Post-growth: wellbeing within boundaries

Kalis, Giorgos, Jason Hickel, Daniel W O’Neill, Tim Jackson, Peter A Victor, Kate Raworth, Juliet H Schor, Julia K Steinberger, and Diana Urge-Vorsatz. 2025. Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries. www.thelancet.com/planetary-health, vol.9(1):e62-78. January 2025.

All the leading experts on alternatives to continued economic growth have combined their efforts to review post-growth research, replacing the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. This is part of planetary sustainability science including ecological economics, Doughnut and wellbeing economics, steady-state economics and degrowth. Most of these make proposals within the capitalist system while viewing GDP as a poor measure of progress, while the latter two emphasise a democratic transformation of the economic system to reduce ecological impact and inequality and improve wellbeing.

Starting with ecological, social and economic limits to growth, and building on the 1972 Limits to Growth report which predicted overshoot and collapse about now, the review discusses whether technology could offset resource scarcity and higher prices, which is difficult to predict, and whether collapse could come from scarcity or from pollution affecting regenerative capacity. More recently, resource scarcity has been replaced by planetary boundaries defining a safe operating space, including greenhouse gas emissions, material use and other global ecological impacts. Given the recent projections of higher economic costs of climate change, the review suggests taking a precautionary approach.

The second issue is the decoupling controversy, whether it is possible to achieve green growth by decoupling GDP from carbon emissions and material use. The evidence shows that GDP remains coupled to resource use because of the rebound effect, when declining cost leads to increased demand. While high-income economies shift to services, they rely on imports, so the engines of the economy remain energy, materials and human labour. Scenarios showing that decoupling can meet climate goals rely on hypothetical large-scale negative emissions technologies that are unrealistic. On the other hand, greening the economy can be an engine of growth if the social and environmental impacts of a clean energy transition with enough energy for other societal uses can be managed. Energy and material use can only be reduced, never brought to zero.

The review then considers human wellbeing and social limits to growth. Above a certain level of income, GDP growth does not improve human wellbeing, as the costs of growth (pollution, mental health, social upheaval) offset the wellbeing benefits. Decreases in GDP are correlated with reduced happiness, but increasing GDP shows no relation to happiness. Countries with full employment policies, social safety nets and decommodified public health programmes and other public services exhibit increased life satisfaction, and human relations have a much stronger effect on personal wellbeing than income once basic needs are met.

With reference to stagnation and economic limits to growth, high income countries show decreasing per capita GDP growth, even stagnation, which could be seen as an outcome of economic success and environmentally beneficial. Voluntary fertility decreases, but the shift to services is usually subsidised by underpaid agricultural and industrial labour in low and middle income countries. More seriously, when economic and political systems are dependent on growth for their stability, stagnation under capitalism poses substantial risks to institutional stability.

It is really helpful to have such a review of post-growth models and policies. The absence of growth in existing economies can lead to unemployment, inequality, debt accumulation, social instability and decreased wellbeing. New ecological macroeconomic models integrate economic and financial variables. Rather than a single goal of utility and GDP growth, these models have multiple non-substitutable goals such as sustainability, equity and wellbeing. They show that lower growth paths lead to better climate outcomes, and the right policies produce good social outcomes. Working-time reduction from increasing labour productivity, and a shift from capital-intensive to labour-intensive sectors, maintain employment without growth, while a job guarantee or transfer payments reduce inequality. Sustainable scenarios combine technology, policy-driven investment strategies, and redistribution to slow growth and environmental impact without compromising wellbeing. Public debt may increase somewhat, but household debt declines. Carbon and resource taxes can stimulate innovation, assisted by research subsidies, while redistributive tax designs and inclusive decision-making can improve acceptance.

Policies for a post-growth transition to secure good social outcomes in employment and living standards with a greener, healthier and more equitable economy, can include universal basic services such as health care, an unconditional income, a job guarantee, and working-time reductions. Other options are a maximum permissible income, wealth taxes, public money with credit policy and taxation to reduce excess demand and control inflation, and replacing GDP with wellbeing and sustainability indicators.

A core concern is the dynamics of inequality in the absence of growth. When GDP growth is lower than the return on capital, wealth holders accumulate a greater share of national income. Reduction of inequality in the 20th century was due to destruction of wealth during wars and redistributive policies. With zero growth, policies that reduce returns to capital, such as by taxing wealth or promoting worker ownership and trade unions, and supporting labour-intensive industries like education and health care, can prevent inequality from increasing. There are various cultural, social and political arrangements that can allow societies to prosper without growth in different contexts.

Addressing growth dependencies is another issue, particularly the relationship between social spending and GDP. Population ageing and increasing productivity in other sectors raise the cost of care services. When this is coupled with privatisation and financialisation of the sector making short profits necessary, and the power of the resulting vested interests, this is sensitive to power relations. Public finance and credit regulation can redirect labour and resources where they are most needed without relying on growth.

There is a continuing debate about whether capitalist economies have inherent growth imperatives, requiring growth to keep the economy functioning. With technological innovation, firms are under pressure to accumulate capital to avoid being driven out of business by competitors. Debt with interest might also compel growth, although positive interest rates are compatible with not-growing economies if the profits are distributed to households.

The review also addresses the politics that might make such radical policies possible. The political hegemony of GDP growth, as a political imperative locked in by power relations, institutions and accounting systems, can make a post-growth transition politically difficult. This emerged from managing production during war, and then the arms race during the Cold War, making growth a natural and unquestionable objective. Its success as a political objective stems from its function to appease and deflect distributional conflict, supporting state legitimacy and political stability. However most Europeans are in favour of post-growth, and the problem can be framed as one of limited resilience due to growth-dependence, with solutions responding to immediate challenges of stability, prioritising wellbeing rather than averting environmental loss. There are geopolitical implications of post-growth, when first movers might face capital flight or a decline in geopolitical power unless they collaborate and impose penalties on non-participants.

Attention is also needed to North-South dynamics in a post-growth context. Low-income countries should achieve the same social outcomes as high-income countries, increasing production as necessary to achieve these outcomes, but the need for resource use contraction and convergence in the world economy will require structural changes. Growth in high-income countries relies on a large appropriation of materials, energy, land and labour from the Global South in traded goods, an unequal exchange because of their power to organise global supply chains depressing the prices of labour and resources and draining the South of its productive capacities. Post-growth in high-income countries might benefit low-income countries by eliminating an unfair appropriation of resources. However policy interventions would be necessary to reduce dependency on exports to maintain employment and service debts. Low-income countries need to reduce reliance on foreign currency, and mobilise resources, labour and production around human needs and national development objectives. The focus should be on social outcomes, following local modes of human development and wellbeing.

All this leads to the big question of living well within limits. Can wellbeing be achieved at lower levels of resource use than in high-income countries today, while allowing all of humanity to stay within planetary boundaries? Good social outcomes in some middle-income countries match or exceed those of high-income countries, but no country is staying within its fair share of planetary boundaries. The level of resource use of high-income countries cannot be universalised, and there is very little room for excess or inequality. There is a need for alternative provisioning systems (both infrastructure and technology, and markets, governments and culture), and distributional dynamics to radically change current relationships between resource use and human wellbeing. Increasing beneficial provisioning factors like public services, income equality, and democratic quality, and reducing detrimental factors like economic growth beyond moderate levels of affluence, will meet human needs at much lower levels of energy use. Implementing public provisioning systems achieves better health outcomes. A recent model showed that human needs for 10 billion people can be met with energy use compatible with 1.5°C. Industrial transformation models combining supply-side and demand-side measures could reduce material use by 56%, energy use by 40-60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero.

The review concludes that, in a situation of slowing growth and ecological breakdown, there are stable post-growth pathways that can allow high-income countries to achieve both social and environmental objectives. They need to be improved with better environmental and wellbeing indicators, adjusted to consider the geographical and economic contexts of the Global South, improved to capture international relations such as trade, capital and currency flows, and extended to global climate economy models useful for the IPCC. Policies are needed for global institutional arrangements necessary to end unequal exchange between the Global North and the Global South. Social outcomes can be decoupled from GDP through robust public services and safety nets, income equality, and democratic quality. Finally, we need to address the politics that could make post-growth transitions possible, and changes in international governance and world order to open opportunities for post-growth and sovereign development.

SOURCE: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)0031…