an indirect route. People might think that it is good for our children to develop a sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity. And they might think that one important way to do that involves promoting love for nature. In that case, it might be good for them to love nature even if loving it involves some hedonic costs: the price of a sense of wonder is being saddened by the way that nature is being damaged, but wonder is worth the price.
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•International policy discourses on culture and sustainability are anthropocentric, economic growth-oriented and methodologically nationalist, and international cultural policy organisations and documents, such as United Nations resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021, have been impotent in intertwining culture with ecological sustainability.
•Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 is analyzed as an examplar of this anthropocentric and economist discourse.
•The ideological underpinnings of cultural policy are the primary reason why culture has not been seriously recognized in international sustainability policies. A profound shift away from anthropocentric worldviews, growth-oriented ideologies, and methodologically nationalist frameworks is needed.
•This ‘new’ understanding of culture in international cultural policies have to cover nature and ecology and see humans and their culture as part of larger ecosystemic framework. Incorporating such a view in public policy requires a new kind of “planetary cultural policy”.
Abstract
Many artistic expressions call for cultural, social and political change. Though the policy environments in which they emerge remain predominantly wedded to a consumption-driven creative economy. In doing so, they tacitly endorse a methodologically nationalist perspective on artistic expression, trade in creative goods and services, and cultural identity. By using the United Nations resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 as a case in point, we argue that the language of this document, which reflects the current hegemonic discourse of creative economy, misses its target when claiming to promote sustainability because it is (1) anthropocentric, (2) growth-focused and (3) methodologically nationalist. Through a discourse analysis of this particular UN resolution, we demonstrate the multiple and conflicting connections between culture and sustainability through the perspective of planetary well-being. The main target of our criticism is the anthropocentric nature of sustainability discourses, but also their unreserved promotion of perpetual economic growth. In response, we articulate the need for a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric worldviews, growth-oriented ideologies, and methodologically nationalist frameworks to enable environmentally engaged cultural policies and citizens.
1. Introduction: the tension between planet, people and culture
In November 2019, the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared that 2021 would be the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. The idea of the theme year was formulated in discussions between United Nations (UN) agencies, including UN-Habitat, UNESCO and UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; recently rebranded as UN Trade & Development), which also consulted representatives of pro-creative economy organisations such as the OECD and the Asia-Europe Foundation. Indonesia drafted the resolution text, which was then presented to a group of representatives of 27 countries from all inhabited continents. The final and published version of the resolution is a consensus of these multi-layered discussions. Rather than being a final result that every involved state can fully rally behind, in practice a “consensus” text is precisely one containing conflicts. It is through the subtleties of phrasing that consenting parties ensure that all other parties can recognise their red lines, pet peeves, and concerns in the text, without (seemingly) ceding too much ground. A consensus is therefore not a strong joint position, but merely a position that no one strongly objects to.
Much like other United Nations documents, the resolution commits loyalty to the background organisations and their policies and programmes, as well as the international organisations and their branches that work on the topics of the resolution:
Recalling the Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which states that the organization, as part of its purposes and functions, will maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge by encouraging cooperation among the nations in all branches of intellectual activity, and noting the report of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on culture and sustainable development, in which it is stated that cultural and creative industries should be part of economic growth strategies […] Welcoming the efforts of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other entities of the United Nations system to promote the creative economy for sustainable development. (United Nations, 2019, 2, emphasis added)
The resolution is, therefore, not so much a visionary document but largely a reflection of past initiatives and interventions. The document is thus a palimpsest through which decades of ideas and initiatives filter through.
The key argument of the resolution is that the creative industries can, should and do promote sustainable and innovation-based economic growth. The resolution mainstreams culture in and for sustainability by defining culture above all through its economic significance and national scope: “[The resolution] encourages all to observe the year in accordance with national priorities to raise awareness, promote cooperation and networking, encourage sharing best practices and experiences, enhance human resource capacity, promote an enabling environment at all levels as well as tackle the challenges of the creative economy” (UNCTAD, 2021). UNCTAD led the implementation of the theme year policies and activities in consultation with UNESCO and other relevant UN agencies.
Despite the triumphant tone of the resolution, culture plays a minor role in policies for sustainable development (Duxbury et al., 2017). If anything, it plays a contradictory role: art and culture can certainly play a positive part, but the creative industries have an enormous environmental impact that needs to be addressed (Miller, 2018). This is partly because of how the sector operates, but also because of the sponsorship connections many arts institutions maintain with fossil fuel producers, airlines and car manufacturers (Evans, 2015).
Our article builds on the following streams and debates in cultural policy: the dominant discourses and trends in international cultural policies, the economisation of cultural policies, the position of creative economies and industries in national economies, and, most of all, the meaning and position of culture in policies and politics for an ecologically sustainable world, that is, the rethinking of the human/culture and nature relationship. Brkldly, and eventually, the focus of our article is on the relation between cultural policy and cosmopolitan citizenship and identity, we posit that a new kind of human actorship in the era of climate crisis, one that includes the idea of human beings as members of the planetary community/entity. This is because we think we need more critical use of comprehensive research and policy concepts cultural policies. Such concepts still remain disconnected from the commonplace understandings of sustainability in cultural policy, as we explain in this paper. We use concepts such as the planetary well-being approach (Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Brundtland Commission, 1987) down-to-earth approach, which combine ecological, social, cultural and economic perspectives, allowing us to transcend the afore-mentioned tensions and dualisms. (A) They allow us to move towards a more robust and permanent approach when it comes to human and cultural actions – be they economic, anthropocentric or related to identity/citizenship – within natural ecosystems. (B) They enable us to rethink what culture should mean to become a key concept in the manifold efforts for sustainable futures. (C) We can use them to break the local/national-global dualism and reconstruct cosmopolitan or cosmopolitical (Beck, 2016) approaches.
This article thus explores how international policy documents frame culture, creative economy and culture’s role in sustainability. We look, in particular, at the documents and narratives proposed by United Nations Agencies, because they and their sub-actors pursue trendsetting in terms of what national, regional and local cultural policies focus on, and how culture should or could be approached (Pirnes, 2008). We are aware that there are local cultural policies and practices, which include critical and eco-sensitive features (see e.g. Bell et al., 2011; Gross & Wilson, 2020; Perry & Symons, 2019) and which potentially could be scaled at least to national level policies and practices, but to study them and their potential impacts is a topic for another article. Nevertheless, one of the key issues in international cultural policies on sustainability in the near-future is to change the orientation radically from one-sided economism towards discursive formulation and facilitation of ecological and non-anthropocentric ‘sustainable culture’. Part of this should be the rebuilding these policies more bottom-up than before in the sense that local ecological, planetary and non-capitalist forms of cultural production would get more attention in them.
The overall question this article sets out to answer is thus: Do the hegemonic creative economy and climate change discourses of international cultural and sustainability policies recognise the urgent need to rethink the human/nature and culture/nature relations? This is particularly relevant as climate change itself is a tricky concept that can be characterised as a “hyperobject” (Morton, 2013) or as an “event” (Tavory & Wagner-Pacifici, 2022). The main target of our criticism is the anthropocentric nature of the resolution and its unreserved promotion of perpetual economic growth, which are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability (Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Jackson, 2021; Raworth, 2017) and “organismal needs”, as we explain below (Kortetmäki et al., 2021). By using the above concepts, we try to articulate the need for a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric, growth-oriented ideologies and methodologically nationalist frameworks to enable environmentally engaged cultural policies.
2. Data, methods and theory
Through a discourse analysis of the resolution, we demonstrate the multiple and conflicting connections between culture and sustainability through the perspective of planetary well-being and other relevant current social scientific theories.
Our primary data consists of a single document: the resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2019), which declared 2021 to be that year, to be led and implemented by UNCTAD and Indonesia. This decision – together with the more general policy discursive and organisational history – has influenced the way the relation of creativity and sustainability is understood in the Resolution as UNCTAD unexceptionally defines it with the strong economy association (see e.g. UNCTAD, 2022) and Indonesian creative policies have also a long tradition of linking it to economic growth (De Beukelaer, 2021).
The resolution is exemplary of how a cultural policy commonly connects culture and creativity to sustainable development. As we explore in section “The context of the resolution” the document under scrutiny is a political culmination of two decades of UN inter-agency work on the issue. It is an apt summary of the issues addressed, and given its limited length it exposes the discursive shortcuts inherent to the discourse – which often remain buried in verbose reports. The document is exemplary in its message and useful in its brevity, even if it offers a simplified conceptualisation of the creative economy. However, the resolution is not norm-setting. It rather reflects existing norms and concerns. Like many such United Nations documents, it offers (almost by definition) a consensus text of how states see a certain issue.
Due to the importance of this history and context, we have also looked beyond this single document by engaging with other recent documents of international organisations to describe more comprehensively the current hegemonic discourse on cultural sustainability and its construction over time in the field of international cultural policies (see below).
We use rhetorical discourse analysis as our method for analysing the resolution. It means that we concentrate on “textual practices” (Fairclough, 1995, 185): how certain kinds of words and expressions are used to construct certain kinds of definitions of culture and sustainability and to convince the reader of their validity (cf. Johnstone & Eisenhart, 2008). We also pay attention to other levels of discursive formation by shedding light on the organisational roles and practices that influence the messages of the resolution and their value in international and national cultural policies (cf. Pyykkönen, 2012). Before the actual discourse analysis, we provide a theoretically-driven content analysis of the resolution to initially clarify its key ways of speaking about culture and sustainability in the light of our theoretical framework.
We use multiple theories and theoretical perspectives to interpret the results and further discuss our findings. The first theoretical perspective focuses on the cultural economy (e.g., Throsby, 2010) and the idea of a so-called value-based economy (Klamer, 2017), which aim to emphasise the role of culture in orthodox economic thinking. The second theoretical perspective concentrates on recent social scientific and anthropological theories that attempt to rethink and reformulate the human/culture/nature relations. Here our aim is to show how the definitions of culture and sustainability – under the umbrella of the creative economy discourse – tend to be growth-centred, anthropocentric and methodologically nationalistic (Beck, 2006; 2016; Latour, 2018; Malm, 2018). The third theoretical perspective focuses on planetary well-being, which to our understanding further directs the criticism at the conventional culture and sustainability nexus by suggesting orientations and practices that intertwine culture – and policies concerning it – with our planetary existence and identity in a novel way (Kortetmäki et al., 2021). Besides planetary well-being, we rely on Tim Jackson’s (2009, 2021) ideas on prosperity and post-growth to put practical flesh on the theoretical bones of the necessary change.
Building on these theoretical and conceptual foundations, we strive for a new conceptualisation of “planetary cultural policy”, which consists of such policy discourses and practices on heritage, arts, creative work and identity in which nature and culture are seen as part of the same systemic totality, and the intrinsic and other values of cultural activities are determined based on how they promote ecological sustainability.
3. The hegemonic discourses of culture and sustainability
Sustainability and culture have been discussed in the national and international cultural policy contexts for over 20 years from various perspectives: What does “culture” stand for in culture and sustainability? What is the role of culture among the pillars of social, economic, and ecological sustainability? What is cultural sustainability? And, above all, how should cultural policies tackle sustainability issues? Due to the diversity of interests, intentions, expectations, discourses and related practices, sustainability does not have any single form in cultural policies. Similarly, researchers argue that culture has remained too vague to be a pragmatic policy issue, confined to the margins of national and international policies for sustainability (e.g., Sabatini, 2019; Soini & Dessein, 2016). Others claim that proponents of cultural sustainability have not managed to intertwine culture with the other pillars of sustainability, especially ecological sustainability, which has diluted the significance of culture in sustainability policies (e.g., Kagan, 2011). For instance, culture is not explicitly mentioned in any of the titles of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, 2018; Vlassis, 2015).
As a reaction – less openly expressed – to this vagueness and marginalisation of culture in global sustainability policies, key international cultural policy agencies such as UNESCO and UNCTAD have embraced the economisation of culture (De Beukelaer & Spence, 2019; Garner & O’Connor, 2019; Pyykkönen, 2012).Despite some voices that have tried to expand the hegemonic economic reductionism of value (‘economism’) in more or less liberal societies by emphasising the social and educational values of cultural expressions (e.g., Klamer, 2017; Throsby, 2010), the research on this move has been ontologically uncritical the “economy”. The issue of how culture should contribute to sustainability – especially to its ecological dimension, which we consider the most critical and significant one – in this intertwinement has also remained almost unstudied in realpolitik.
This economism in the culture and sustainability discourse – and the general understanding of culture’s value – is underpinned by widely shared and ideologised significations of the capitalist market economy. In particular, the neoclassical theories of economic growth (Solow, 1999), Schumpeterian ideas on innovation, creativity and entrepreneurialism (Schumpeter, 1942; see also Potts, 2009) and related political ideas and trends (e.g., Hautamäki, 2010) have had a tremendous but thus far under-researched impact on cultural policies. These ideologies have created and strengthened a global discourse according to which the wealth and well-being of the world, nations and people are dependent on increasing productivity and economic growth. Through education, consumerism and national financial and economic policies, for instance, and through being entwined with the globalising knowledges and practices of capitalist production, these principles and their logics have become naturalised presumptions in our societies and cultures (Jackson, 2009; 2021). According to some current researchers of philosophy, environmental sociology and politics, capitalist market economism has intertwined with two cornerstones of our Western culture: anthropocentrism and methodological nationalism (Beck, 2006; Malm, 2018). Latour (2018) argues that the cultural mindset stemming from this hinders us from thinking of ourselves and our actions – practical, discursive, political etc. – as “terrestrial”, as being part of the earth and its ecosystems when acting both locally and globally.
Over time, the principles of capitalist production and market economy have also become normalised in cultural policies that guide the creative and cultural industries (McGuigan, 2015), particularly after key international players such as UNESCO and UNCTAD have adopted them as norms (De Beukelaer & Spence, 2019; Pyykkönen, 2012). In the case of UNESCO, it has meant the culmination of its long “struggle” to justify the significance of culture and cultural diversity by creating such a numerical and measurable framework discourse for them. This framework resonates positively with both the dominant rationalities of global politics and the interests of nation states and their “methodological nationalism”. UNCTAD has helped popularise the “creative economy” discourse since 2004. UNCTAD’s ostensible goal is to enhance the prosperity and wealth of the poorest countries by facilitating access to global markets for their products. Both UNCESCO and UNCTAD implicitly ground their work on anthropocentrism: the ideas and the actions they support are from humans, for humans. Nature is an instrument of their creative expressions and economic efforts.
One might argue that this particular resolution – and the work of the United Nations in general – is already “planetary” or “universal”. We disagree, because United Nations agencies are intergovernmental forums that serve to find a common ground among nations through multilateral processes (De Beukelaer & Vlassis, 2019), not to foster an overarching set of principles that serve humanity or the planet – let alone the “universe” – as a whole. Hence, the discourse we criticise is inter-national at best, whereas what we call for is a fundamental shift in the normative foundations of global governance, by prioritising the planetary above the (inter)national. In our approach and in the context of this analysis, planetarism means that in global cultural policy, in addition to human values and well-being – and against the dominant emphasis on economic value – the values and well-being of the environment has to be seriously and thoroughly considered, and to reconsider the concept of culture and to rescale it so that it intertwines with the nature and not detaches from it, as has been mostly typical for the hegemonic narrative of modernism (Koistinen et al., 2024; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; see also Latour, 2017). Alasuutari (2016) argues that policy discourses across most domains have become “synchronised”, not through coercion, but through the voluntary creation of epistemic communities. In this discourse making and identicalisation the supranational organisations, such as UN and EU, are significant players due to their legal and legitimate grounds to determine the dissemination of ideas and discourses to international and intranational policymaking. These kinds of organisations take a clear step forward on putting the ecological sustainability as the first and main goal of the cultural policies. They thus actually, though not inherently, act as an ‘obligatory passage point’ for planetarisation of cultural policies. Signs of this can be already found from the documents such as New European Bauhaus (European Commission, 2021) and Pact for the Future (United Nations, 2024), and some related policy initiatives. How these changes take place in practice, is always an empirical question and a topic of deep discussion and observation beyond the scope of this article, where our focus is on global cultural policymaking discourses.
Research debates have been more diverse than the policy discussions, especially the dominant policy discourses. Among the best-known research publications on culture and sustainability are those originating in the research network “Investigating Cultural Sustainability” (which was active 2011–2015), which brought together more than 50 European researchers. One of the key findings of this collaborative research is that culture can function for, in and as sustainable development (Dessein et al., 2015; Soini & Birkeland, 2014). Consequently, if cultural policy wants to broaden its scope of influence, it should opt to focus on the “for” sustainable development perspective because it allows the development of the sustainability of cultural expressions as well as the use of the cultural sphere and policies to enhance other aspects of sustainability, especially the ecological one (Duxbury et al., 2017). One of the key perspectives in policy reports and research papers on culture and sustainability is that they strive for “mainstreaming culture” by explaining it and its meanings next to the other pillars of sustainability. In our view, this, however, involves the “risk” that analyses merely concentrate on explaining the value of different kinds of cultural expressions and thus usually justify the economic determination of culture (e.g., Sabatini, 2019).
While some of the above-mentioned studies briefly suggest that the interrelatedness of biological and cultural forms of diversity should be enhanced in the culture and sustainability discourse/praxis (see, e.g., Dessein et al., 2015), we try to critically renew and complement them. We argue that the “mainstreaming of culture” should not be realised on an “anything goes” or economic basis, but rather by binding culture strongly and explicitly to the planetary and ecological aspects of sustainability. This does not only concern economism, but applies to anthropocentrism and methodological nationalism as well: the “planetary mainstreaming of culture” should consider principles, solutions and identities/citizen-subjectivities broader than national and human ones – ones that are both cosmopolitical and ecosystemic (see also Beck, 2006; Malm, 2018).
4. The context of the resolution
The concept of sustainable development was introduced in 1987 by the “Brundtland Commission”, formally known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission, 1987). It first defined “sustainable development” in its report Our Common Future. This document aimed to respond to the environmental threat of global warming and the need to raise the living standards of those in so-called developing countries as well as to ensure a focus on economic growth, which was seen as one of the key indicators of economically sustainable development. Culture was not an explicit topic in the report, although many of its themes were related to it. When culture was first explicated as an issue of sustainability in international cultural policy during the UNESCO Decade of Culture and Development (1988–1997), it was connected to socioeconomic dimensions. Culture was seen as a root and a driving force of economic development and social improvement in so-called developing countries (WCCD, 1995). As we already referred, this stance has been predominant in UNCTAD’s and UNESCO’s recent approaches on culture and sustainability.
UNCTAD has been instrumental in framing culture in and for sustainability, especially in so-called developing countries. UNCTAD has been greatly involved in the international creative economy policy discourses since 2004, which also marked their beginning globally. Its programmes and documents have framed culture and sustainability to describe the broader discursive practice that is indelibly linked to the resolution and its overwhelmingly economic tone. UNCTAD uses programmes and reports to turn its rich datasets on trade in creative goods and services into analyses and trends. The best known is the Creative Economy Programme, dating back to 2004 (see, e.g., UNCTAD, 2022). The programme’s main purpose is to generate “economic information through a trade lens, to understand past trends and project into the future and to promote data-led understanding of trade in creative goods and services, intellectual property, ideas and imagination” (ibid.). At its core are the so-called Creative Economy Mandates (see ibid.), one of which is the resolution we are studying here. The mandates are based on the research and policy analyses that UNCTAD produces with its partners. The central ones for UNCTAD’s meaning making are creative industry reports such as Creative Industry 4.0: Towards a New Globalized Creative Economy (UNCTAD, 2022), which aims to argue not only that the creative economy is crucial for national and global economies, but also that the creative industries can actually be key drivers of the technological change and, thus, the large-scale economic and livelihood changes of the near future.
UNESCO, whose mandate explicitly covers culture, is another key actor in defining culture in, for and as sustainability. Since the afore-mentioned Brundtland Commission (1987) report, it has explicitly discussed sustainability as a key issue to enhance through its policies. UNESCO’s declarations and conventions – such as Our Creative Diversity (WCCD, 1995), Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Heritage (UNESCO, 2001) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005) – have outlined UNESCO’s arguments on the need to secure a sustainable future and apply culture in it. One might even say that UNESCO has been the prima driver of novel significations and contexts for culture within the framework of sustainability (cf. Dessein et al., 2015, 45, 51). The 2005 UNESCO Convention is a useful starting point for analysing the organisation’s rationale on culture and sustainability as it stresses the economic significance of cultural expressions and the construction of strong cultural industries (De Beukelaer et al., 2015; Garner & O’Connor, 2019; Pyykkönen, 2012).
UNESCO’s work is not only about making meanings, but also consists of collecting and analysing worldwide data on culture and sustainability. On the basis of this knowledge, it launches and participates in projects that promote culture in and for sustainability, such as the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. UNESCO worked hard to get culture included in the Sustainable Development Goals (Soini & Birkeland, 2014) but was not successful as none of the original 17 SDGs focus exclusively on culture (United Nations, 2018). However, there are official post-SDG explanations about how culture nonetheless is “at the heart of SDGs” (Hosagrahar, 2017), and what nations and local advocates should do to pay attention to culture when trying to follow the SDGs (UCLG, 2021). After a few years of active campaigning, culture was finally explicitly noted in four of what are called SDG targets in the revised version of the goals (United Nations, 2019).
It is not only the UN or its agencies that have intertwined culture and sustainability with the economy in recent international policies. Both the OECD and the G20 have recently published reports that are very much in line with the principles and objectives of UNCTAD and the resolution we analyse here. Although the OECD pays attention to the creative economy’s potential in enhancing environmental sustainability in its note for Italy’s 2021 G20 presidency (OECD, 2021), the paper includes parts that openly favour culture’s role for economic growth (e.g., ibid., 12). The text-level discursive similarity between the G20’s (2021)Creative Economy 2030 policy brief and UNCTAD’s recent statements is striking: “Before COVID-19 hit, the global creative economy was growing rapidly in many regions. This momentum should not be lost in the wake of the pandemic; rather, greater investment needs to flow to the creative industries that have the potential to make localised and high impact, and help us shift to a new sustainable economy” (ibid., 9–10). This is not surprising as representatives of UNCTAD and other pro-creative economy organisations (e.g., the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre and the Global Project Culture and Creative Industries) have participated in writing the G20’s policy brief. The World Bank & UNESCO (2021), too, greatly participates in the economist discourse making through its publication Cities, Culture, Creativity: Leveraging Culture and Creativity for Sustainable Urban Development and Inclusive Growth, jointly produced with UNESCO: “Cultural and creative industries are key drivers of the creative economy and represent important sources of employment, economic growth, and innovation, thus contributing to city competitiveness and sustainability” (ibid., 2).
5. The resolution
The resolution is an exemplary and nearly caricatural account of the discourse surrounding the “creative economy”. Ecological sustainability is almost completely absent from the resolution, and when it is mentioned, it is subordinated to capitalist economic objectives. In our analysis of the resolution, we found three interlinked categories through/in which the significations of culture are constituted: (i) Anthropocentrism; (ii) Economic Determinism; and (iii) Methodological Nationalism. Through our analysis, we argue that these discourses are problematic in terms of ecological sustainability, post-Anthropocene subjectivities, and notions of planetary well-being and prosperity (cf. Jackson, 2009; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Latour, 2018).
5.1. Anthropocentrism
In general, anthropocentrism refers to a human-centred worldview and morality: humans are the only rational and truly meaning-making species and hence the key agents of the world; they are the ones who can, through work and reuse, dominate objects that originally belonged to nature; they can own and assume control over nature due to their supreme capabilities; and the value of nature is determined by its value for humans so that nature does not have an intrinsic value (Barry & Frankland, 2002). Though this raises questions of what the Anthropocene means. Commonly, it’s a shorthand for the idea “that modern human activity is large relative to the basic processes of planetary functioning, and therefore that human social, economic, and political decisions have become entangled in a web of planetary feedbacks (Malhi, 2016). Though it risks masking the deeply unequal and inequitable distribution of human influences and consequences on this way of looking at “our” era (Malm & Hornborg, 2014).
What is emblematic of anthropocentrism is that humans are either consciously or unconsciously defined and valued against nature and its actors such as animals. This is a typical text-level ‘regularity’ (see Foucault, 1972) and order in the whole centrism discourse. On the other hand, in ecocentrism and biocentrism, for instance, nature and its well-being are observed against humans. This discursive order derives from the nature/culture division, one of the major narratives in Western thought. This binarism is indeed one of the most problematic aspects of the “centrisms” in terms of ecological sustainability because it separates humans and nature from each other per se (Boddice, 2011).
As we have already claimed, conventional cultural policy understands culture as a merely human issue and makes the human the subject of and subject to cultural policy and its share of rights, actorships, beneficiaries and, in the end, the bios itself. Most studies and documents on cultural sustainability do not really pay attention to the position and role of nature or natural agents. We can take a key UN text as an example: although the UN Sustainable Development Goals address the sustainability of the environment in multiple ways and dimensions, they mostly focus on the human perspective, and the non-human aspects of sustainability are considered only if they instrumentally contribute to the human aspects (see also Dryzek, 2005, 157). The resolution also highlights the centrality of humans within its proposed approach to linking culture and sustainability:
Recognizing the role of the creative economy in creating full and productive employment and decent work, supporting entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, encouraging the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, stimulating innovation, empowering people, promoting social inclusion, and reducing poverty […]
Highlighting that the creative economy encourages creativity and innovation in attaining inclusive, equitable and sustainable growth and development, while facilitating life transitions and supporting women, youth, migrants and older persons, as well as empowering people in vulnerable situations […]
Stressing that the creative economy can contribute to the three dimensions of sustainable development and the achievement of the 2030 Agenda, including by fostering economic growth and innovation, eradicating poverty, creating full and productive employment and decent work for all, improving the quality of life and empowerment of women and young people. (United Nations, 2019, 3)
As illustrated by these excerpts, anthropocentrism stands in a logical relation to economic goals. Creative economic practices serve humans and human development without reflecting the ecological limits of these actions. Superficially, it seems that everything is in order: if the functioning of the creative economy is secured and supported, it will improve the well-being and actorship of all humans. However, we argue that this thinly veiled anthropocentrism undermines the ultimate aims of the resolution itself as well as all the other major cultural policy documents that deal with sustainability. If we want to strive for true sustainability – at the pace necessary to prevent the massive environmental crisis we are facing at the moment – we should “focus on the systems and processes that support life, well-being, and biodiversity at different spatial scales” (Kortetmäki et al., 2021, 2).
Most commonly, anthropocentrism is not an explicit point of departure or a goal. However, policy documents and research have been criticised for their “human-centred sustainability” (e.g., Lepeley, 2019): despite their good intentions, they are too much oriented to human agents and undermine the role of humans as part of broader systems and networks that also include non-human actors; all cultural and human actions have ecological and ecosystemic impacts on the planetary future (Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Latour, 2018; Malm, 2018).
The resolution is a model example of this human-centred sustainability. Although it does not explicitly mention anthropocentrism, its discussion of sustainability is limited to human needs and well-being, especially from the perspective of prosperity and economic growth. The more moral and principled sections are also human-centred: when important values and goals (human rights, human creativity and ideas, gender equality, peace) are listed, no reference is made to environmental issues, except for a loose mentioning of sustainable lifestyle. However, what overemphasises the resolution’s anthropocentrism above all is that there is no explicit recognition of planetary wellbeing, not even the term “ecological sustainability”.
5.2. Economic determinism
As the title of the resolution already indicates, the economy is its main theme. The resolution lists ways in which the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) can enhance economic growth – without, however, specifying whether it means the growth of national economies or that of private businesses – and in which the economic growth brought by the CCIs fosters social values and goals such as “empowerment for all”, “eradicating poverty”, “decent work for all” and “empowerment of women and young people”, as the following excerpts illustrate:
Recognizing the need to promote sustained and inclusive economic growth, foster innovation and provide opportunities, benefits and empowerment for all and respect for all human rights […]
[N]oting the report of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on culture and sustainable development, in which it is stated that cultural and creative industries should be part of economic growth strategies […]
Recognizing the ongoing need to support developing countries and countries with economies in transition in diversifying production and exports, including in new sustainable growth areas, including creative industries. Emphasizing the resilient growth in international trade in creative industries, including the trade of creative goods and services, and its contribution to the global economy, and recognizing the economic and cultural values of the creative economy. (United Nations, 2019, 1–2)
Economic significance is a relatively new perspective in international cultural policy discourses: while the focus on the economic value of culture was mainly criticised until the 1980s due to the instrumentality, recuperation and alienation of arts, culture, creativity and passion (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 94–136; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007; McGuigan, 2015). Bilton (2007), among others, argues that in the 1990s, experts, consultants and researchers started to speak positively about the economic value and meanings of arts and culture. Gradually, this perspective was taken up in cultural policies and by their key spokespersons such as administrators, educators and consultants, and finally by cultural actors and professionals as well. The current discourse on the economic side of culture is neutral or even downright positive about and in favour of the commodification of cultural products. This view on the cultural industries has spread in recent years together with the increasingly prevalent talk about the “creative industries”. Bilton describes the conceptual evolution from cultural industries to creative industries as follows:
The term “cultural industries” indicates that creativity grows out of a specific cultural context and emphasizes the cultural content of ideas, values and traditions. The term “creative industries” emphasizes the novelty of ideas and products and places creativity in a context of individual talent, innovation and productivity. (Bilton, 2007, 164)
This shift resonates with larger structural developments: the discursive transition from cultural industries to creative industries started in the 1990s along with the shifts in the capitalist market economy and its business structures and economic, labour and social policies. Whereas the traditional material industries weakened in so-called Western countries, the developing immaterial and digital information economy needed concepts like creativity, innovation and information and related practices to an extensive extent. Cultural policies and cultural policy researchers seized the moment and boldly defined arts and culture as the core of the emerging creative economy and designated it as a key economic growth sector. Creative industry/economy is a vaguer concept than cultural industry/economy, but its benefit is its broader scope and association with other – economically more important – industries and sectors. Through “creative industry” or “cultural and creative industries”, it is possible to raise the broad economic importance of arts and culture – at least rhetorically (Garnham, 2005).
The “economy” in creative economy refers to the organisation and the work of structures, institutions, groups and individuals concerning the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of goods and services that are defined creative and cultural. In this context, a product is therefore one that results from creativity – whether individually, collectively or industrially contributed – and is meant to be sold in the market, and its market value is at least partially based on the creativity used in its production (Throsby, 2010).
This economism is criticised because of its instrumental character, and because it endangers the intrinsic value of culture (e.g., Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 94–136; McGuigan, 2015). Recently, critical attention has focused more on the factors of precarious working conditions and the exploitation of the passion and creativity of creative workers (e.g., Gielen, 2015; McRobbie, 2016). Less thought has been given to the fact that whether material or immaterial, the production of creative goods for economic growth is indelibly against the fundamentals of ecological sustainability (De Beukelaer, 2019a). However, there is a growing body of research literature theorising alternative forms of cultural economy (e.g. Clammer, 2016, 65–90; Conill et al., 2012; Maurer, 2008; Vanolo, 2012; see more about his later in this section). These studies share a justification of non-capitalist values for the cultural production and work and the exploration of post-capitalist practices of cultural sector and production (e.g. commoning). While many of them take a critical stance towards the capitalist economic growth, very few of them observe the issue from the point of view of ecological values or practices, the radically different relation of culture and nature (i.e. ecologically sustainable culture and non-antropocentric cultural subjectivity), and how these alternative paradigms are – or should be – considered in cultural policies. Increasingly, research includes perspectives on how culture and nature can be merged on the conceptual level of the cultural policies, and how culture can be approached foundational in the de- and post-growth economies and their national and local practical applications (Banks & Oakley, 2024; McCartney et al., 2023; Pyykkönen, 2024).
In this context, we neither buy into the doxa of economic growth, nor do we dogmatically defend degrowth: we remain growth-agnostic. Our key objective is to stop using economic turnover as a proxy for other goals, such as those concerning creativity, culture and environment, because they cannot be captured by this proxy (cf. van den Bergh, 2010). The obvious alternative would be to set policy objectives that do not explicitly build on growth. The macro-economic outcome could be growth or degrowth, but this ought to be secondary to stated objectives, which in our case relate to both formulating non-econocentric and non-anthropocentric international cultural policies (especially when speaking about culture and sustainability) and – through national and local policies – paving way for the ecologically sustainable cultural productions instead of capitalist cultural industries. These are important goals both for changing the mentalities and practices (i.e. immaterial and material “consumer cultures”) of our societies and recognizing the crucial place of labour-intensive jobs in post-growth economies (cf. Jackson, 2021).
The growth and intensification of creative production – and even the maintenance of the current level – will require unsustainable amounts of resources such as raw materials, energy, transportation and devices (Jackson, 2009; see also De Beukelaer, 2019). Meanwhile, research shows that it is possible for all humans to live within planetary boundaries and above social thresholds – that is, within the “doughnut” or the “safe operating space for humanity” – though not without radically rebalancing consumption patterns between rich and poor people (Hickel, 2019; O’Neill et al., 2018; see also Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Gupta et al., 2024) while also addressing the colonial root causes of planetary plunder (Agyeman et al., 2003; Jackson, 2009; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Malm, 2018; Rockström et al., 2009). The change requires the broad and effective adoption of post-growth thinking, attitudes and their implementation in economic and social practices, which in addition to greener production and massively less consumption of material goods has to include practices of equal and inclusive social work and health-care, and democratisation of decision-making processes and citizen-involvement in governance (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Gupta et al., 2024; Kortetmäki et al., 2021; Raworth, 2017).
If we approach cultural production mainly from the perspective of profit making and economic growth, it is most certainly connected – at least indirectly – to such forms of capitalist production that are anti-ecological per se. As the citations at the beginning of this section suggest, two main discursive lines can be distinguished here: the resolution tries to prove again and again (a) how the creative and cultural industries serve the economic growth of nations, and (b) how cultural and economic values (incl. technological and industrial innovations) are intertwined without any challenges. As mentioned, economic determinism and anthropocentrism converge in the resolution: a greater and well-functioning creative economy – and economic growth in general – is assumed to serve the interests of all humans. The ecological and environmental consequences of the creative economy are secondary concerns at best. In addition to being linked to the other aspects, the economy also determines them in the resolution; humans and their relations and subjectivities are valued, signified, and represented within the economic frame.
5.3. Methodological nationalism
While the climate crisis is a quintessentially global issue, cultural policy still relies on and strengthens the idea of nation states at the centre of politics. This is to be expected as the United Nations framework generally doesn’t address the tensions between global challenges and national interests head-on. The resolution reaffirms this state of affairs and, as mentioned above, blends it seamlessly with the capitalist market economisation of culture:
Recommitting to sustaining and supporting developing countries’ economies to transition progressively to higher productivity through high-value-added sectors, by promoting diversification, technological upgrading, research and innovation, including the creation of quality, decent and productive jobs, including through the promotion of cultural and creative industries, sustainable tourism, performing arts and heritage conservation activities, among others […]
Acknowledging that innovation is essential for harnessing the economic potential of each nation and the importance of supporting mass entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation, which create new momentum for economic growth and job creation and expand opportunities for all, including women and youth […]
Stressing the importance of appropriate national policies aimed at promoting the diversity of cultural expression and advancing creativity for sustainable development. (United Nations, 2019, 2–3)
This kind of approach can be called “methodological nationalism”. It means the tendency of actors to assume that “the nation-state is the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002, emphasis in original). In other words, it is a historically constructed post-Westphalian notion according to which nations and nation states are sovereign actors in solving political challenges and problems. Beck (2016) has criticised the concept in the context of current international politics concerning global problems. He claims that acute “cosmopoliticised” risks such as the climate crisis could give rise to “emancipatory catastrophism” – new normative horizons of common goods and a cosmopolitan outlook – if only we would be politically able to move beyond methodological nationalism. In the 21st century, not only the major challenges but also the “spaces of action” have become cosmopolitised. Beck’s view is that we can tackle these risks only with global political structures and policies, and by rethinking political agency from the level of the state to that of citizen-subjects. Emancipatory catastrophism could at best lead us to a new political approach of “methodological cosmopolitanism”. Latour (2018) makes a similar claim: we need to create political approaches and policies that are not grounded in national or global interests, but instead the earth. We globally need to learn new ways to live on and with the earth, and this is what cosmopolitan politics and agencies must be about.
How, then, does methodological nationalism appear in the resolution? As we can see from the citations at the beginning of this section, nation states are the ones that primarily benefit from the economic growth produced by the CCIs. They not only profit their economies, but also their nations in terms of prosperity, welfare and equality. Moreover, nation states and their national policies are the key actors of the resolution. It depends on them how all the economic and societal improvements generated by the creative economy will take place. The above contextualisation is not problematic only from the perspective of cultural sustainability and its basic values such as cultural diversity, but especially in terms of ecological sustainability, which is not national in its character.
6. Conclusions: towards a new planetary cultural policy
The United Nations promote the idea that the creative economy, through its constituent creative industries, will contribute to the transition towards sustainable development. However, the resolution on the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development 2021 we have examined as a key exemplar of these efforts fails to convince that the claims it makes will indeed materialise. Though it would not be useful to argue that if only United Nations agencies would change their tune, we’d be able to shift away from the kinds of ideas embedded in this Resolution. Indeed, if the document were more radical and progressive, it would not be representative of dominant international organisations’ and states’ views and interests, and it would likely not gain much traction because it would not align with dominant discourses in these organisations or responsible state ministries – and most importantly, among consultants (De Beukelaer & Vlassis, 2019). However, the “non-progressiveness” and lack of radical views might well exist also because of the politics behind the documents and the power imbalances between the contributing actors, which impact the outcomes of the political negotiations and disputes. As known, some parties – e.g. strong and powerful nation states or international organisations – do have more say than others in the resolution making processes..
While it is necessary to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the climate crisis, it can be counterproductive to make assertions without a shred of evidence. To make matters worse, the resolution makes gratuitous claims that fly in the face of empirical evidence, as we have illustrated above. The resolution stumbles over several pitfalls.
First, we have shown that the resolution fails to define a clear and realistic target (i.e., what should be “sustainable”). This may seem self-evident, but the term has become such a catch-all for anything from the grossest forms of corporate greenwashing to the most genuinely committed actions. For the term to have any meaning, it needs to be defined unambiguously. This should include an articulation of whether it means environmental, social and cultural sustainability – or merely one of them – and a clear dissociation from the hegemonic growth-oriented economist view. The definition also needs to be pragmatic in the sense that it recognizes existing and outlines new broader political projects and their tools to challenge the current capitalist and anthropocentric political order of culture. One solution would be to start seriously thinking about culture and sustainability in relation to the post-growth “safe operating space” and “doughnut economy” (Raworth, 2017; cf. Jackson, 2009), in that they offer more practical narratives and are clearer on what is needed and what can’t be exceeded.
Second, the resolution’s objectives and methods remain entirely captured within the doxa of “green growth”. This is not the, but merely a blueprint for climate action – and perhaps not the most credible one at that (Hickel & Kallis, 2019). As “green growth” remains the dominant framework for policies, explicitly recognising it as one among many competing visions of the future is all-important when working at the intersection between art, culture and creativity in relation to climate futures.
Third, both UNCTAD and UNESCO remain fixed on their respective raisons d’être, without addressing the systemic challenge we face. This results in an impoverished articulation of what the future should be, which remains tone-deaf to the real challenge that underpins the climate crisis: how to ensure life in dignity and prosperity without wrecking the planet. In sum, the resolution we have studied is fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability and the “organismal needs” (i.e. basic need that must be satisfied for an organism [human, animal, plant etc.] to realise its typical and special way and characteristics of life) of planetary well-being (Kortetmäki et al., 2021).
Notwithstanding our above criticisms of the resolution, the potential of art, culture and creativity to help confront the climate crisis is real. Its strength lies in a commitment to global environmental citizenship, which puts the planet before economic and anthropocentric or narrowly defined national, ethnic or religious group interests (Duxbury et al., 2017).1 It should help to address global issues with a cosmopolitan sensibility (De Beukelaer, 2019b). What we propose thus inherently challenges the normative foundations and horizons of public policy. Beyond shifting the normative ground on which policymaking builds, we would argue that it also requires a new political economy of creative work, which focuses on degrowth, revaluing craft and setting up a universal basic income. This should help lay the groundwork for a post-consumer society, in which the dignity and well-being of people and the planet take precedence over shareholder value.
Our suggestions might sound like wishful thinking. Which they are. Though so are the expected outcomes of the approaches suggested in the Resolution text. Policy texts inherently are wishful thinking. Contrary to this consensus-document, we believe that our suggested approach, “our” wishful thinking if you will, is more constructive. Which kind of “wishful thinking” one entertains is not just a mirage; it is helpful in offering both a semblance of a way out of this mess and a positive story that can garner public and political support. We are now at a point where the creative economy, as characterised in the Resolution, does neither.
In sum, our key argument is that the relation of culture and environment should be radically re-evaluated and re-defined when speaking and acting about sustainability and culture. Simply repackaging the creative industry policies of the past two decades as “sustainable” does little but further delay the much-needed rethinking of the future we want. To do that, we need a new kind of “planetary cultural policy” in which decision-making on culture always takes into account the environment, ecological sustainability and planetary boundaries per se. In addition, it must ideologically and conceptually understand culture as part of nature and vice versa. Finally, cultural policies should acknowledge that everything that human beings as cultural actors do has serious and true ecological implications, which also makes it a question of citizenship, identity and subjectivity. This would definitely confuse the already blurred boundaries of cultural policy as an administrative sector even more, but we think that it is an “obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986) – i.e., the point of access to the irreversibly new understanding of relation between culture and sustainability that all key actors have to recognize and “go through”, if they want to participate in the process – if we really want to see culture as an important factor in sustainability policies and practices.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Miikka Pyykkönen: Writing – original draft. Christiaan De Beukelaer: Writing – original draft.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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Dr. Miikka Pyykkönen is a Professor on Cultural Policy in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He teaches bachelor and master students in the study programme Cultures, Communities and Change, and doctoral students in Cultural Policy doctoral studies. He is also a docent in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. His current research areas are cultural policy, international cultural policy, culture and sustainability, economization of culture, entrepreneurship and history of ethnopolitics.
Dr. Christiaan De Beukelaer is a Senior Lecturer in Culture & Climate at the University of Melbourne and a Global Horizons Senior Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. He was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie – FIAS-FP COFUND Fellow in Necessary Utopias at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille Université. His primary research project is Shipping in the Oceanic Commons: Regulation and Prefiguration (ClimateWorks Foundation). His most recent book Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping, published by Manchester University Press, is also available in French translation as Cargo à Voile: Une Aventure Militante pour un Transport Maritime Durable, published by Éditions Apogée. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.1
We do recognise that citizenship is always grounded in the lives of people, which are spatially and temporally bound. This offers up a further challenge of finding a space that connects the “planetary” and the individual, through multiple levels of social entanglement and political engagement.
There are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable. In this Review, we explore the rapidly advancing field of post-growth research, which has evolved in response to these concerns. The central idea of post-growth is to replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Key advances discussed in this Review include: the development of ecological macroeconomic models that test policies for managing without growth; understanding and reducing the growth dependencies that tie social welfare to increasing GDP in the current economy; and characterising the policies and provisioning systems that would allow resource use to be reduced while improving human wellbeing. Despite recent advances in post-growth research, important questions remain, such as the politics of transition, and transformations in the relationship between the Global North and the Global South.
Introduction
How can contemporary societies enhance human wellbeing in the absence of economic growth? This question is the foundational scientific issue for the emerging research agenda on post-growth,1 motivated by the tight coupling of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and environmental damage,2 the declining marginal benefits of income for human wellbeing,3 and the social and political risks of economic slowdowns.4 Post-growth refers to societies that do not pursue GDP growth as an objective, and which are able to meet human needs in an equitable way without growth while staying within their fair share of planetary boundaries.
Post-growth research can be seen as part of sustainability science that is influenced by—but not constrained within—ecological economics, drawing from different traditions and contributing to the construction of a new economics that brings interdisciplinary (eg, ecological, anthropological, historical, sociological, and political) insights into our understandings of how human provisioning works. Post-growth emphasises independence from—or prosperity without5—growth, and serves as an umbrella term encompassing research in Doughnut and wellbeing economics, steady-state economics, and degrowth. Doughnut and wellbeing economics call for the satisfaction of basic human needs and high wellbeing within planetary boundaries, whereas steady-state economics emphasises the need to stabilise societies’ resource use at a relatively low, sustainable level. Doughnut, wellbeing, and steady-state economics generally position their proposals within the current capitalist system, whereas degrowth is critical of the possibilities of an egalitarian slowdown within capitalism given that capitalist competition is structurally geared towards growth. Degrowth therefore emphasises the need for a planned, democratic transformation of the economic system to drastically reduce ecological impact and inequality and improve wellbeing. Degrowth, similarly to steady-state economics, regards a lower GDP as a probable outcome of efforts to substantially reduce resource use.6 Reducing GDP is not a goal of these approaches, however,5 but, it is seen as something that economies need to be made resilient to. The Doughnut and wellbeing approaches are more agnostic about GDP growth, but still view it as a poor measure of progress. Post-growth is plural and open to all these perspectives. All approaches converge on the need for qualitative improvement without relying on quantitative growth, and on selectively decreasing the production of less necessary and more damaging goods and services, while increasing beneficial ones.
There is a large literature on post-growth and increasing interest in the concept as indicated by articles in prominent scientific journals,7–9 reports in international media,10 and substantial new funding for post-growth research.11–14 To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review of the field. Unlike recent systematic reviews of degrowth, for example,15–17 which quantify emerging themes and gaps in the literature, our Review is an expert overview, written by leaders in the post-growth field, each specialised in one of its various branches. We have identified what we deem to be the most important recent contributions, without being constrained by the conventions of a narrower systematic review (ie, looking only at articles where the term post-growth appears in the title or body of the article), to include the theoretical and empirical evidence that is relevant to post-growth claims. First, we explain how post-growth research has evolved within planetary sustainability science, engaging with ongoing debates about ecological, social, and economic limits to growth. Second, we provide an overview of controversies, advances, and breakthroughs in the field in the past 5 years and identify remaining knowledge gaps.
Ecological, social, and economic limits to growth
Resource limits
The year 2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Limits to Growth, a report that first posed the question of whether there are limits related to the Earth system that could put constraints on industrial development. The report was based on a system dynamics model (World3) that was parameterised with data from 1900 to 1970, and simulated scenarios for population, food, non-renewable resources, pollution, industrial output, and services to the year 2100.18 In the Standard Run of the model, which assumed the continuation of historical decision-making, the result is overshoot and collapse (figure 1). In this scenario, as industrial capital grows, it consumes a larger and larger share of the resource flow, until resource depletion leads to the collapse of the industrial base, followed by the collapse of everything that is dependent on it—services, the food supply, and ultimately, the human population.17
Figure 1 Four different scenarios of the original Limits to Growth model in comparison to actual dataShow full captionFigure viewer
Limits to Growth triggered a long and heated debate,23 which remains unsettled.24 Many economists suggested that high prices for scarce resources could result in technological innovation and resource substitution. The assumption that technology grows exponentially, and at a rate sufficient to offset the drag from resource depletion, allows growth to continue without limit.25 The decline of commodity prices in the 20th century, and especially in the 1980s, when the debate about Limits to Growth took place (figure 2), was seen as a repudiation of the Limits to Growth hypothesis and a confirmation of the power of technology to offset resource scarcity.25
The Standard Run of the Limits to Growth model, however, did not suggest scarcities before the 2010s. Given the cumulative nature of compound growth, the hypothesis was that seeming abundance would at some point turn quickly into scarcity.18 Increasing resource prices since the 2000s (figure 2), coupled with economic shocks, have brought back concerns that resource scarcities might indeed limit growth.27 Other system dynamics models built on World3 suggest peaks and scarcities for various critical metals in the second half of the 21st century.28,29 However, these models, similarly to the original World3 and all future-oriented models, run the risk of underestimating unpredictable technological breakthroughs that might be incentivised by higher resource prices.
From resource limits to planetary boundaries
Scientists have also sought to assess the validity of the Limits to Growth model by looking at how well it fits historical trends since its publication.20,21 Previous studies21,30 have explored how the various runs of the Limits to Growth model compare with actual trends and suggest that the world is most closely tracking the Double Resources scenario,18 which differs from the Standard Run in its assumption that the initial stock of non-renewable resources is twice as large as the Standard Run resource stock (figure 1). In this scenario, collapse occurs later and is driven not by scarcity of non-renewable resources (ie, a source limit), as in the Standard Run, but by persistent pollution and its impact on ecosystem stability (ie, a sink limit, otherwise known as a regenerative capacity limit). The Double Resources scenario arguably aligns more closely with the current understanding of the most pressing environmental limits facing humanity. For example, climate change is a much greater concern now than running out of fossil fuels31 (interestingly, the original Limits to Growth report did refer to the possibility of climate change as a form of persistent pollution). The replication of trends in the relatively stable 1970–2020 period, nonetheless, does not imply by any means that collapse will occur by a specific date.32 The Limits to Growth model was never intended to make exact predictions, but to explore the system’s overall behavioural tendencies. Moreover, as the Limits to Growth modellers suggested, less attention should be given to the model’s behaviour past the peak as the process of approaching limits will instigate a change in the system’s structure.
The past decade has seen a shift in sustainability science from questions of resource scarcity to those of global change and limits, through the study of planetary boundaries that provide a “safe operating space for humanity”.33 Anthropogenic pressures now exceed six of the nine identified planetary boundaries—those related to carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, and novel pollutants.34–36 Natural scientists have linked Earth system trends to socioeconomic trends, including economic growth, illustrating the “Great Acceleration” of ecological impacts and population and economic growth.37 Some economists, by contrast, have argued that as economies get richer, after a specific point in development, their impact on the environment is likely to decrease (ie, the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis).38 The new consensus in the empirical literature, however, is that although some local pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, have fallen in high-income countries, typically due to better policy, this does not hold for greenhouse gas emissions, material use, or other global ecological impacts.38
A separate discussion concerns whether crossing planetary boundaries will limit growth. There are two contending perspectives on this question. In William Nordhaus’s DICE model, for example, the reference scenario projected that a 4·3°C increase in global temperature by 2100 would lead to only a 4·3% loss in output compared with baseline projections, in a global economy that is 7·8 times larger than in 2015.39 However, such projections excluded uncertain, abrupt, and non-linear changes in the Earth system, and underestimated climate damages by relying on current correlations between regional temperature and regional GDP as a proxy for the economic impact of global warming.40 Newer studies suggest much higher economic costs of climate change than previously estimated—with existing warming already locking in a 19% income per capita loss within the next 26 years,41 whereas each additional 1°C rise in temperature costs the world 12% in GDP losses.42 Given the uncertainties involved in such estimations, and the problems with reducing all ecosystem and wellbeing losses due to climate change to a GDP figure, an alternative approach, which many sustainability scientists have adopted, is to take planetary boundaries as a precautionary objective, and then ask whether it is possible to return to or stay inside planetary boundaries with continued economic growth.43
The decoupling controversy
Much of the research on reconciling economic growth with planetary boundaries has been framed as a question of whether it is possible to achieve green growth—ie, to decouple GDP from carbon emissions and material use (the latter because it is strongly linked to environmental pressures and biodiversity loss).44,45 This literature distinguishes between relative decoupling, which is a decline in the material or carbon intensity of GDP, where GDP grows faster than material use and emissions; absolute decoupling, which is when GDP grows while material use and emissions decline; and sufficient absolute decoupling or genuine green growth, which is when GDP grows while material use and emissions decline enough to keep the economy within planetary boundaries.46
Cross-national evidence indicates that GDP remains coupled to resource use as measured by material footprint (ie, accounting for the biomass, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels required to support the final consumption of goods and services).47 This finding holds across material categories and most regions, with some exceptions, such as decreasing fossil fuel use in some European countries.47 The consensus from recent reviews and meta-analyses is that while relative decoupling of GDP from material use is common, there is no evidence of sustained absolute decoupling.2,48 Moreover, modelled projections indicate that at the global scale, absolute decoupling is unlikely to occur even with optimistic assumptions about technology.49
Why are resources and GDP so tightly coupled? A first explanation focuses on the so-called rebound effect—the hypothesis that technological improvements in resource efficiency do not necessarily yield reduced resource use because declining costs lead to increased demand.50 A study of 57 cases of materials and modern artefacts, for example, found no evidence of dematerialisation,51 and economy-wide energy rebounds of 78–101% have been observed in the USA, the UK, and some European countries.52 Another explanation focuses on the material intensity of services, structural change, and international trade. A global empirical analysis found that all sectors of the economy are roughly equivalent in terms of their climate, land, and water impacts due to the embedded resource requirements of services and the fact that incomes earned in the service sector are partly spent on material goods.53 Cross-border research indicates that as high-income economies grow and shift towards services, they increasingly offshore agricultural and industrial production and rely on imports47 (eg, for agriculture, the Global North net-imports embodied land and biomass from the Global South54). Domestic material extraction might therefore decline, but total material footprint—which accounts for materials embodied in trade—continues to increase.47 These explanations are in line with the ecological economics view of the engine of the economy being energy, materials, and human labour.55
With carbon emissions, the picture is more complex, since substitution with cleaner energy is possible. In the period 2005–15, absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions occurred in several high-income countries, even accounting for trade (ie, consumption-based emissions).56 However, this time period was one of historically low growth for many of these nations (figure 3), suggesting that while decoupling is possible, the rate of growth still matters, and the lower it is, the more feasible absolute decoupling becomes. In the USA, for instance, the 2008 recession was an important cause of emissions reduction,57 complicating arguments about green growth. A 2018 study found that Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have achieved sufficient decoupling,46 but critics have noted that this assessment uses the 2°C carbon budget instead of a 1·5°C budget and ignores consumption-based emissions.58 The speed of reduction is also not sufficient from a fairness perspective if one accounts for the higher mitigation responsibilities of countries that historically have been high emitters of greenhouse gases.58,59 Even the best performing nations, such as the UK and Sweden, are not on track to meet Paris Agreement objectives, as a fair distribution of the global carbon budget would require them to reduce emissions by 10% and 12% each year, respectively, which is double their existing policy commitments.60
Figure 3 Growth rate in real GDP per capita, 1960–2020, for different regions and countriesShow full captionFigure viewer
Despite this uncertainty about the prospects of sufficient decoupling, green growth remains a standard feature of the climate mitigation scenarios for 1·5°C and 2°C that are modelled using conventional integrated assessment models and reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).61,62 These scenarios reconcile economic growth with climate goals by relying on hypothetical large-scale negative emissions technologies with CO2 removal schemes developed in the future, unprecedented energy efficiency improvements, or both.63 These scenarios also ignore climate impacts on the economy and society.64 Several studies raise questions about the risks of relying on untested negative emissions technologies65 and about the historically unprecedented rates of GDP–energy decoupling in low-energy scenarios.52 Five new studies show how reductions in aggregate output make achieving climate objectives easier, without having to rely on possibly unrealistic assumptions about technological change.66–70
If the standard green growth argument is that growth can continue while ecological pressures are reduced to sustainable levels, a stronger claim is that greening the economy can itself be an engine of growth. Several economic models show that investments in green infrastructure and climate mitigation might have a multiplier effect that increases growth in countries with economic slack.71–73 The short-run stimulus effects of a clean energy transition, however, should be distinguished from possible second-order, or longer-run effects.74 There are open questions concerning whether green investments crowd out other, more productive (in terms of GDP) investments,75 or whether stranded fossil fuel assets might cause financial shocks that impact GDP negatively.72 Models show that if clean energies depend on dirty inputs for their production, technological innovation does not suffice to both sustain growth and reduce emissions.76 There are ongoing debates regarding the social and environmental impacts of a clean energy transition,77–79 its implications in terms of the net energy left for other societal uses,79,80 and the emissions that this transition will involve.79 A related argument is that a decline in energy return on energy investment—ie, the ratio between the amount of energy produced and the amount of energy used to produce that energy, therefore a proxy of a net energy surplus—will negatively impact growth81 and that if it falls below a certain minimum ratio, growth might altogether become impossible.82 However, concerns that a shift to renewables could precipitate such a scenario are probably misplaced, as renewables have comparable, if not higher, energy return on energy investment than fossil fuels, when energy returns are measured at the point of use.83,84
In summary, there is little agreement as to whether sufficient absolute decoupling is feasible. One can note a schism on this question between mainstream and ecological economics, and green growth versus post-growth approaches in sustainability science. Although green growth is theoretically possible, and inadequate progress in the past is no proof of future impossibility, the post-growth field suggests taking a precautionary approach, given the historical record and the rapid narrowing of the window to prevent ecological breakdown.85 Post-growth, it should be emphasised, does not state that decoupling economic activity from emissions and getting to net zero emissions is impossible, just that it is made harder by economic growth. For energy and material use, which can only be reduced and never brought to zero, the necessary reductions are easier to achieve with post-growth.
Human wellbeing and social limits to growth
A second motivation behind post-growth research, dating back to the same era as Limits to Growth, is the observation that above a certain level of income, GDP growth does not improve human wellbeing.86 The social limits hypothesis holds that there is a limit to the extent that growth improves subjective wellbeing, because humans adapt to higher levels of income,87 and compare themselves to others who are also getting richer,88 or because additional production goes towards zero-sum status goods.89 The social cost hypothesis is that above a certain level of GDP, the costs of growth (eg, congestion, pollution, mental health, social upheaval) might offset its wellbeing benefits.90 Growth is said to become uneconomic.91
One line of evidence supporting the social limits hypothesis is the much-debated Easterlin paradox, in which self-reported happiness is found to vary directly with income, both between and within nations, but over time the growth of income is not significantly related to the growth of happiness.92 This finding has been challenged93 and it seems that the empirical relationship between growth and happiness depends on the set of countries, the length of period, and the type of wellbeing that is measured.94 Moreover, although income and happiness appear to be related during decreases in GDP, this relationship does not apply during GDP increases.95 New studies that have inspired post-growth research have shown that countries with full employment policies, strong social safety nets, and decommodified public services exhibit increased life satisfaction88,96 and that human relations have a much stronger effect on personal wellbeing than income.97
Research on wellbeing has shown that a wide range of indicators of social outcomes show diminishing returns as GDP per person increases.95 These indicators include the first seven Sustainable Development Goals (no poverty, zero hunger, good health, quality education, gender equity, safe water, and sufficient energy), which, under existing arrangements, are achieved at a GDP of around $15 000 per person (measured in 2011 US purchasing power parity dollars).98 Improvements in social outcomes have been found to be driven primarily by factors other than income, such as public health programmes and other public services.99–101
Tentative support for the social cost thesis comes from research on alternative indicators to GDP.102 The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), for example, is a more comprehensive metric of progress that, in contrast to GDP, distinguishes between damaging and beneficial activity.3 A meta-analysis of 17 countries finds a general pattern of levelling-off of GPI, and a decoupling of GPI from GDP.3 Globally, GPI per capita peaked in 1978 and has since not increased beyond about $7000 per capita (measured in 2005 US$).
Even if growth above a certain level of income does not improve wellbeing, this does not imply that negative growth benefits wellbeing. The negative effects of recessions on happiness are well established;88 however, positive trends in social outcomes have been observed during some recessions,103 and they have been linked to social bonds104 and public health systems.105 Given concerns with growth linked to overshooting planetary boundaries and fatally undermining human long-term wellbeing, post-growth research asks under which social conditions and with what types of policies could high levels of wellbeing be sustained at low levels of output and resource use.106 In contrast to the utility maximisation approach that underpins GDP, post-growth conceptualises human wellbeing in terms of a wide range of subjective and objective measures of wellbeing, with a focus on satisfying basic needs.106,107
Stagnation and economic limits to growth
Another question is whether growth will continue in economies that have already reached high levels of GDP. High-income countries, such as the USA, Japan, and Italy, are showing signs of declining growth rates or even stagnation.108,109 Per capita GDP growth rates have decreased in these countries over the past 60 years, with a more modest slowdown in the global economy (figure 3).
Economists have sought to explain this trend in several ways. One interpretation is that marginal returns decline as an economy grows and becomes more complex.110 Endogenous growth models, however, claim that knowledge and new ideas can provide increasing returns to capital investment in infrastructure or education that offset diminishing returns.111 New empirical evidence suggests that productivity in research and innovation might be declining, with implications for economic growth.112 Many economists now think that there is a stagnation trend in high-income countries, with explanations focusing either on demand-side and investment-related factors,113,114 or supply-side factors (eg, demographics, education, distribution, energy, and debt).109,115 For the latter, energy is found to account for only a small share of the drag on growth, but this argument assumes that the effect of energy on GDP is small given the small share of energy-related expenditures in total GDP. If energy were to become scarce, which is possible, albeit far from certain, this relationship could change, given that when energy is scarce, it can impose strong constraints on growth.116 During large oil shocks, for example, output growth can substantially fall.117
Whereas an economic slowdown has traditionally been seen as a problem,118 a few recent contributions approach it as the outcome of economic success: high-income countries have reached historically unprecedented levels of output and wealth, and stagnation is the effect of desired developments, such as lower voluntary fertility rates or a shift from manufacturing to services.108 Other studies, however, show that the shift of high-income countries to services has been based on an unequal exchange of labour with low-income and middle-income countries, such that high living standards in the former are subsidised by underpaid agricultural and industrial labour in the latter.54,119
Whatever the underlying reason or one’s attitude toward it, an economic slowdown could prove to be environmentally beneficial.120 Economic research has shown that the desired (or optimal) rate of consumption growth might decline to close to zero if (environmental) risks associated with new technologies and people’s preferences for safety are taken into account.121 From a post-growth perspective, the problem then is not that growth might be coming to an end, but rather that, given that economic and political systems are dependent on growth for their stability,5 stagnation under capitalism poses substantial risks to institutional stability.4 How to prosper without growth therefore becomes a crucial question.5
Post-growth research
Over the past 5 years, research under the labels of post-growth,1 degrowth,122 Doughnut economics,43 wellbeing economics,123 and steady-state economics91 has started sharpening the questions that need to be answered if the goal of prosperity without growth is to be achieved.
Post-growth models and policies
An absence of growth in existing economies can trigger unemployment, inequality, and debt accumulation, as factors that are linked to social instability and diminished wellbeing.4,5 Recent research has explored the conditions under which such outcomes could be averted. An important methodological advance has been the development of several new ecological macroeconomic models.124 These models differ from the original Limits to Growth model by integrating economic and financial variables. Unlike conventional macroeconomic models, which apply an optimisation framework with a single goal (eg, utility, and hence GDP growth), ecological macroeconomic models typically have multiple non-substitutable goals (eg, sustainability, equity, and human wellbeing).125 Models simplify and quantify a complex reality, allowing a range of possibilities to be explored, based on what-if scenarios. However, quantification might miss more qualitative, ambiguous, and context-specific elements that are better captured by mixed, or qualitative approaches, such as case-studies or ethnographies, which are also part of the interdisciplinary toolkit of post-growth research.
Two particularly important ecological macroeconomic models developed to test the possibility of post-growth interventions and trajectories are LowGrow SFC (calibrated with data for Canada126) and Eurogreen (calibrated with data for France127). Different policy measures and assumptions produce different outcomes, but it is notable that scenarios from these two models and countries share some core tendencies (figure 4). In both models, lower growth paths lead to much better climate outcomes. Moreover, good social outcomes are possible when the right policies are implemented. Working-time reduction and a shift from capital-intensive to labour-intensive sectors maintain employment without growth, while a job guarantee (Eurogreen) and additional transfer payments (LowGrow SFC) reduce inequality. Sustainable scenarios combine technology, policy-driven investment strategies, and redistribution in ways that slow growth and environmental impact without compromising wellbeing. Public debt increases, although not to unsustainable levels, whereas household debt declines (figure 4).
Reducing working time is crucial in these scenarios because it reduces unemployment, which is the effect of increasing labour productivity in the context of lower or declining growth.5,128 In addition, studies at different scales (national, state, and household) and over time (from the 1990s to the present) show that working time is positively correlated with carbon emissions,129,130 although to date, robust causal models have not been estimated and there is continued debate about the efficacy of working-time reduction as a strategy for climate mitigation.131 Ongoing global trials involving a four-day workweek might provide further insights on such questions.
Carbon and resource taxes are also used in these models. Previous studies provide additional evidence on the utility of these interventions. For example, fuel taxes lead firms to innovate more in clean (and less in dirty) technologies,132 although the transition can be slow unless taxes are combined with heavy research subsidies.133 Questions remain regarding the distributive consequences of carbon taxes134 and their political acceptability.135 Some researchers suggest that redistributive tax designs, such as carbon dividends,136 and inclusive decision-making processes might improve acceptance.137 However, as concluded by a notable economist,138 given political obstacles, “carbon pricing alone at politically plausible levels is unlikely to be particularly effective in reducing emissions from the oil and gas used in the transportation, commercial, and residential sectors [and] economists need to look elsewhere for efficient climate policies”.
Several other policies for a post-growth transition have been proposed, and recent efforts have attempted to synthesise these into coherent packages (table).139 Some of these policies might be compatible with growth, but in the post-growth literature, the objective is to secure good social outcomes (eg, employment and decent living standards) in the absence of growth, and to restructure the economy to be greener, healthier, and more equitable.139 Core proposals include universal basic services (including health care), an unconditional income, a job guarantee, and working-time reductions. Although more research is needed, many of these policies have already been applied in practice, including within controlled experiments. For example, there is growing evidence on the positive social effects of basic income-like cash transfers to economically vulnerable groups.140 There is evidence also that productivity-led working-time reductions can improve environmental outcomes141 and that intensified labour productivity, with no reduction in working time, negatively affects workers’ wellbeing and damages long-term productivity.142 Finally, there is sufficient evidence that universal basic services are directly linked to strong social outcomes. Data from 153 countries show that an increase in public health expenditure is associated with a decrease in both child and adult mortality.143 Data from 193 countries show that universal health coverage is associated with increased life expectancy at birth and increased healthy life expectancy.144 Concerns abound about how to pay for such social policies in a post-growth scenario, and how to do this while also controlling inflation. These are currently being addressed by proponents of these policies through Modern Monetary Theory and public money finance (table).
Description
Advocates’ case for
Concerns or points of debate
Universal basic income
A monthly income guaranteed to all residents for life, without any requirement
Compensates for unpaid care work; reduces inequalities; enables people to engage in non-wage creative activities; decouples survival from employment; removes stigma and bureaucracy associated with conventional benefit systems
If funded by tax on income or resources, universal basic income might create a dependency on growth to fund it; it might suppress wages or increase rents, as business owners pay less and property owners charge more in the knowledge that workers receive the basic income; environmental pressure might rebound if income is spent on material consumption
Working-time reduction
Reduction of statutory hours of work per week or year
Ensures high employment in the absence of growth; confers wellbeing and health benefits; reduces environmental pressures; redistributes productivity gains to labour
Might reduce purchasing power for workers if hourly pay remains constant (this is not the case, however, for proposals for working time reduction with constant monthly wage); might result in rebounding environmental impacts if free time is used in resource-intensive ways; might increase unemployment if rising labour costs encourage firms to adopt labour-saving strategies
Universal basic services
Guaranteed access to health care, education, housing, transit, food, and care services for all, without (or with only partly) having to pay for them
Secures minimum conditions for decent living regardless of fluctuations in aggregate output; reduces poverty; redistributes access to services; reduces inequalities
Access to some services (eg, food and housing) might need means-testing, which can create stigma and could create incentives for people to remain insecure to retain access to these services
Job guarantee
All residents are guaranteed access to training and employment in essential public works
Eliminates involuntary unemployment; reduces poverty and exclusion; can be used to direct labour toward socially and environmentally beneficial activities; can be used to set good labour standards and wages across the whole economy
Limited public ownership of means of production constrains the possibility of redirecting the economy through public works; in some countries, the state might have insufficient legitimacy to restructure the economy and it might be unpopular to work for the state; higher wages could prompt labour-saving strategies by capital; higher wages could stimulate more growth
Maximum income
A maximum permissible total income or a maximum wage differential within an organisation, or society as a whole
Limits inequalities; reduces the excess purchasing power of the rich; reduces unnecessary production and consumption; reduces ecological impacts
Tax evasion; outmigration of high-paid professionals
Wealth tax
Progressive annual tax on asset holdings above a certain threshold
Reduces inequalities; distributes wealth more equitably; can be used to fund social and ecological policies
Tax evasion; wealth and capital flight
Public money
Creation of money by the state to spend on social and environmental initiatives; credit policy and taxation are used to reduce excess demand to control inflation
Increases fiscal possibilities; facilitates debt-free money that does not require growth to be repaid
Power can be misused to pay for socially and environmentally detrimental projects; might be politically difficult to tax money out of circulation to reduce inflation
Replacing GDP
Replace GDP with wellbeing and sustainability indicators
Removes distorting role of GDP, which is a poor measure of wellbeing; directs policy to wellbeing and sustainability goals
Absence of powerful epistemic community to support alternative indicators; GDP accounting entrenched in institutional structures
Cap and adapt
Cap and phase out fossil fuels, rationing fossil fuel use per country
Direct reduction of emissions; equitable sharing of mitigation
Monitoring and enforcement; unlikely to reach more binding international agreement
Green New Deal
Public investment programme on the order of 5% of GDP to achieve a just climate transition, coupled with social policies
Fast mobilisation of resources for climate mitigation; social justice and reduction of inequalities
Cost, and pressure for growth to pay back investments; environmental injustice against regions where raw materials are extracted from
Carbon taxes or dividends
Tax carbon (including on imported goods) and return revenue as a universal dividend
Incentivises a shift away from carbon-intensive activities; avoids distributional consequences and conflict
Needs to be very high to have a real effect; few substitution possibilities for many carbon-intensive activities; has lost political momentum
Table
Post-growth-oriented policies
A summary of the main arguments made by advocates of these policies, alongside their most pertinent critiques. Advocates have defended proposals against such critiques; we see these debates as open and marking frontiers for new research.
A core social and economic question concerns the dynamics of inequality in the absence of growth. This question is motivated by Thomas Piketty’s thesis that when GDP growth is lower than the real rate of return to capital (which has historically been around 5%), a greater share of national income can accumulate in the hands of wealth holders.145,146 Data from the USA, China, France, and the UK show rising top income and wealth shares since the 1980s, but with substantial variations due to different country-specific policies and institutions.147 Notably, in Piketty’s dataset, inequalities historically increased after the 1980s in a period when economies did grow, and the great reduction in inequalities in the 20th century was the side-effect of the two wars and the destruction of wealth, as well as the redistributive policies that were brought about by the wars. In low-growth or zero-growth environments, policies that reduce returns to capital (eg, by taxing wealth or by promoting worker ownership) and policies that support a shift to labour-intensive industries (eg, education or health care) can prevent inequality from increasing.145,146 Independently of growth rates, the role of strong trade unions is also crucial in reducing inequalities.148
Beyond economic policy-oriented research, researchers have also sought to conceptualise what post-growth would look like in various domains of life: from innovation149 and urban planning150 to fashion151 or leisure.152 These studies follow a more qualitative approach, often based on case-studies, offering rich hypotheses about cultural, social, and political arrangements that could allow societies to prosper without growth in different contexts.
Growth dependencies
Under existing economic arrangements, growth is regarded as necessary to increase employment, reduce inequalities, and raise tax revenue to pay for public services. How can these growth dependencies be reduced? For instance, how can welfare systems (eg, pensions, education, and health care) be sustained without growth? Researchers have proposed that specific policies can achieve these objectives (table). The difficulty associated with modelling such changes lies in the inability to calibrate them using historical experience. Two approaches have been taken to address this problem. One is to analyse case studies in which individual nations (eg, Japan) have had to manage long-term stagnation.153 The other is to deconstruct the mechanics of growth dependency for particular sectors of the welfare state and generate different institutional possibilities for welfare without growth.154,155
The relationship between social spending and GDP is arguably an important source of growth dependencies. As research on the UK social care sector shows, population ageing and increasing productivity in other sectors that raise the cost of care services, coupled with a privatisation and financialisation of the sector that makes short profits necessary, renders constant growth an imperative for social care providers. But this growth crucially depends on power relations, since there are alternative options for financing care services other than through growth in revenue, yet these are limited by vested interests linked to the privatised organisation of the care sector.155 How to pay for social services without growth is an important question, and a research agenda is now opening on the possibilities of public finance and credit regulation to redirect labour and resources where they are most needed without relying on growth.156
Debates persist about whether capitalist economies have inherent growth imperatives—ie, mechanisms that require growth to keep the economy functioning and that are difficult for individuals, firms, or nation states to circumvent.157 Studies have argued that under conditions of technological innovation, firms are under pressure to accumulate capital to avoid being driven out of business by competitors.157 Debt with interest might also compel growth, at least in the case of private or external debts, although models find that positive interest rates are compatible with non-growing economies if all profits from interest are distributed to households.158 A study of ten historical cases concluded that interest-bearing loans have been problematic in past non-growing and slow-growing economies, and have occasionally been dealt with by cancelling debts or banning compound interest.159
Although post-growth policy frameworks are fairly well developed, there has been less focus on the politics that can make such radical policies possible. One line of research looks at the factors that lock in growth-oriented policies and thus leave little room for alternatives. Historians and social scientists have sought to explain the origins of the political hegemony of growth:160 the dominance of the pursuit of GDP growth as a political objective. Growth might not be an economic imperative in the abstract, this literature suggests, but rather a political imperative, locked in by power relations, institutions, and accounting systems geared towards its pursuit.161 The contemporary preoccupation with GDP first emerged as a response to the need of governments to manage economic production during the Great Depression and the Second World War, whereas growth-targeting became entrenched during the Cold War, linked to the arms race between the two blocs.161 An iterative process between accounting and targeting, and the institutions geared towards the measurement and pursuit of GDP, gradually made growth appear as a natural and unquestionable objective.162 But the success of growth, as a political objective, stems from its function, which was to appease and deflect distributional conflict, becoming a core factor of state legitimacy and political stability.163 Political theorists now debate the effects that an end of growth might have on the legitimacy and stability of liberal democracies.4,164 However, some scholars argue that while a shift to authoritarianism is a strong possibility, social conflict might also, under conditions that remain to be studied, open up paths to deeper and more direct forms of democracy.122
Whereas these accounts suggest that a post-growth transition might be politically difficult for structural reasons, other studies point to promising political possibilities. Survey research shows that most Europeans are in favour of post-growth,165 most scientists (especially climate scientists) are either agnostic towards growth or favourably inclined towards degrowth,166 and interviews with elected members of the European Parliament find a strong current of post-growth ideas among left and green politicians.167 Research on the German Parliament, however, finds that political discourse and practice around growth remains unresponsive to politicians’ individual convictions, because of growth’s entrenched role as a political option to mitigate distributional conflict.168 Promising avenues open when the problem is framed as one of limited resilience due to growth-dependence, and with specific solutions that respond to immediate challenges of stability169 or when prioritising wellbeing rather than averting environmental loss.170
Although there is a vibrant literature on the ways social movements could act as political agents of post-growth,171–173 less attention has been paid to the geopolitical implications of post-growth scenarios, and the risks first movers might face, such as capital flight or a decline in geopolitical power. As with the climate clubs proposed by economists,174 there might be possibilities for post-growth clubs, where nations collaborate around a shared set of post-growth policies and impose penalties on non-participants. The Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership (including Scotland, Iceland, New Zealand, Wales, Finland, and Canada) and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (a sort of international agreement on an equitable downscaling of a damaging industry, now signed by many countries), can be seen as steps in this direction.123,175
Living well within limits
Post-growth research on resource use and human wellbeing grapples with two big questions: can wellbeing be achieved at lower levels of resource use than what characterises high-income countries today? And if so, would this allow humanity as a whole to stay within planetary boundaries?
Post-growth research explores both subjective and objective measures of wellbeing, and recent empirical studies agree on two important points. First, there is substantial variation in the levels of resource use and carbon emissions at which good social outcomes are currently secured,176,177 with several middle-income countries achieving social outcomes that match or exceed those of high-income countries.178 Second, there are currently no countries that achieve good social outcomes while staying within their fair share of planetary boundaries (figure 5)—although some, such as Costa Rica, come close.180
Figure 5 Number of social thresholds achieved versus number of biophysical boundaries transgressed for 92 countries in 2015, scaled by per capita GDPShow full captionFigure viewer
Empirical research points therefore to an important conundrum. On the one hand, high-income countries achieve high levels of human wellbeing but significantly overshoot their fair share of planetary boundaries.181,182 The level of resource use of these high-income countries cannot be universalised.177 On the other hand, despite a decline in the amount of energy required to achieve human development goals,183 modelling decent living standards for all within planetary boundaries shows that, under existing conditions, there is very little room for excess or for inequality.184
This research has led to a shift of attention towards alternative provisioning systems and the types of distributional dynamics that could radically change current relationships between resource use and human wellbeing.185 Provisioning systems refer to both physical systems (eg, infrastructure and technology) and social systems (eg, markets, government institutions, and culture). Research shows that by increasing beneficial provisioning factors (eg, public services, income equality, and democratic quality) and reducing other detrimental factors (eg, economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence), human needs can be met at much lower levels of energy use.186 There is also well established, but in need of updating, empirical evidence that many low-income countries that implement public provisioning systems achieve better health outcomes than much wealthier economies that do not.187 Moreover, the first global decent living energy modelling effort calculates that human needs can be met at a good standard for 10 billion people with levels of energy use that are compatible with 1·5°C.188 A recent review of industrial transformation models and scenarios found that combined supply-side and demand-side measures could reduce current economy-wide material use by 56%, energy use by 40–60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero.189
North–South dynamics in a post-growth context
In the post-growth literature, there is general agreement that low-income countries should achieve social outcomes similar to those that high-income countries presently enjoy, and should increase production as necessary to achieve these outcomes.7,91 However, the need for resource use contraction and convergence within the world economy raises questions about necessary changes to the structure of the world economy. A core question is how development and resource use in low-income countries links to development and resource use in high-income countries.
Ecological economists have approached this question using environmentally extended input–output data and have found that growth in high-income countries relies on a large net appropriation of materials, energy, land, and labour from the Global South, embodied in traded goods.54,190 World-system scholars in turn have argued that this unequal exchange occurs because richer states are able to leverage their financial and geopolitical power to organise production in the Global South toward supplying global commodity chains, while depressing the prices of labour and resources in the Global South.54,191 This process drains countries in the Global South of their productive capacities that could be used instead to provide for local human needs and achieve development objectives more directly.54,191 This analysis runs counter to dominant narratives in development economics and mainstream policy discourses. However, if this literature is correct, post-growth in high-income countries might be beneficial for low-income countries, to the extent that it reduces or eliminates an unfair appropriation of resources.171,172
However, to the extent that low-income countries have come to depend on exports to high-income countries to maintain employment and service debts,192 post-growth transitions and demand reduction in the latter could have damaging effects in the former, in the absence of policy interventions. The literature on monetary sovereignty193 and industrial policy194 could be helpful in offering insights into how governments in low-income countries can reduce reliance on foreign currency, and mobilise resources, labour, and production around human needs and national development objectives.
Another angle through which questions of human development and growth have been approached is through the literature on post-development and needs-oriented development, which have emerged from the Global South, and which argue that growth should not be pursued as an objective in itself; rather, the focus should be on social outcomes, following local models of human development and wellbeing, rather than a universal Global North growth model.195,196 This literature builds on a long history of growth-critical ideas in some Global South countries, such as India and Bhutan,197 or experiences in countries, such as Tanzania, Iran, and Haiti.198
Lessons learned and knowledge gaps
Independent of what one thinks about the sustainability or desirability of economic growth, given that the world finds itself in a situation of slowing growth coupled with intensifying ecological breakdown, the emerging post-growth research described here asks important questions and offers tentative answers that can help prepare societies for an unstable future.
Post-growth research has established a new generation of national ecological macroeconomic models that make it possible to explore questions of stability and wellbeing without growth, while evaluating in a systemic way the effects of alternative social and economic policies. These models indicate that there are stable post-growth pathways that can allow high-income countries to achieve both social and environmental objectives. Yet these models could still be improved in four ways.
First, there is a need to expand the range of environmental and wellbeing indicators considered.199 Recent extensions include material flows and the ecological footprint.200 It would also be useful to explore whether post-growth scenarios would have positive or negative effects on other environmental variables, such as biodiversity, land-use, and water, or to model broader social measures, such as health and life satisfaction. Second, there is a need to adjust and calibrate the models for geographical and economic contexts other than those of Europe and North America, evaluating alternative development policies and stability questions relevant for Global South economies. Third, national-level models need to be improved to capture international relations and dynamics, accounting for trade, capital, and currency flows—factors that might complicate post-growth scenarios in a single country. And finally, there is a need to extend the national economy approach to global climate economy models that connect to and improve on existing Integrated Assessment Models, so that post-growth mitigation scenarios can be modelled for the IPCC.63 One should expect important developments in all of these fronts in the next 5 years given substantial resources devoted by the EU to related research.11–14
As this Review has shown, there is accumulating evidence on policies that could secure wellbeing without growth in high-income countries (eg, universal access to essential goods and services, working-time reduction, and carbon and wealth taxes). Approaching the question of stability as a problem of growth dependency has helped to identify the institutional factors that link stability to growth, and the alternatives that might break such dependencies. Given that at present no countries are enacting post-growth agendas, small-scale experimentation, such as with basic incomes and working-time reduction, offers a controlled setting for reproducible knowledge, though experimentation must be scaled up and extended to other policies. One interesting direction is participatory action research, such as the Doughnut Economics Action Labs, where stakeholders and members of the public develop post-growth programmes for their cities.201 Stakeholder approaches could also be used for diagnosing and addressing growth dependencies through policy labs. However, there is still a gap concerning policies suitable for Global South contexts and the global institutional arrangements necessary to end unequal exchange between the Global North and the Global South.
There have also been important developments, as noted above, in understanding the factors that allow social outcomes to be decoupled from GDP, such as robust public services and safety nets, income equality, and democratic quality.186 And beyond general contract and converge scenarios between high-income countries and low-income countries, there is a need for sector-by-sector and region-by-region analysis of human needs and resource transformations.
Finally, the question of politics emerges as an important research frontier. Whereas science is advancing on the questions of desired pathways, provisioning systems, and policies for a post-growth economy, we still know little about the politics that could make post-growth transitions possible in reality. A particular blind spot concerns geopolitical relations, and how changes in international governance and world orders open up, or close down, opportunities for post-growth and sovereign development.
Scientific interest in the questions addressed in this Review has increased over the past several years—the IPCC has extended discussions through its Sixth Assessment Report85 and the European Research Council13,14 and the European Commission have supported new research.11,12 Whereas post-growth research has been developed primarily within sustainability science and ecological economics, there are important insights on questions of stability and wellbeing to be offered by many other disciplines. Bringing disciplines together, developing new trans-disciplinary concepts, and integrating empirical studies with theoretical frameworks and models could provide valuable insights into how societies can achieve high wellbeing without economic growth, and within planetary boundaries.
Contributors
GK led the conceptualisation and writing of this Review and compiled the table. JH contributed to conceptualisation and led the writing of the sections on planetary boundaries, wellbeing, and development. DWO, TJ, PAV, KR, JBS, JKS, and DÜ-V contributed to writing this Review. DWO carried out the analysis of the Limits to Growth scenarios and created figures 1, 3, and 5; TJ created figure 2; and PV created figure 4. The data used to prepare the visuals are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Declaration of interests
GK, JH, and JKS acknowledge support by the European Research Council funding for the REAL project (grant number 101071647). GK and JH’s work is also supported by the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence (CEX2019–374 000940-M) grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. DWO acknowleges support by the EU in the framework of the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement numbers 101094211 (ToBe) and 101137914 (MAPS). TJ and PAV
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Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 