Degrowth has moved steadily from the margins of ecological economics toward the center of scholarly debate over the past decade. At its core, the idea is a deliberate downscaling of production and consumption in affluent societies, paired with the promise that a good life for all remains possible within planetary boundaries. Crucially, degrowth envisions this contraction not as imposed austerity but as collectively defined self-limitation, a society choosing sufficiency over excess. Green growth, by contrast, is the dominant policy orthodoxy: the proposition that economies can keep expanding while decoupling prosperity from environmental harm through technology, efficiency, and markets. The two visions imply very different appeals to individuals, and that difference is precisely what the new research set out to measure.

The study, conducted by Dallas O’Dell, Frédéric Basso, and Ganga Shreedhar, addressed a gap that has persisted even as degrowth scholarship has flourished. Little empirical work has examined which communication and framing techniques can translate the agenda’s system-level focus into individual consumption decisions and self-limitation practices. Equally neglected, the authors note, is the role of the messenger: whether commercial or non-commercial voices are better positioned to promote sufficiency or to advance the degrowth cause. The team ran two online experiments with U.K. millennial respondents, the first with 969 participants and the second with 933, followed by regression analyses to probe the relationships between exposure, values, and stated or revealed choices.

Study 1 focused on what the researchers call sufficiency-promoting marketing, or SPM, messages. These are communications that borrow the tools of commercial marketing to encourage people to consume less, and the experiment compared versions expressing self-orientation without limits, corresponding to a green growth logic, against versions expressing self-orientation with limits, corresponding to degrowth. The comparison uncovered little difference in consumption attitudes and behaviors between the two conditions. In other words, when sufficiency was packaged as a marketing pitch aimed at the individual, whether or not it carried an explicit message of limits made almost no measurable difference to how respondents thought or acted.

That null result carries a sharper implication than it might first appear. The authors conclude that sufficiency-promoting marketing appeared ineffective at making degrowth values relevant to individuals or at promoting widespread self-limitation, which renders the approach incompatible with any genuine degrowth agenda. The paradox is structural: marketing, by its nature, addresses individuals as self-interested consumers, while degrowth asks people to think collectively and to accept limits on consumption itself. A message that invites people to buy into buying less, framed in the persuasive vocabulary of commerce, seems to dissolve the very idea of collective self-limitation it is meant to convey.

Study 2 shifted the terrain from the marketplace to the civic sphere. Here the researchers tested whether communications framed around degrowth or green growth, delivered by a non-commercial messenger, affected civic-oriented values and policy support for collective limitations. The results diverged in an instructive way. Green growth framing garnered higher support for environmental policy, suggesting that its familiar promise of prosperity without sacrifice remains the more effective route to building a political coalition. Degrowth framing, meanwhile, increased the likelihood that respondents would choose degrowth or a-growth positions when asked to take a stance in the growth-versus-environment debate.

Read together, the two studies sketch a division of labor that degrowth advocates may find bittersweet. Degrowth framing, the authors write, inspires values, while green growth spurs policy support. The vocabulary of limits and downscaling can shift where people stand in the abstract debate about economic growth, nudging them toward post-growth or agnostic positions on the question itself. But when the outcome that matters is concrete backing for environmental policy, the green growth frame outperforms it. The message that resonates philosophically is not the message that mobilizes politically, at least not in the forms tested here.

The research also flags a potentially counterproductive psychological dynamic. Degrowth messaging that concentrates on system-level problems and on solutions based on reductions may disengage individuals from mobilizing for societal change. This is a familiar pattern from the broader literature on climate communication: framing problems at scales too large for individual agency, or defining solutions primarily in terms of what people must give up, can produce resignation rather than resolve. For a movement whose central demand is collective self-limitation, the finding poses a genuine strategic dilemma, since the system-level framing that gives degrowth its coherence may be the same framing that leaves potential supporters passive.

The authors present these results as exposing the paradoxical nature of sufficiency-promoting marketing while also revealing psychological implications of degrowth messaging that can guide advocates developing communication strategies in non-commercial contexts. The practical takeaway is not that degrowth communication is futile, but that its current forms may be mismatched to the outcomes advocates seek. If the goal is value change and a repositioning of the public in the growth debate, degrowth framing has demonstrable traction. If the goal is policy support, the evidence favors green growth’s more familiar promise. Messengers, too, matter: the experiments suggest that non-commercial voices are the appropriate channel for testing these frames, since commercial messengers promoting sufficiency appear to undermine the message they carry.

For a field that has often argued about degrowth in theoretical terms, the study offers something rarer: experimental evidence about how real respondents actually respond. With samples approaching a thousand participants in each study, the findings carry weight beyond anecdote, and they complicate a simple narrative in which the right words could unlock public enthusiasm for downscaling. Translating system-level change to individuals, it turns out, is not a matter of finding the perfect slogan. The frames that make people rethink growth are not the frames that make them back policy, and the marketing toolkit that works for selling products may be structurally incapable of selling sufficiency. As debates over post-growth economics intensify, both advocates and critics now have empirical ground to stand on, and it suggests the path from ecological philosophy to political mobilization is narrower and more winding than either side has assumed.

Subject of Research: Experimental comparison of degrowth and green growth message framing effects on sustainability values, behavior, and policy support

Article Title: Translating system-level change to individuals: Experimental evidence on avenues to communicate about degrowth and green growth

Article References: O’Dell, D., Basso, F., & Shreedhar, G. (2026). Translating system-level change to individuals: Experimental evidence on avenues to communicate about degrowth and green growth. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(5), e0000245. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000245

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000245

Keywords: degrowth, green growth, climate communication, sufficiency, message framing, environmental policy, consumer behavior, self-limitation, sustainability, online experiments, U.K. millennials, PLOS

The research team, led by Liam Ó Riada with Unai Pascual, Esther Turnhout and Julia Neidig, applied discourse analysis to the historical record of Spanish education policy. Discourse analysis, in this context, is a method for examining how language constructs reality: which concepts are elevated as self-evident truths, which are marginalized, and which actors are granted authority to define what education is for. Rather than treating policy texts as neutral descriptions of reform, the researchers read them as battlegrounds where different worldviews compete. This approach draws on political theory holding that dominant ideas are never permanent; they can be destabilized by crises and dislocations, creating openings for alternative visions to enter the mainstream.

The analysis identified three distinct periods in Spanish education policy. The first, spanning roughly 1975 to 1990, coincided with Spain’s transition to democracy after four decades of dictatorship. During this era, policy discourse was animated by emancipatory aspirations: education was framed as a vehicle for freedom, democratic citizenship and social justice. The legacy of authoritarian schooling made it politically urgent to imagine classrooms as spaces where critical thinking and participation could flourish. This period, the authors argue, contained genuine affinities with what scholars now call transformative sustainability education—an approach that emphasizes transdisciplinary learning, experiential and embodied pedagogies, and the capacity of learners to question and reshape the systems around them.

That emancipatory moment, however, did not last. From about 1990 to 2018, the study documents the consolidation of a neoliberal consensus in Spanish education policy, one heavily shaped by the discourse of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD and similar actors have long promoted a human-capital framing of education, in which schools are evaluated primarily by their contribution to economic competitiveness and employability. Under this logic, the purpose of education narrows to generating human capital: measurable skills that can be fed into labor markets. Standardized assessment, international rankings and performance indicators became the dominant instruments of governance, and the creative, critical and transdisciplinary pedagogies that sustainability transformation requires were progressively marginalized.

The technical heart of the study lies in showing how this economistic framing operated discursively. Human-capital discourse did not merely coexist with other visions of education; it absorbed and reinterpreted them. Even concepts with emancipatory origins, such as lifelong learning or educational quality, were redefined in market-oriented terms. The researchers describe this as a hegemonic process, in which one worldview achieves such dominance that its assumptions become common sense, rendering alternatives difficult even to articulate. For advocates of sustainability education, this meant that arguments about ecological crisis, social justice or intergenerational responsibility struggled to find legitimate space within a policy conversation organized around productivity and competitiveness.

The third period begins in 2019 and continues to the present, and it is here that the analysis becomes most striking. A sequence of dislocatory events—including large-scale student climate mobilizations, growing public awareness of ecological breakdown and political turbulence within Spain—destabilized the previously settled consensus. Sustainability emerged as a central signifier in education policy, culminating in a new education law that explicitly legitimizes transdisciplinary, experiential and embodied pedagogies. For the first time in the country’s democratic history, the legal architecture of Spanish schooling formally recognizes that learning for sustainability must go beyond transmitting facts about the environment and instead engage students in transformative, experience-based practice.

The authors are careful, however, not to declare victory. Their analysis shows that the discursive opening of the recent period remains constrained by entrenched neoliberal governance. The market-oriented logics built into assessment regimes, funding structures and institutional incentives did not disappear when sustainability entered the policy vocabulary. This creates a real risk of co-optation: the possibility that sustainability itself will be reframed as another form of human capital—a set of green skills for a green economy—rather than as an invitation to question the economic assumptions that drove ecological crisis in the first place. The study suggests that whether the current opening leads to genuine transformation or to a rebranded version of the old consensus depends on struggles still underway.

One of the most consequential findings concerns how change actually happens. The researchers found that dislocatory events alone are insufficient; what matters is whether different struggles for educational reform can be linked together into a broader coalition. When movements for climate action, pedagogical innovation and democratic schooling connect their demands, they can collectively push elements of transformative sustainability education into law and policy. Conversely, when reform efforts remain fragmented, the resilient machinery of market-oriented governance tends to absorb or dilute them. This insight travels well beyond Spain: it offers a strategic lesson for educators and policymakers in other countries navigating similar tensions between economic and ecological imperatives in their school systems.

The Spanish case also illustrates a broader tension in global sustainability politics. International organizations have increasingly embraced education as a tool for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, yet the same institutions often promote the human-capital frameworks that the study identifies as a barrier to transformative pedagogy. The result is an ambivalence at the heart of international education policy: sustainability is celebrated in declarations while the governance instruments that shape classrooms daily continue to reward standardization and measurable economic outcomes. The Spanish experience shows that national politics can partially break from this pattern, but only when domestic coalitions are strong enough to translate crisis into legal and institutional change.

What emerges from this research is neither optimism nor fatalism, but a precise map of where leverage lies. The discursive history of Spanish education demonstrates that dominant framings are historically contingent rather than natural, that crises can crack them open, and that coalitions can push transformative visions into binding policy. At the same time, it warns that vocabulary is not victory: a law that mentions sustainability can still be implemented through competitive, market-driven governance that hollows out its meaning. For anyone concerned with how education systems might help societies navigate the ecological transition, the Spanish record offers both a warning and an invitation—the door to transformative education is open, but only sustained political struggle will keep it that way.

Subject of Research: Discourse analysis of Spanish education policy and openings for transformative sustainability education

Article Title: From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability

Article References: Ó Riada, L., Pascual, U., Turnhout, E., & Neidig, J. (2026). From generating human capital to transformative education: discursive struggles in Spanish education policy and openings for sustainability. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(8), e0000267. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000267

Keywords: education policy, sustainability transformation, Spain, discourse analysis, human capital, OECD, neoliberalism, transformative education, climate crisis, pedagogy, PLOS, policy reform

The OS10 Programme itself is an ambitious undertaking with an unusually high-level pedigree. Initiated under the leadership of Professor Wei Yang, a Chinese scientist and Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the programme carries the full title Towards Open Science Infrastructure Sharing Network: Knowledge and Data Sharing Platform from China. It received official endorsement from UNESCO in February 2025, placing it squarely within the guiding framework of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, the landmark 2021 instrument that defined shared principles for making research publications, data, software, and hardware openly available. The programme is also aligned with the strategic plan of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, the United Nations designated Science Decade intended to mobilise scientific cooperation for global development goals.

Institutionally, the programme is structured as a distributed collaboration rather than a single centralised project. The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhejiang University serve as the liaison and supporting institutions, handling coordination and operational support, while the CAST-UN Consultative Committee on Open Science and Global Partnership, known as CCOS, acts as the lead organisation. This arrangement reflects a broader philosophy within the open science community: that infrastructure for sharing knowledge should itself be shared, with responsibilities distributed across institutions and regions rather than concentrated in any one country or consortium. The new memorandum between NSL and PLOS extends that philosophy by bringing a major international publisher directly into the programme’s development.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two parties will explore cooperation across several concrete areas. These include the sharing of scientific research outputs and open science resources, the development of the technical architecture that underpins the OS10 platform, and open science capacity-building in regions that participate in the programme. PLOS may also join relevant OS10 working groups, contributing expertise to resource coordination, technical standards, and service design. For PLOS, a non-profit publisher that has spent two decades experimenting with open access business models, the memorandum offers a channel to test its ideas within a large-scale, internationally endorsed infrastructure initiative. For the Chinese institutions, it brings in a partner with deep experience in peer review reform, open licensing, and the practical mechanics of running scholarly publishing at scale.

Capacity-building receives particular emphasis in the memorandum. The two organisations plan to strengthen open science skills and institutional readiness in China and in other OS10 participant regions through training programmes, workshops, community engagement activities, and international exchange. This focus addresses one of the most persistent gaps in the open science landscape: the divide between institutions that have the technical staff, policies, and funding to share research openly and those that lack such capacity. Training librarians, data managers, and researchers in low-resource settings is widely seen as essential if global open science is to be genuinely inclusive rather than an advantage enjoyed only by well-funded institutions in North America, Europe, and East Asia.

The memorandum also opens the door to connecting OS10 with the outcomes of PLOS’s Redefining Publishing initiative, an ongoing effort by the publisher to reimagine the mechanisms of scholarly communication, and to expanding cooperation on open science policy and practice more broadly. The intersection is significant. Publishing reform and infrastructure development are often pursued on separate tracks, with publishers experimenting in their journals while infrastructure projects build repositories and platforms. A formal channel between a major open access publisher and a UNESCO-endorsed infrastructure programme creates the possibility of aligning those tracks, so that innovations tested in publishing workflows can inform the design of shared platforms, and vice versa.

OS10 is not starting from zero. The programme has already delivered three milestones that illustrate its scope. The first is the launch of the Open4Science platform, accessible at open4science.cn, which provides access to more than 100 million open science and technology resources and has already reached users in 105 countries. That scale matters: a discovery layer that aggregates open publications, datasets, and tools from many sources can dramatically lower the barrier for researchers who would otherwise need to search dozens of disconnected repositories. The platform’s reach across more than half the world’s countries suggests substantial demand for such aggregation, particularly in regions where national open science infrastructure is still nascent.

The second milestone is the development of the International Specification for Open Knowledge and Data Sharing and Application, a standards document intended to advance international collaboration and the sharing of open science infrastructures. Technical standards are the unglamorous backbone of any sharing network. Without agreed specifications for how metadata is described, how licences are declared, and how datasets are exchanged, even the most well-intentioned platforms remain islands. A specification developed with international participation and endorsed through a programme of this stature could serve as a common reference point for institutions building compatible systems, much as shared protocols underpinned the growth of the early web.

The third milestone is the release of the Open Science Readiness Index, or OSRI, together with its associated monitoring platform. The index maps open science development and trends across all 193 UN Member States, providing what is effectively a global diagnostic of where countries stand in adopting open science policies, building infrastructure, and cultivating practice. Monitoring tools of this kind serve two purposes. They give policymakers an evidence base for targeting investment and capacity-building where readiness is lowest, and they create a baseline against which progress during the Science Decade can be measured. Combined with the Open4Science platform and the international specification, the index completes a triad of infrastructure, standards, and measurement that gives OS10 a distinctive profile among open science initiatives.

The significance of the NSL-PLOS memorandum lies less in any single deliverable than in what it represents: a convergence between China’s rapidly growing open science infrastructure efforts and the international publishing community’s reform agenda, mediated through a UNESCO-endorsed framework. The stated ambition of both parties is to promote the open sharing and innovative use of scientific knowledge and data, contributing to a more open, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable global open science ecosystem. Whether that ambition translates into durable, interoperable systems will depend on execution over the coming years, but the ingredients are now in place: a platform with global reach, an emerging specification, a readiness index covering every UN member state, and a formal partnership linking infrastructure builders with one of open access publishing’s most experienced innovators. For researchers, librarians, and policymakers watching the open science transition, the OS10 programme is now one of the initiatives to watch.

Subject of Research: International cooperation on open science infrastructure through the OS10 Programme

Article Title: National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences and PLOS sign MOU on jointly advancing the OS10 Programme

Article References: National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences and PLOS sign MOU on jointly advancing the OS10 Programme. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: open science, PLOS, Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Science Library, OS10, UNESCO, Open4Science, open access, research data sharing, open science infrastructure, capacity building, International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development