Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries

Giorgos Kallis, Jason Hickel, Daniel W O’Neill, Tim Jackson, Peter A Victor, Kate Raworth, Juliet B Schor, Julia K Steinberger, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz

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 GlobalNorth and the Global South.


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