The Doughnut Economic Action Lab

By Antje Lang
November 2020

Climate breakdown is a by-product of a system that prioritise economic growth above well-being. While economic growth has no doubt contributed to decreasing poverty rates and improve health outcomes, growth for the sake of growth has led to rampant environmental degradation and climate breakdown. Enter: the Doughnut. No, not the kind you eat. Rather, Doughnut Economics, a framework developed by Kate Raworth, which sets out a safe operating space for humanity that remains within planetary boundaries and above the social foundation where all people have access to life’s essentials.

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The Doughnut Economy is regenerative and distributive by design, ensuring that the resources that come into the system are reduced, reused, and recycled; rather than chugging through use via a one-way system as has been commonplace, particularly since the 1950s.

Underpinning the Doughnut is a set of principles to ‘think like a 21st century economist.’:

1. Change the goal – shifting our measurement of prosperity from GDP to the Doughnut
2. See the big picture – recognize that the economy is embedded within societies, which are embedded within the planet, rather than being separate and self-contained entities
3. Nurture human nature – moving from the idea that humans only act in their own self-interest, as they do in traditional economic theory
4. Get savvy with systems – understand that systems-thinking is essential to economic theory
5. Design to distribute – our systems should be designed to distribute resources – material and intellectual.
6. Create to regenerate – build economies that a restorative and renewing to the cycles of life, rather than assuming that more growth will eventually clean up the environment.
7. Be agnostic about growth – whether or not economies grow according to dominant metrics does not equate to whether they make us thrive; therefore, we need to shift our mindset from one that is primarily concerned with growth to one that is primarily concerned with whether or not we thrive, regardless of whether there is growth or not.

Of course, many of us may feel bombarded by frameworks about how we can potentially do things differently. The challenge is implementation, oftentimes combined with a feeling of powerlessness if we’re not in a position of what one might expect to be ‘traditional’ authority. Surprise, surprise, there is no ready-made formula for transformational change. And while higher-level gears of decision-making can certainly create or impede enabling environments for the kind of change we need to address climate breakdown, much of this work is done on small local scales. To take the Doughnut perspective, though, is to recognize that the framework’s call to be distributive and (re)generative by design means that it can only be achieved Now Enter: Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL).

DEAL is a global action-oriented knowledge-sharing community that allows community members the opportunity to create and share tools, stories, and invents to implement the Doughnut in different contexts and at a variety of scales. It provides a kind of living laboratory to test and iterate on the ideas set out in Doughnut Economics. For example, a member from Cornwall developed ‘The easiest community Doughnut recipe ever’ which practitioners can use to facilitate short conversation or full-day workshops that use the Doughnut as a framework to identify impacts of a project or activity. There’s the Creating City Portraits, which provides a methodology to downscale the doughnut to a city scale. Ultimately, DEAL provides a platform upon which to experiment and co-create ideas for systems that work to support people and planet in thriving. 

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You May Also Be Interested In: Methods for Inclusive Cities: Key Stakeholder Engagement Tools, The First Value: Embedding Climate Justice within the Built Environment, The Venus Lab