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
Lancet Planet Health 2025 9: e62–78.
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 characterizing 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 Global North
and the Global South.
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[Noteworthy for CACOR members is the following item. Ed.]
The year 2022 marked the 50th anniversary of Limits to Growth, a report that first posed the question of whether there are limits related to the Earth system that could put constraints on industrial development. The report was based on a system dynamics model (World3) that was parameterized with data from 1900 to 1970, and simulated scenarios for population, food, non-renewable resources, pollution, industrial output, and services to the year 2100.[18] In the Standard Run of the model, which assumed the continuation of historical decision-making, the result is overshoot and collapse (Figure 1). In this scenario, as industrial capital grows, it consumes a larger and larger share of the resource flow, until resource depletion leads to the collapse of the industrial base, followed by the collapse of everything that is dependent on it—services,
the food supply, and ultimately, the human population.[17]
Limits to Growth triggered a long and heated debate,[23] which remains unsettled.[24] Many economists suggested that high prices for scarce resources could result in technological innovation and resource substitution. The assumption that technology grows exponentially, and at a rate sufficient to offset the drag from resource depletion, allows growth to continue without limit.[25] The decline of commodity prices in the 20th century, and especially in the 1980s, when the debate about Limits to Growth took place (Figure 2), was seen as a repudiation of the Limits to Growth hypothesis and a confirmation of the power of technology to offset resource scarcity.[25]
The Standard Run of the Limits to Growth model, however, did not suggest scarcities before the 2010s. Given the cumulative nature of compound growth, the hypothesis was that seeming abundance would at some point turn quickly into scarcity.[18] Increasing resource prices since the 2000s (Figure 2), coupled with economic shocks, have brought back concerns that resource scarcities might indeed limit growth.[27] Other system dynamics models built on World3 suggest peaks and scarcities for various critical metals in the second half of the 21st century.[28,29] However, these models, similarly to the original World3 and all future-oriented models, run the risk of underestimating unpredictable technological breakthroughs that might be incentivized by higher resource prices.
[See the article for the figures and citations. Ed]
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