The rationale for the work rests on a well-documented paradox. Both individual educators and the institutions that govern them recognize the benefits of applying educational evidence to teaching, yet the gap between academic research and frontline practice has persisted since at least the early 1990s, when Charles Kaestle famously described the awful reputation of education research. Previous studies have traced the problem to multiple, overlapping causes. Research competence is poorly integrated into initial teacher education, so many graduates never learn to interpret studies or judge the quality of evidence. Few professionals are trained to distinguish reliable findings from unfounded claims. Time is another critical constraint: teachers are unwilling to invest scarce hours in engaging with research, and those in leadership positions are often unwilling to fund the resources that would make such engagement feasible.

The new study also highlights subtler obstacles that operate at the psychological and structural level. Teachers may resist change because new evidence conflicts with pre-existing beliefs and values, a phenomenon long noted in the literature. Research on teacher effectiveness suggests a kind of ossification: classroom effectiveness improves rapidly during the first five to seven years of teaching and then plateaus, a shift the authors of that earlier work attribute to the transition from deliberate, reflective practice to habitual routines at the neural level. Meanwhile, the way scientific articles are written poses an accessibility problem in itself, and the realities of a given classroom often differ so much from the conditions of the original research that teachers judge the findings irrelevant. Political pressures and the rush to publish significant results can further compromise research quality and ethics, leading society to confuse impact with quality and to adopt ineffective practices.

Against this backdrop, the researchers set out to build a measurement tool rather than another exhortation to collaborate. Their questionnaire follows a cross-sectional design and draws on Dillman’s Tailored Design Method, a framework for constructing surveys that produce valid and reliable results. Questions were drafted with clarity, impartiality, and conciseness in mind, each addressing a single element. Crucially, the instrument defines what it means by educational research and scientific evidence, ensuring that all respondents share a common conceptual framework, since definitions of research can vary widely across the teaching population. The questionnaire measures three main variables on five-point Likert scales: perception of barriers to accessing and transferring scientific evidence, perception of potential facilitators, and perception of the potential of new technologies to help teachers integrate evidence into the classroom.

Content validity was established through a formal expert judgment process. Eleven experts, nine from the university sector and two schoolteachers with university affiliations, evaluated every item for comprehension, relevance, and importance. Selection criteria required experience in education and educational technologies, training in scientific research, more than three years of professional experience, and membership of different educational bodies and institutions. The experts’ own competence was quantified using the K Coefficient, or Expert Competence Coefficient, which combines a knowledge coefficient with an argumentation coefficient. The results were reassuring: most experts scored above 0.8, indicating high competence, with only two in the medium range. Every item received an average score above 3.5 out of 4, and with the standard threshold of 80 percent expert agreement met, all items were retained for the pilot phase.

The pilot test involved 278 students enrolled in the Master’s Degree in Teacher Training at four Catalan universities: Universitat de Lleida, Universitat Ramon Llull, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, and Universitat de Vic. Drawn from a total population of 450 prospective secondary teachers through non-probabilistic convenience sampling, the sample exceeded the 259 participants calculated as necessary for a 99 percent confidence level with a 5 percent margin of error. The questionnaire was distributed by email and in person, with students able to respond via a QR code on their mobile devices. Notably, 37.05 percent of the sample combined their studies with active teaching work, a situation the authors describe as distinctive to the Catalan context.

The statistical analysis is where the study earns its technical credibility. Because Mardia’s multivariate kurtosis coefficient of 18.963 indicated non-normal data, the researchers selected the Weighted Least Squares estimation method, chosen for its robustness against departures from normality in exploratory factor analysis. Sampling adequacy was confirmed with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of 0.847, comfortably above the 0.80 threshold considered good, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was highly significant. An oblique Promax rotation was applied to allow factors to correlate, and the resulting correlation matrix justified that choice. Applying the Kaiser criterion, a scree test, and a parallel analysis comparing observed eigenvalues against those from random data, the team retained seven factors, each represented by at least three items with loadings above the 0.32 significance threshold.

The seven factors tell a coherent story about what shapes evidence use. Factor 1 captures technology as a facilitator, addressing how digital tools can help integrate scientific evidence into classrooms. Factor 2 reflects institutional support, including time to implement evidence and the accessibility of research in terms of language and complexity; a negatively loading item within this factor signals that research lacking relevant conclusions for practice can undermine even improved access. Factor 3 concerns direct contact between teachers and research teams. Factor 4 covers educational resources, Factor 5 groups relevance, accessibility, and practicality, Factor 6 encompasses physical and cognitive barriers to accessing scientific articles, and Factor 7 measures the value of scientific literature itself as a professional resource. Reliability analysis showed Cronbach’s Alpha values above 0.7 for all factors except Factor 7, which scored 0.492; the authors retained it because its eigenvalue exceeded 1 and its low consistency likely reflects the small number of items, while also noting that merging it with Factor 4 would have produced an acceptable alpha of 0.764.

The practical implications extend well beyond psychometrics. By mapping the latent structure of teachers’ perceptions, the instrument gives policymakers, teacher educators, and researchers a diagnostic tool for identifying exactly where the pipeline from evidence to practice breaks down, whether at the point of access, interpretation, institutional backing, or technological support. The authors acknowledge limitations: convenience sampling limits representativeness, and the sample of Catalan master’s students may not generalize to the broader teaching population. They propose administering the questionnaire to more active teachers across experience levels and complementing future quantitative analyses with qualitative and mixed-methods designs to strengthen validity. Still, the study delivers what Kaestle argued was essential decades ago: a clear picture of the frontline of the system. With a validated instrument now available, the dialogue between educational research and classroom practice has, for the first time, a reliable way to measure itself, and a concrete pathway toward closing a gap that has persisted for more than thirty years.

Subject of Research: Design and validation of a self-perception questionnaire on teachers' use of scientific knowledge in teaching practice

Article Title: Design and validation of a self-perception instrument on the use of scientific knowledge in teaching practice

Article References: Guinovart-Pedescoll, M., & Palau, R. (2025). Design and validation of a self-perception instrument on the use of scientific knowledge in teaching practice. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-024-00026-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-024-00026-5

Keywords: educational research, scientific evidence, questionnaire validation, teacher training, exploratory factor analysis, evidence-based practice, teaching quality, research-practice gap, psychometrics, educational technology, Catalonia, teacher perceptions

The stakes are considerable. Upper respiratory and gastrointestinal infections remain among the most common causes of illness in school-aged children worldwide. According to figures cited by the research team, more than 90 percent of children aged three to six catch at least one respiratory infection each year, and roughly half experience a diarrhoea-related illness. Attendance at kindergarten or primary school amplifies this burden, because classrooms are environments of constant physical contact, shared surfaces, and imperfect hygiene. Proper hand hygiene is regarded as the most cost-effective and straightforward measure available to reduce these infections and the school absenteeism that comes with them. Crucially, healthy habits formed in early childhood tend to persist into adulthood, which is why schools are such an attractive setting for intervention.

The World Health Organization’s 2009 guidelines on hand hygiene in health care already promote multimodal strategies that combine education, supplies, and real-time feedback. A systematic review of eighteen cluster-randomized controlled trials concluded that such programmes can reduce respiratory-tract infections and sickness-related absence, although the methodological quality of the underlying studies varied. Previous work has also highlighted the pedagogical power of fluorescent markers viewed under ultraviolet light. When children apply a glowing gel and then see, under a black light, exactly which parts of their hands they missed, the invisible becomes vividly concrete. Studies in paediatric waiting rooms and primary schools have shown that this kind of visual concretization can improve washing technique, and the evidence generally suggests that combining interactive education with fluorescent visualisation works better than either element alone.

What has been missing, the Catalan researchers argue, is objectivity and scale. Traditional UV-based interventions rely on manual or semi-automated scoring of photographs, which is time-intensive and vulnerable to observer variability. To address this, the team—based at the Preventive Medicine Unit and Infection Control Group of Joan XXIII University Hospital and collaborating primary care researchers—developed a semi-automated, AI-assisted image analysis pipeline, and, to their knowledge, no published school-based intervention study had previously integrated such a tool into UV-based hand hygiene feedback and outcome assessment.

The study was designed as a controlled before-after repeated measures study conducted within the Sentinel Schools Network of Catalonia in the Camp de Tarragona region during the 2023 to 2025 academic period. Two primary schools were matched in advance by low-socioeconomic urban context, management type, and school size, then pragmatically assigned to intervention and control groups to minimise cross-contamination between arms. Sixty-four pupils at the intervention school and sixty-two at the control school took part. Hand hygiene was assessed at baseline and again at one, three, and six months after the intervention. At each assessment, participants applied roughly one millilitre of fluorescent alcohol-based hand rub, rubbed their hands, and placed them inside a custom-built UV device that provided a uniform dark background and controlled illumination. Two photographs per child captured the dorsal and palmar surfaces under standardised conditions, and the percentage of adequately covered hand surface was calculated.

The intervention itself was deliberately brief. Pupils at the intervention school received a thirty-minute educational session covering the seven-step technique for alcohol-based hand rub and the role of hand hygiene in infection prevention, delivered through a short video, slides, and classroom materials, followed by a practical activity with real-time visual feedback. No reinforcement activities took place between follow-up visits. Control-school pupils received the same educational session only after the study ended; during the study they were exposed to the UV device during assessments but received no direct feedback on the areas they had missed.

The AI pipeline worked in three stages. First, a YOLOv8 object detection model localised each hand and classified its view and laterality—right or left, dorsal or palmar. The team labelled 5,197 images of hands and augmented them to 57,163 through transformations such as mirroring, rotation, translation, scaling, and illumination changes, training on 51,446 images and validating internally on 5,717. Evaluated on 2,381 new labelled images after 247 training epochs, the model achieved an overall accuracy of 94 percent across the four hand classes. Second, a pretrained Segment Anything Model from Meta segmented each hand from its background without additional training, failing on only 48 hands at first attempt, 38 of which were recovered with minimal manual adjustment. Third, colour isolation using thresholds in hue, saturation and value space identified the fluorescent regions and generated binary coverage masks. This final stage proved the weak link: HSV-based fluorescence detection showed low agreement with ground-truth annotations and required human supervision, a limitation the authors attribute to image-to-image illumination variability that could be mitigated by redesigning the device or adopting a more robust automated approach.

The effectiveness results told a nuanced story. At baseline, adjusted estimates of clean hand surface coverage were similar in both schools, at 0.888 in the control school and 0.910 in the intervention school. At one month, both groups improved comparably, reaching 0.937 and 0.943 respectively—a rise the authors suggest may reflect assessment awareness, the implicit prompting of the UV procedure itself, or limited contamination between school communities. From three months onward, however, the trajectories diverged. The control school regressed partially toward baseline, falling to 0.913, while the intervention school held and then built on its gains, reaching 0.944 at three months and 0.958 at six months. The adjusted between-school differences became statistically significant at three months, with a difference of 0.031, and widened at six months to 0.041. Within the intervention school, all follow-up contrasts against baseline were statistically significant, with the largest gain at six months; within the control school, only the one-month change was statistically supported. The analysis used a beta mixed-effects regression model with a logit link, a random intercept for each pupil to account for repeated measures, and adjustments for multiple testing. Girls performed modestly better than boys, and the model revealed meaningful between-pupil heterogeneity in baseline performance.

The authors are careful about what these numbers can and cannot show. Because the study involved only a single matched pair of schools, the between-school contrasts are treated as exploratory rather than confirmatory cluster-level causal estimates. Residual confounding from unmeasured school-level characteristics cannot be excluded, and baseline differences in age, grade composition, household size, and parental education between the two schools were present, although additional statistical adjustment for age and grade did not meaningfully change the results. The incomplete end-to-end automation of the image analysis is a second acknowledged limitation. Still, the researchers argue that embedding prevention and health promotion interventions in school settings can generate actionable evidence for public health and education practice, and that if the approach is replicated across a larger number of clusters and more diverse contexts, it could be scaled up and integrated into routine school health programmes—particularly if measurement and feedback can be delivered with minimal staff burden.

The broader significance lies in the marriage of two ideas. One is pedagogical: making the invisible visible, so that a child can see the glowing residue on the backs of the hands or between the fingers that a quick rinse leaves behind. The other is technological: replacing subjective human scoring with a standardised, reproducible computer-vision workflow that limits observer bias and could, in principle, support large-scale monitoring across many schools. Neither idea is new on its own, but their combination in a real school intervention is a first, and the six-month durability of the effect—modest in absolute terms but statistically consistent—adds to growing evidence that structured instruction plus UV-based feedback can sustain improvements where feedback alone cannot. For a measure as cheap and universal as handwashing, even small, persistent gains in technique among children could translate into fewer infections, fewer missed school days, and habits that last a lifetime.

Subject of Research: A school-based hand hygiene intervention using UV visual feedback and AI-assisted image analysis in primary school children

Article Title: Evaluation of a hand hygiene intervention in two primary schools using UV-based feedback and AI-assisted image analysis

Article References: Bordas, A., Colom-Cadena, A., Aceiton, J., Martínez-Torres, S., García-Pino, A., Escaramis, G., Muntada, E., Rey-Reñones, C., Gens-Barberà, M., Casabona, J., Basora, J., & Martín-Luján, F. (2026). Evaluation of a hand hygiene intervention in two primary schools using UV-based feedback and AI-assisted image analysis. Public Health in Practice, 12, Article 100856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100856

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100856

Keywords: hand hygiene, primary schools, ultraviolet feedback, artificial intelligence, image analysis, YOLOv8, Segment Anything Model, infection prevention, school health promotion, children, public health, Catalonia

The study was conducted by Bayla Ostrach, a medical anthropologist and family medicine researcher at Boston University School of Medicine, who carried out fieldwork at the only clinic then contracted with the Catalan public health system to provide full-spectrum abortion care. That single-clinic arrangement is itself a telling detail. Although abortion is, by policy, available through the public system in Catalunya, the actual delivery of services depends on a small network of contracted providers, meaning that patients in much of the region must travel to one facility to exercise a right that the law nominally guarantees everywhere. Using opportunistic and convenience sampling, Ostrach documented patient experiences directly within this setting, capturing the practical texture of access in a way that surveys and administrative data cannot.

Ethnographic methods of this kind are particularly well suited to studying abortion access because the barriers patients encounter are rarely formal or visible in policy documents. A waiting list that adds two weeks, a phone line that is difficult to reach, a health worker who implies that a medication regimen is the only appropriate option, or a comment that carries judgment—these are the frictions that accumulate into delay, and delay is the single most consequential variable in abortion care, since gestational age limits determine whether a patient can be treated at all. By embedding observation in the clinic and talking with patients as they moved through the system, the study was able to record these frictions as they occurred, rather than reconstructing them retrospectively.

The results converge on a central conclusion: years after liberalization, delays and obstacles persisted throughout the public health system. Participants described waiting periods and scheduling difficulties that pushed their care later into pregnancy, misinformation about what services were available and how to obtain them, and the continuing weight of abortion stigma, which manifested both in interactions with the health system and in patients’ own accounts of their decisions. Stigma, in this context, is not merely an emotional burden; it operates as a structural barrier, discouraging patients from asking questions, delaying their presentation for care, and shaping how providers communicate about options.

One of the study’s most striking findings concerns the form that stigma took within the publicly funded pathway itself. Participants reported pressure to undergo pharmacologic abortion—that is, medication-based termination rather than an aspiration or procedural method. Medication abortion is safe, effective, and appropriate for many patients, and its availability is an unambiguous good. The concern raised by the study is different: when patients are steered toward one method regardless of their clinical circumstances, gestational age, or personal preference, the pressure itself becomes a form of obstruction. Method choice in abortion care should reflect informed patient preference within clinical guidelines, and reports of systematic steering suggest that the public system’s delivery model, whatever its logistical rationale, was not consistently centering patient autonomy.

The study also documented the socioeconomic motivations that participants described for seeking abortion, particularly in the context of existing child-rearing responsibilities. Many patients were already parents, and their decisions were framed explicitly around the material realities of raising children—income, housing, work schedules, and the absence of adequate support. This finding aligns with a long line of research showing that the most common reasons women give for seeking abortion are financial and caregiving constraints rather than health complications or fetal indications. It also underscores a point that abortion access researchers have made repeatedly: the people most affected by delays and obstacles in publicly funded systems are those with the fewest private alternatives, and the most marginalized patients bear the brunt of every added barrier.

That distributional point is central to the study’s significance. The abstract notes that delays and obstacles appear to especially impact the most marginalized, and the single-contractor structure of Catalan abortion provision illustrates why. A patient with a car, flexible employment, and private resources can absorb travel costs, take time off, and, if necessary, pay for private care. A patient working hourly shifts, caring for children, or lacking documentation or funds cannot. When the public pathway is slow or opaque, the system effectively sorts patients by their capacity to navigate it, converting administrative friction into inequity. In this sense, the Catalan case is a warning for any health system that treats legal availability as equivalent to realized access.

The research also carries methodological and ethical weight. The study protocol was reviewed by the human subjects research board at Boston University School of Medicine and, under United States federal research regulations codified at 45 CFR 46, was determined exempt from further review, while still being conducted in accordance with those federal guidelines; all participants provided informed consent. The research was unfunded, and the author declares no competing interests. The article is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, and the version shared ahead of final publication is citable and carries a permanent digital object identifier, a practice that journals increasingly use to speed the dissemination of peer-reviewed findings.

For public health, the implications reach well beyond Catalunya. The global health community has long identified access to safe, high-quality abortion as a priority, and the study’s central lesson is that liberalization is a beginning, not an endpoint. A law changes what is permitted; a health system determines what is possible. Between the two lie waiting times, referral pathways, provider training, method availability, information quality, and the informal norms that shape clinical encounters. The Catalan experience shows that even where all of these operate within a framework of legality and public funding, they can still function as obstacles—and that closing the gap requires monitoring not just whether services exist, but how patients actually experience them.

The study’s conclusion is deliberately restrained but pointed: years after abortion liberalization, overall health system delays and obstacles persisted, even in an ostensibly ideal setting of legality and public funding. That phrase—ostensibly ideal—is the finding’s sharpest edge. If a wealthy European region with a universal health system, a liberalized law, and public financing still produces the delays, misinformation, and stigma documented here, then no jurisdiction can assume that legal reform alone delivers equitable access. What remains to be studied, and what the Catalan case now demands, is the systematic measurement of patient experience as a core indicator of abortion service quality, treated with the same seriousness as clinical outcomes. Until then, the gap between the law on the books and the care patients receive will continue to fall hardest on those with the least capacity to bridge it.

Subject of Research: Patient experiences navigating publicly funded abortion care in the Catalan public health system years after Spain's 2010 abortion liberalization

Article Title: Patient experiences in the Catalan public health system years after abortion liberalization

Article References: Ostrach, B. (2026). Patient experiences in the Catalan public health system years after abortion liberalization. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00486-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00486-4

Keywords: abortion access, abortion delays, abortion stigma, Catalonia, Catalunya, public health system, publicly funded healthcare, Spain abortion law, medication abortion, health equity, medical anthropology, reproductive health

The report emerges from the REAL post-growth research project, funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant and led by Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel of ICTA-UAB together with Julia Steinberger of the University of Lausanne. In this research tradition, economic growth is treated not as an unqualified good but as something closer to an addiction: a pursuit that no longer reliably improves people’s lives while progressively compromising the resources and environmental stability on which future well-being depends. Post-growth scholarship therefore seeks ways to raise quality of life without depending on continued expansion of production and consumption, which is increasingly doubtful in viability and incompatible with the limits of a finite planet. The Catalan study translates that abstract ambition into a concrete inventory of interventions, each calibrated to the region’s actual socio-environmental conditions.

The report’s principal investigator, Salvador Pueyo, acknowledges that there are reasons for pessimism given the scale of global and everyday problems, but he insists that the game is not over, and that defining solidly grounded policies is an immediate necessity for emerging from the current crisis. Giorgos Kallis, principal investigator of REAL, describes the work as a fundamental study, the first to calculate how a region can transition toward a post-growth future, demonstrating that such a transition is feasible. A central methodological contribution of the report is its quantification of the resources demanded by current modes of living and production, compared against the potential capacity of Catalonia and of the planet as a whole. Pueyo emphasizes that the analysis does not focus on individual responsibility but on the potential for collective change, while conceding that a collective shift of this magnitude will inevitably also involve changes in consumption habits.

Nowhere is the quantitative rigor more evident than in the energy chapter. The report presents data showing that moving away from fossil fuels is urgent and, crucially, is not currently happening. Meeting Catalonia’s entire present energy consumption exclusively through renewable sources, the authors calculate, would require occupying the equivalent of 4.9 percent of the region’s territory, a burden with consequences that would be difficult to bear; increasing consumption further would make the problem even worse. To avoid this, the plan calls for a sharp reduction in energy use combined with the sequential deployment of renewables, beginning in locations with lower environmental impact and moving later to higher-impact sites, preserving future opportunities to mitigate damage. Notably, the report finds that the bulk of current electricity consumption could be covered using rooftops and degraded land, provided the Catalan government, the Generalitat, plays a proactive role: covering 60 percent of available rooftop areas is estimated to require an investment equivalent to 4.5 percent of the Generalitat’s non-financial budget over five years, an outlay the authors consider recoverable.

Mobility receives equally specific treatment. To cut energy consumption and environmental impacts, the report proposes curtailing private motorized traffic while strengthening public transit, and redirecting subsidies for electric cars toward leasing services, vehicle-sharing systems and community fleets. Air transport is singled out as a sector in need of rapid contraction, addressed through targeted fiscal tools. The report demonstrates that sharply reducing air traffic would save resources, reduce impacts and lower vulnerabilities while simultaneously generating public revenue and tempering housing prices, a combination of benefits that makes it one of the more politically attractive proposals in the plan. The document also draws attention to the emerging challenge posed by data centers, whose swelling energy appetite threatens to undermine any conservation gains achieved elsewhere in the economy.

The agrifood chapter offers perhaps the study’s starkest accounting. Catalonia, the authors find, lacks the agricultural capacity to feed both its human population and its livestock industry simultaneously, even if meat exports were halted completely, while sustainable extensive farming could cover only a small fraction of current consumption levels. The report therefore deems a drastic reduction in the consumption of animal-based products indispensable, and prescribes a transition toward an agroecological model centered on small-scale farmers rather than large corporations, prioritizing food security over exports. Agroecological intensification, the report argues, would maintain high productivity while delivering far greater benefits for sustainability, rural livelihoods and public health. Beyond Catalonia’s borders, the authors identify a coordinated international reduction in animal-source consumption as perhaps the last remaining hope for the climate, because even the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, more necessary than ever, is no longer sufficient on its own to respect the 1.5 °C limit. On the emissions side, to avoid exhausting the carbon budget compatible with that limit by 2028, the report proposes a 7 percent annual reduction in fossil emissions in Catalonia beginning in 2026, alongside the food-system shift.

The economic pillar of the plan is inseparable from these physical transformations. As Pueyo puts it, a post-growth transition requires a profound transformation of economic, fiscal, labor and social policies, because economic tools must drive sustainability even at the expense of growth, and when growth ceases to be a priority or is simply no longer viable, redistribution becomes key to meeting basic needs. The report proposes an adaptive eco-voucher scheme (EVA) that combines an environmental consumption tax with a complementary currency distributed to citizens, penalizing higher polluters while compensating those with a lower environmental footprint. A progressive land value tax would curb speculation and lower housing costs, with revenue earmarked to expand public rental housing, support housing cooperatives and fund social spending. These instruments, the authors argue, allow fiscal policy to reward low-impact behavior rather than simply punishing consumption, a design intended to protect low- and middle-income households through the transition.

On labor and social rights, the plan proposes a cushion income (renda coixía), a tailored welfare benefit protecting low- and middle-income households, and, as an alternative or complement, a job guarantee focused at least on those facing the greatest difficulty finding work, estimated to cost 2.4 percent of the Generalitat’s budget. Recommendations include shortening the workweek to improve quality of life and share caregiving duties, and guaranteeing public or cooperative employment for workers displaced by the eco-social transition. The governance layer of the plan is equally ambitious: a commitment to ethical banking, the cooperative model and public-community partnerships, binding citizens’ assemblies for strategic decisions, and mechanisms to ensure that leadership positions are held by individuals motivated by the common good. The method underlying the whole report is data and statistical analysis, grounding each policy in measured resource flows rather than rhetoric.

Perhaps the most politically consequential finding concerns unilateral action. Globally, the authors argue, there is no alternative path to improving everyone’s quality of life; yet implementing post-growth policies unilaterally is far more difficult for a specific territory, especially one inside the eurozone. Research under the REAL project has advanced post-growth economic policy for the eurozone as a whole, but a major challenge remained: determining what Catalonia can do while the rest of the currency union has yet to act. Pueyo admits that at the outset the team feared Catalonia’s margin for unilateral maneuver would be minimal, but they are now more optimistic, having compiled existing policies and developed new ones that can, in principle, be applied without waiting for external coordination. The researchers hope these policies will serve as a benchmark for other countries, and that even if unilateral implementation is insufficient on its own, Catalonia’s example could supply the leadership needed to drive the international coordination that major global challenges demand. The report frames the present global landscape as the failure of the globalized economic model, and its central challenge as articulating a new form of cooperation focused on people and the planet, drawing on historical precedents that demonstrate the viability of such collective action.

Subject of Research: A quantitative post-growth policy study modeling how Catalonia can maintain resilience and well-being while decoupling from economic growth.

Article Title: Can Catalonia survive without economic growth? A new study says it can

Article References: Can Catalonia survive without economic growth? A new study says it can. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: post-growth, Catalonia, ICTA-UAB, climate emergency, energy transition, agroecology, renewable energy, land value tax, job guarantee, eurozone, 1.5 °C limit, degrowth policy