Towards post-growth policymaking: Barriers and enablers for wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives

Laura Angresius, Milena Buchs, Alessia Greselin and Daniel W. O'Neill

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Providing wellbeing for all while safeguarding planetary boundaries may require governments to pursue post-growth policies. To understand how post-growth policymaking can be fostered, we examine wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives across governance scales in Europe, New Zealand, and Canada. To identify political dimensions of barriers and enablers as well as priorities for future action, we apply a framework that distinguishes polity, politics, and policy to analyze the data. We find that the main barriers are polity-related contextual factors while the main enablers are the political agency of key individuals and positive framings of post-growth visions. Despite the focus of the post-growth literature on policies, our results suggest they have limited transformative potential in the current system. The overarching economic growth paradigm severely limits the initiatives' scope of action. Highly motivated individuals and high-level political support are more essential in driving initiatives than pressure from civil society. Practitioners who promote growth-critical perspectives often face tensions: they need to appeal to broad stakeholder groups while avoiding cooptation. Overall, our findings suggest that further structural changes are required to support post-growth initiatives: a greater presence of post-growth approaches in economics education and the media is required for post-growth discourses to become more accepted, and to build understandings of how growth dependencies can be addressed.

Date: 2025-01, Revised 2025-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17600 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2501.17600

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().