#100 Ways of Reimagining Post-pandemic Living and Working – Doughnut Economics

These blog posts were conceived  as a platform for sharing ideas, projects and initiatives that could help us regain control over our lives, and steer change towards a more humane way of living, working and rebuilding our communities and cities in a more inclusive way.

This week I take a look at Doughnut Economics, and their place in our post-pandemic vision of progress and development. “A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not just grow”, says Kate Raworth in her Doughnut Manifesto, published nine years ago.

Today, there is a fast-growing global community that is turning those principles into reality and the pandemic has brought fresh urgency to transformative action. For example, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) is a platform helping these communities to share their stories of how to build regenerative and distributive economies, and the city of Amsterdam is home to the Amsterdam Donut Coalition, a network of change-makers who are already putting the Doughnut into practice in their city along these seven principles:

1. Strive to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Strive to align your organization’s purpose, networks, governance, ownership and finances with this goal.
2. See the big picture. Recognize the potential roles of the household, commons, market, and state – and their many synergies – in transforming economies.
3. Cherish human nature in all its diversity, participation, collaboration and reciprocity. Take care of each other and the wellbeing of all.
4. Think in systems. Experiment, learn, adapt, evolve and strive for continuous improvement.
5. Be distributive. Work in the spirit of open design and share the created value with everyone who co-creates it.
6. Be regenerative. Be climate and energy smart, and strive to work with and within the cycles of the living world (be less extractive of value I would personally add!).
7. Don’t let growth become an end in itself. Know when to distribute the work through others instead of scaling it up.

If many more cities adopted these principles we would soon have a large body of experiments to be able to power real change forward and not just tinker at the edges!