Post-Growth Approaches for Economic Transformation

Despite attempts to mitigate today's largest global challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and waste, wealth and income inequality, social polarization and geopolitical conflict, and economic precarity and financial fragility, what we now refer to as the polycrisis—the interplay across the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks facing society—has only deepened over the years. This has prompted an increase in the literature around research that demonstrates how solving these problems cannot happen in isolation, but rather demands a transformation of the entire underlying system that allowed the problems to emerge in the first place. This course explores how our current economic system creates and reinforces the polycrisis, what a new system that respects planetary biophysical constraints should look like, and how transformation of this embedded economic system could take place. We make explicit the implicit underlying narratives that form the basis of neoclassical economic models and institutions. We evaluate alternative models and institutions based on evidence for the ways in which natural systems and human well-being are mutually reinforcing. We reexamine traditional indigenous ways of governing the commons in the context of themes related to the essentiality of biodiversity to ecosystem services, biomimicry, regenerative agriculture, and collaborative decision-making. Qualitative and quantitative approaches (tools, metrics, and policies) aligned with alternative narratives and models are proposed for decision making in complex embedded systems. We discuss how these approaches relate to provisioning systems (for example, food, energy, water, and housing) and whether and how they are or should be supported by self-governed communities, governance, business, and finance. This course introduces two alternatives for each piece of information about the polycrisis to emphasize possible avenues for change rather than instill fear, which research shows often leads to paralysis or rigid conservative thinking. At the end of the course, students better understand the economy-in-society-in-the-biosphere and are equipped to identify how they can connect with others in community or organization and take collective action for systems change.