I’ve just been to a three-day conference on sustainable prosperity in Europe, attended by thousands of people.
In a stirring opening address, the speaker said governments must stop misusing GDP growth as their goal and move swiftly and urgently to sustainable wellbeing within planetary boundaries. They got a standing ovation.
The young leader of a climate and social justice movement concluded the event with a call to join the “movement of movements”, to create a new economy based on sustainable prosperity, justice and sufficiency. Everyone rose to their feet to show their solidarity.
This is not the start of a utopian novel set in an alternative universe.
This was a real event: the Beyond Growth conference held at the European Parliament last week. Sponsored by the European Commission and the Club of Rome, it attracted more than 2,500 participants (with another 2,000 online).
I believe it marks a tipping point in thinking and governance in response to the convergence of crises facing humanity today.
We are in a race of tipping points. We are exceeding biophysical planetary boundaries and the climate is fast approaching irreversible tipping points that could give us a world that human civilisation has never experienced.
Social capital is eroding due to runaway inequality and political polarisation. People around the world recognise that life is not getting any better. Levels of anxiety, depression and burnout are skyrocketing across the Western world. Full-time employees unable to pay rent, people turning to precarious gig work to make ends meet, employers cutting staff and increasing workloads – all have become normal in this system, which extracts natural resources, energy and time.
The root cause of these crises is our societal addiction to an outdated economic paradigm based on the single-minded pursuit of GDP growth at all costs. This paradigm claims that all people want is more income and consumption without limit, that the market economy can grow forever, that massive inequality is justified to provide incentives to promote growth, and that any efforts to address climate and other environmental problems must not interfere with growth.
The EU conference, in contrast, emphasised what has long been recognised in parts of the academic and policy communities – that GDP was never designed to measure societal wellbeing, since it only measures marketed production and consumption, conflating positive and negative outcomes. It also says nothing about the distribution of income, unpaid work, or damage to the environment. Continuing to misuse GDP as a policy goal is driving our societies towards an unsustainable future that benefits an increasingly small fraction of the population while impoverishing the vast majority.
All of these things must be considered in any attempt to measure true societal wellbeing.
The Beyond Growth conference had several sessions on alternative indicators that do just that. In fact, it showed that the number of experiments with societal wellbeing indicators is in the hundreds. These experiments can help us move towards a broad consensus on what needs to be included to form a more complete and useful picture of societal wellbeing that can replace GDP as a societal goal.
It also emphasised the need for models that incorporate the complex dynamics of the economic system embedded in society and the rest of nature. These models would allow projections into the future to assess the sustainability of various policies aimed at providing societal wellbeing. They could build on many recent efforts, including the Canadian economy’s LowGrow model and the global Earth4All model of the Club of Rome.
The conference also recognised the pioneering efforts of several governments, including the EU and the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) group – Canada, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales – to begin to implement measures of sustainable wellbeing and the policies needed to achieve them.
What are these policies? An open letter, signed by more than 400 leading economists, scientists, policy makers and activists provides the following list of some of the key elements:
Biocapacity: Fossil fuel phaseouts, limits to raw material extraction, nature protection and restoration measures for healthy and resilient soils, forests, marine and other ecosystems. For example, a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty; a resource justice and resilience act including a binding material footprint reduction target and real, area-based nature restoration.
Fairness: Fiscal instruments to foster a more equal society by eradicating income and wealth extremes, as well as super-profits. For example, a carbon wealth tax; both minimum and maximum incomes.
Wellbeing for all: Secured access to essential infrastructures via an improved and ecologically sensitive welfare state. For example, Universal Basic Services (including the human rights to health, transport, care, housing, education and social protection); job guarantees; price controls for essential goods and services.
Active democracy: Citizen assemblies with mandates to formulate socially acceptable sufficiency strategies and strengthen policies based on ecological limits, fairness and wellbeing for all and a stronger role for trade unions. For example, local needs forum; climate conventions; participatory budgeting.
Finally, the conference recognised that vested interests in maintaining the current system – including billionaires, the fossil fuel sector, the defence sector, Big Pharma and industrial agriculture – will continue to fight to prevent the transformative changes needed.
Overcoming our societal addiction to the current system will require a broad consensus and a movement of movements around the shared goal of sustainable wellbeing for humans and the rest of nature. This conference will, hopefully, be remembered as one of the early sparks of the movement to create the world we all want.
Teaser photo credit: Mangrove replanting in Mayotte. By Lizot pierrick – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72167050. Marine restoration is one of the policies needed to achieve sustainable wellbeing, experts say.
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Such conferences may boost morale, and generate useful rhetoric, but we need to recognize that the obstacles to even small movement in the right direction are formidable. This refers to Canada as one of the governments in a Wellbeing Economy model–really? I see no difference between policy there and in the US. The wellbeing of the oil industry is about a hundred times more important to lawmakers than the wellbeing of the human citizens…because it contributes 100 times as much to their campaigns, and legislation is an expensive commodity. Only billionaires and corporations can afford it. Basically all the world’s “democratic” governments work on this legislation-for-bribes model. The citizenry could perhaps still force change if it rose up en masse–but this is easily prevented because the same corporations that own the governments own the media. So the citizenry is kept busy fighting over manufactured outrage issues, the government advances its surveillance so it can know where any potentially serious resistance may be forming, at the same time it entitles itself to keep its own doings beyond public scrutiny.
WHAT we can do about all this I don’t know but I think it would be more useful to talk about it than to keep having conferences to talk about what would be good policy if we were not ruled by sociopaths, corporations and billionaires. People have been proposing better measures than GDP for 40 years but nothing changes because keeping us wedded to GDP-as-religion has worked well for the sociopathic billionaires and corporations. Spinning hypothetical fantasies of what-we- SHOULD-do, and arguing out the details, is fun but it doesn’t actually accomplish anything toward getting us closer to that pretty fairytale world.
I think that this type of presentation is exactly why critics of degrowth are so easily able to marginalize degrowth as an ideological fantasy… rather than as an irrefutable necessity.
…because it fails to concretely motivate the necessity of degrowth, this presentation leaves on feeling that, at best, degrowth would be, “nice, but not necessary.” It is also easy to characterize this type of presentation as, “griping because the world isn’t perfect,” as, “utopian wish-listing that these people have no idea how to pay for,” or as some sort of political maneuver by socialists.
At the very least, without concrete motivation, “nice but not necessary” is easy to ignore, in a world of pressing imperatives felt by nearly every nation and individual.
I can understand how this type of presentation got started, and why it is still so common.
Interest in degrowth approaches began quite a long time ago (at LEAST 60 years) (same for alternatives to GDP, for at least 40 years), but the main push to develop those approaches in the past two decades was taken up by small groups of academics, starting roughly 2000-2010.
Until the past 4-5 years, those academics did not have the “benefit” of today’s startlingly clear evidence of biodiversity collapse (separate from GHG impacts) and of existential and accelerating impacts of global heating (and other GHG impacts).
So, while somewhat referring to limits to growth, biodiversity losses, and the potential of climate change (as in the original article posted here*), many of those academics developed talking points based on what they had at the time — data trends related to quality of life and societal well-being.
As a result of that formative history, many of those academics are still steeped in those arguments… either by habit, or by not wanting to abandon the arguments underlying a decade or more of work.
Those types of arguments are also subtly reinforced by the world at large.
Individuals and media outlets are relatively tolerant of talking about gradual (so gradual that it isn’t clear they will ever happen) societal changes, or theoretical systemic changes that might someday be interesting… but initial push-back against arguments for near-term systemic (radical) change quickly becomes much sharper.
So, it’s easier for many degrowth advocates to focus on those types of arguments — they subtly but pervasively reinforced (the modus of all social learning) — there is some enthusiastic, positive response from some, and not too much push-back, overall.
These types of arguments are, I feel, are unfortunately ultimately counter-productive… making it easy dismiss, marginalize, and doubt the efficacy or importance of the related policy suggestions.
Here’s what I am getting at…
Today — every (or almost every) one of those policy suggestions can be concretely derived as essential, with absolute logical rigor, based on clear and irrefutable physical evidence.
The difference in presentations might appear subtle, or insignficant, yet I feel that, in the long-term, the difference in presentation can be profound.
Presented as, “these approaches would reduce societal inequities,” or “make life better” (somehow), these approaches are not strongly motivated (particularly given that there are many other policies, not to mention consumer products) that claim to do the same.
Every time I see a presentation like this, I can’t help but feel that an opportunity has been missed, and that perhaps the importance of degrowth has been undermined.
How might “concrete” logic yield the same results…?
Here’s a quick sketch —
There are two motivations for degrowth — that must work in partnership — climate change (global heating) and ecological limits other than climate change.
(Most people start with climate change, then then add ecological limits (e.g Planetary Boundaries) as a tack-on. I prefer the reverse order.)
(1) The demonstrable, irrefutable fact that human civilization has already wildly exceeded ecological limits other than climate change, already driving global ecosystems spiraling into collapse (before climate change impacts became pronounced), shows that continue growth is not possible, stasis is not possible, and that “green growth” approaches are likely to be catastrophic.
(2) The fact of substantial and accelerating real-world impacts of global heating — with the possibility of radical, abrupt changes possible at virtually any moment — adds extreme urgency, in terms of time-frames, to the concerns in (1).
Together, (1) and (2) imply
—> imminent reductions in availability of natural resources —> globalised trade/resource systems will increasingly be unstable —> existing financial systems face near-term failure —>
—> growth-based financial and economic systems are incompatible with (near-term) human survival (survival — not just “well-being”) —>
—> Stasis is also not possible, because human civilization is already in a state of extreme overshoot —>
STIPULATION — it is better to mitigate and prepare for collapse than to allow collapse to occur without preparing or than to increase the scale and severity of collapse
—> —> human and economic activities must be radically downsized —> non-essential activities must be programmatically substantially reduced or eliminated <— human and economic activities must be radically downsized... to WITHIN a SAFE BUFFER within global ecological limits (—> the best way to ensure global sustainability is through mostly- “piecewise” sustainability (i.e. mostly- local/national self-sufficiency))
—> —> —> in order for people to cease non-essential activities (whether idled or re-purposed), without societal chaos, programs must be put into place to support those people —> universal services and/or universal basic income,
—> —> —> —> in order for support programs to function, stably, without societal chaos, they must be equitable —> equitable implementation of support programs
and so on.
Nearly ALL the usual prescriptions — which can otherwise sound like, “ideological fantasies,” or, “ideological wish-listing” can be CONCRETELY DERIVED, based on pure logic, starting from the verifiable physical realities of our situation.
—
Following that concrete, linear reasoning might feel like a bit of a bore, when writing/presenting it… but it is irrefutable, and I think that’s powerful…. even/especially with repetition.
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*This article is representative of many like it, in the sense that it gives a brief mention of limits to growth, “tipping points,” and overshoot of ecological limits, but does not concretely tie those to its proffered systemic change suggestions.
Instead, in this particular case, the main motivations for its policy suggestions are:
“Social capital is eroding {…} life is not getting any better. {…} anxiety, depression and burnout are skyrocketing {…} people turning to precarious gig work to make ends meet {…}.
“The root cause of these crises is our societal addiction to an outdated economic paradigm based on the single-minded pursuit of GDP growth at all costs. This paradigm claims that all people want is more income and consumption without limit, that the market economy can grow forever, that massive inequality is justified to provide incentives to promote growth, and that any efforts to address climate and other environmental problems must not interfere with growth.”
The presentation does not show how these tie together, nor how the proposed policy suggestions are good (let alone the best) responses.