The research team, led by Frieder Rubik and including Pauline Deutz, Ulrich Petschow, Anne Kildunne and Florian Hofmann, set out to bridge two literatures that have had a substantially separate existence. The circular economy, with its promise of decoupling economic growth from environmental harm through recycling, reuse and efficiency, has taken firm hold with policymakers, particularly in the European Union, where the 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan forms a key pillar of the European Green Deal. Degrowth, by contrast, calls for a managed, intentional downscaling of the economy to operate within planetary boundaries, and remains politically unpalatable. But the authors argue that the two concepts overlap far more than either camp typically acknowledges, and that circular economy research and practice could learn a great deal from degrowth’s insistence on absolute reductions in environmental impact.

To test these ideas empirically, the team combined integrative literature reviews with two contrasting case studies built on semi-structured interviews. The first focused on textile manufacturers in South West Germany, a region with a proud industrial textile heritage now fighting for survival in specialized market niches. Fourteen interviews were conducted with companies ranging from small firms with fewer than 49 employees to large enterprises employing more than 250 people. The second case study examined plastic packaging stakeholders on the east coast of England, in the North Humberside region encompassing Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire, where the local economy is concentrated in agriculture and food production. Twenty-two interviews captured perspectives from local authorities, waste companies, retailers, food and packaging manufacturers, and non-profit organizations.

The numbers behind both sectors are stark. Global fiber production more than quadrupled between 1970 and 2023, reaching 125 million tons, with synthetic fibers now accounting for roughly 67 percent of the total. Fast fashion has accelerated into ultra-fast fashion, with companies like Shein launching new lines every five to seven days. Only an estimated 1 to 7 percent of textile waste is recycled, and recycled fibers make up just 0.7 percent of textile production inputs. Plastics tell a similar story: less than 10 percent of plastic waste was recycled worldwide in 2020 according to the OECD, while microplastics have now been detected in rivers and oceans across the globe, with documented health consequences for aquatic organisms and humans alike. Even under optimistic extrapolations of current recycling growth rates, secondary materials would still account for only around 16 percent of total plastics production by 2040, meaning absolute volumes of waste would continue to climb.

Against this backdrop, the researchers applied a framework that sorts the circular economy’s famous R-strategies, from refuse and rethink through to recycling and energy recovery, into three clusters. Long-loop options such as recycling are the most widely implemented but are, in the authors’ assessment, necessary yet insufficient on their own to keep production and consumption within planetary boundaries. Medium-loop strategies like refurbishing and remanufacturing could slow resource consumption but remain marginal in practice. Short-loop options, including reducing consumption, refusing purchases, repairing and reusing, carry the highest potential for genuine absolute reductions, but they demand lifestyle changes and social reorganization that current economic structures actively discourage.

The interview findings from both case studies were strikingly consistent. In Germany, all the textile manufacturers pursued one or more R-strategies, but long-loop recycling and energy recovery dominated, chosen because they are administratively simple and economically viable in the short term. Only one company used recycled textile fibers as input material, and short-loop strategies existed only as small pilot projects. The companies framed circularity as a competitive advantage and a way to keep pace with global rivals, particularly from China. As one interviewee put it, textile waste is an economic loss, and another declared the ambition to be pioneers. Not a single company was contemplating a shift toward sufficiency-oriented business models geared to a stabilizing or shrinking textile market. Barriers cited included customer unwillingness to pay premiums for recycled yarns, unreliable supply relationships, concerns about the quality of recycled fibers, and unpredictable regulation.

The English plastics case study revealed a similar picture, though with an intriguing difference. Interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020, shortly after the BBC’s Blue Planet II brought plastic pollution into living rooms, captured a wave of environmental concern that several respondents attributed to the so-called Attenborough effect. A social enterprise representative stated bluntly that it needs to stop because the planet has finite resources, while a local authority official questioned how long it would take for people to realize the urgency. Yet this personal awareness rarely translated into action beyond long-loop recovery. Recycling remained the default approach, reinforced by policy instruments such as the UK’s plastic packaging tax on packaging with less than 30 percent recycled content. A retailer that described removing packaging as the holy grail still found a packaging-free trial fraught with obstacles, from supplier contracts to transport, storage and consumer expectations. Most respondents saw systemic barriers as beyond their control, and personal environmental convictions were explicitly separated from professional obligations to support economic growth and local jobs.

The literature analysis reinforced what the interviews suggested. Of the dozens of publications examined for each case study, only a small minority engaged with degrowth or post-growth perspectives at all, and no papers were found examining plastic packaging from a post-growth angle. Studies that did take a degrowth view, such as modeling work by Bachmann and colleagues showing that even a circular, climate-optimal plastics industry could transgress sustainability thresholds by up to four times, remain outliers. In the textile field, one notable scenario study found that a consumption-reduction strategy would be more effective than a recycling-focused strategy for the EU by 2030, while design researchers have argued that a paradigm shift away from volume growth is essential. Fast fashion companies’ own sustainability reports, meanwhile, simply do not address growth at all.

The authors argue that these findings expose a significant implementation gap between circular economy and degrowth policies. Businesses in both sectors operate within a green growth paradigm, treating circularity as material optimization and risk diversification rather than a pathway to absolute reductions. Local authorities, bound by obligations to support local economies and impoverished populations, reinforce the same logic. Degrowth scholarship, for its part, focuses on social innovations and system-level transformation but offers little practical guidance on transforming specific large industrial sectors. The researchers propose that closing this gap requires sector-specific transformation strategies linking company, networking and policy approaches, potentially oriented around what they call a precautionary post-growth strategy that prioritizes planetary boundaries while remaining open to technological and social innovation.

Ultimately, the study suggests that a genuinely sustainable circular economy would likely require mandated reductions in global production of materials like plastics and textiles, enforced through international agreements of a kind that have so far proven elusive, as the collapse of UN plastics negotiations in August 2025 demonstrated. Whether framed as a fiber diet for fashion or a packaging diet for food, the message is the same: efficiency alone cannot deliver sustainability on a finite planet. The groundswell of public anxiety over plastic pollution, the authors note, could yet translate into formal concern for planetary boundaries and, from there, into political appetite for the deeper transformation that degrowth thinking has long demanded. Until then, the circular economy risks remaining what the evidence shows it to be today: a greening of growth rather than a scaling down of resource use.

Subject of Research: The intersection of circular economy and degrowth approaches in plastic packaging and textile sectors

Article Title: Learning from degrowth: strengthening circular economy approaches through case studies of plastic packaging and textiles

Article References: Rubik, F., Deutz, P., Petschow, U., Kildunne, A., & Hofmann, F. (2026). Learning from degrowth: strengthening circular economy approaches through case studies of plastic packaging and textiles. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, Article 1767324. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1767324

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1767324

Keywords: circular economy, degrowth, post-growth, plastic packaging, textiles, planetary boundaries, recycling, sufficiency, fast fashion, green growth, R-strategies, sustainability transformation

The scientific case for looking beyond growth rests on a body of empirical work that has steadily eroded the dominant policy orthodoxy of green growth. Green growth aims to minimize environmental damage while GDP continues to expand, and it remains the preferred response of most governments and international institutions. But the evidence that economies can decouple growth from environmental pressure at the required pace is thin. Research published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that absolute global decoupling of GDP from environmental pressures has not occurred at anything like the speed needed to meet the Paris climate targets. A separate survey of more than 3,000 researchers, co-authored by Suter, revealed strong doubts among experts that global GDP decoupling is compatible with keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius. Against this backdrop, the authors argue, research must explore how human needs can be fulfilled independently of economic expansion and within planetary boundaries.

The core of their argument is that sustainability research must move beyond explaining why a post-growth transition is necessary and start helping people envision what life in such a world could look and feel like. Consider healthcare. How might a post-growth health system prioritize prevention, community-based care, and equitable access while reducing environmental pressures? The authors acknowledge the complex interdependencies and tensions between sectors, but they insist that sector-specific visions are a crucial first step for revealing how post-growth principles could be realized in everyday practices. Concrete sectoral pictures, they argue, can identify the institutional, cultural, and material transitions required to secure a high quality of life with lower ecological footprints. At the same time, they caution that sectoral boundaries are themselves socially and historically constructed, shaped in part by nation-state structures with roots in colonial modernity, and must remain open to contestation so that a sectoral lens complements rather than obscures the systemic relations of power a transformation must ultimately address.

Why is imagination so hard? The authors draw on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and social practice theory to explain. Past experiences and present social positions shape how people think and act, embedding taken-for-granted habits so deeply that alternatives become literally unthinkable. Yet this does not mean social structures never change. According to Bourdieusian theory, it is precisely in times of crisis that things normally taken for granted come into question. The current polycrisis of ecological overshoot, rising inequality, declining population growth, and slowing global GDP is therefore not only a threat but an opening. To harness it, the authors argue, people should learn about the roots of the crisis and its impacts on their own lives, and citizens should be involved early in the visioning process so that the resulting futures reflect real experiences and hopes rather than technocratic blueprints.

Narratives of preferred futures are powerful catalysts for change, and the scientific literature backs this up. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that such narratives can serve as foundations for social transformation. Shared and attractive visions can build hope, inspire action, and align environmental goals with widely held values such as health, social cohesion, and security. Everyday habits make certain behaviors and values seem normal, but crisis moments offer a chance to challenge and revise them. Without concrete visions, however, the post-growth concept risks remaining abstract and difficult to act upon for policymakers and citizens alike. In this sense, the authors write, sectoral post-growth visions have the potential to bridge scientific insight, public engagement, and policy development, connecting the outputs of systems models to the lived texture of daily life.

To make the approach tangible, the article develops healthcare in high-income countries as a worked example, and the numbers are striking. The sector faces a dual challenge: structural dependence on economic growth and the need to operate within ecological limits. Aging populations, rising health burdens, and expectations of improved outcomes drive ever-increasing demand, while financial incentives push providers and related industries to continually expand the number of patients and treatments in pursuit of profit. Up to 30 percent of care is estimated to be low-value or even harmful, the product of overdiagnosis, overtreatment, and excessive pharmaceutical use. Routine check-ups, frequent screenings, immediate medication, and reliance on specialist interventions reflect a cultural belief that more care equals better care. Current incentives and norms, the authors argue, lock both patients and providers into cycles of overutilization and medicalization.

The environmental footprint of healthcare compounds the problem. The sector accounts for approximately 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and pharmaceutical pollution and the promotion of antibiotic resistance through contamination of natural ecosystems pose further serious risks to humans and the environment. A post-growth healthcare system, by contrast, would emphasize preventative, relational, community-based care and recognize the essential role of informal caregivers and local networks. Localization is a central tenet of post-growth thinking, but the authors are careful to note that many pharmaceuticals rely on globally integrated supply chains that cannot be fully decentralized. The realistic goal is to strengthen local resilience where possible while maintaining essential global interconnections. Ownership models could shift from profit-driven to cooperative, public, or not-for-profit forms, aligning service provision with collective well-being rather than economic expansion.

Achieving such a vision requires questioning normalized daily practices and confronting entrenched assumptions about growth, technology, and progress, and the authors see the current crisis in healthcare as a potential catalyst for exactly this kind of value transformation. They call for interdisciplinary collaboration among economists, health researchers, and behavioral scientists, alongside transdisciplinary engagement with public institutions, the private sector, civil society, and citizens. Navigating conflicting interests and trade-offs, they stress, is critical to co-creating grounded, context-specific visions rather than imposing one-size-fits-all designs. The article also assigns researchers three distinct roles in the visioning process: as solution finders for growth dependencies, as orchestrators who structure the process and engage actors beyond academia, including citizens, organizations, artists, and the media, and as providers of scientific facts and future scenarios, such as information on ecological footprint levels that remain within sustainable limits.

Understanding any sector, the authors emphasize, requires more than technical knowledge of how it functions; it demands a grasp of the social structures that sustain it. That includes identifying what people value, how those values are shaped, and who benefits from maintaining the status quo. Sector-specific norms and assumptions, such as what counts as success, what is seen as necessary, and what is perceived as progress, must be made explicit and open to contestation. It is equally crucial to ask who holds institutional power and which vested interests hinder transition, since each sector has its own constellation of dominant actors, whether corporations, professional bodies, regulatory agencies, or academic institutions, that shape how change is resisted or enabled. To ensure quality, the authors propose that resulting visions be visionary, sustainable, systemic, coherent, plausible, tangible, relevant, nuanced, and motivating, criteria drawn from established sustainability science frameworks.

Finally, the authors insist that for post-growth visions to bring about social change, they must reach people far outside academia. Communication is therefore not an afterthought but a core part of the research agenda. They point to arts, storytelling, and participatory media as underexplored channels with great potential to shape cultural narratives and open space for alternative futures. Future visions, they suggest, could be conveyed through television series, fictional books, or theatrical productions, modes of communication that enable wider public engagement and dialogue across social groups. The bet underlying the whole argument is that when people can see, feel, and even be entertained by a concrete picture of a flourishing life within planetary limits, post-growth stops being an academic provocation and becomes a political possibility. The article, published open access on August 24, 2026, is intended as an invitation to researchers across disciplines to begin that imaginative work, sector by sector.

Subject of Research: Sector-specific visioning for post-growth futures, illustrated through healthcare in high-income countries

Article Title: Make post-growth futures tangible with a sectoral perspective

Article References: Suter, M., Tsuchibuchi, Y., & Koch, M. (2026). Make post-growth futures tangible with a sectoral perspective. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(8), e0000281. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000281

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000281

Keywords: post-growth, degrowth, sustainability, healthcare, green growth, decoupling, planetary boundaries, GDP, climate change, social transformation, participatory visioning, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

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

The intellectual stakes are considerable. Current fiscal practice across most advanced economies remains anchored in the New Economic Consensus, an offshoot of neoclassical economics that treats budget deficits as inherently inflationary, subordinates fiscal policy to central bank interest rates, and largely ignores the environmental damage generated by economic activity. Sustainability researchers have sharpened their critique of this orthodoxy, arguing that its core assumptions fail to capture ecological limits, nonlinear dynamics, and distributional realities. Dimitrieva’s analysis instead draws on post-Keynesian traditions and Modern Monetary Theory, which hold that currency-issuing governments are not financially constrained in the way households are, and that the true limits on public spending are real resources, productive capacity, and inflation risk.

The six frameworks differ profoundly on the desirability of growth itself. Green Growth, championed by the OECD, the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank, rests on the hope of decoupling GDP expansion from environmental harm through technological innovation, carbon pricing and circular economy practices. Yet critics, most prominently in work questioning whether green growth is possible at all, point to the speculative nature of absolute decoupling and the stubborn problem of rebound effects, where efficiency gains simply fuel more consumption. Degrowth takes the opposite stance, insisting that wealthy nations must democratically and deliberately scale down energy and material throughput without compromising wellbeing. Post-Growth, grounded in Herman Daly’s steady-state economics, envisions the destination: an economy of constant stocks and flows operating within the planet’s regenerative and absorptive capacities, where knowledge and culture may flourish even as material extraction stabilises.

Doughnut Economics, developed by Kate Raworth, supplies the study’s normative compass. Its visual logic is elegant: an inner ring of social foundations, from water and housing to gender equality and political voice, derived from the Sustainable Development Goals, and an outer ring of planetary boundaries drawn from the Earth-system science of Johan Rockström and colleagues, whose recent work shows humanity has already breached six of nine boundaries. The band between the rings is the safe and just space where humanity can thrive. Notably, the analysis highlights a structural weakness of the SDGs themselves: their economic assumptions remain largely neoclassical, and Goal 8’s pursuit of GDP growth can directly conflict with the climate and biodiversity goals, a tension researchers have quantified as a sustainable development oxymoron. The paper argues the Goals need recalibration to incorporate distributive and biophysical insights from the more transformative paradigms.

Modern Monetary Theory plays the operational role in the proposed synthesis. Because monetarily sovereign governments, such as those of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, spend in currencies they issue, they need not wait for tax revenue or bond markets to fund transformative investment. Taxes, in this framing, create demand for the currency, manage inflation, and redistribute income; they are not the financing precondition for spending. This insight, the paper notes, became impossible to ignore after the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, when governments ran large deficits without fiscal collapse. MMT therefore unlocks what the author calls fiscal space: the capacity to finance universal public services, renewable infrastructure and a Job Guarantee, an employment buffer stock first proposed by Hyman Minsky that stabilises both prices and livelihoods.

The crucial move is differentiation. The study argues that Green Growth strategies are best suited to low-income countries and sectors naturally amenable to greening, such as renewable energy, transport and tourism, where expanding access to public goods remains essential and clean-technology leapfrogging offers genuine development gains. Degrowth-oriented policies, by contrast, fit high-income, high-consumption economies, where deliberately downscaling throughput is vital for staying within planetary boundaries. These differentiated pathways then converge on a Post-Growth steady-state economy, anchored in the Doughnut’s vision of a safe and just space. The paper’s conceptual pathway diagram traces this progression: MMT-enabled fiscal space at the start, context-specific Green Growth or Degrowth transitions in the middle, and Doughnut-guided steady-state convergence at the end.

The comparative analysis is conducted across five dimensions: vision of the economy, relation to growth, role of the state, role of money, and concrete use of fiscal tools. On money, the frameworks split revealingly. Green Growth treats green finance, green bonds and climate-adjusted central bank operations as instruments within capitalist structures, a critique voiced by degrowth scholars who see financialisation commodifying nature. Degrowth and Doughnut Economics propose more radical redesigns, including full-reserve banking, complementary currencies, and the democratisation of money creation, treating money as a social relationship rather than a neutral medium. MMT reframes money as a sovereign public utility limited only by inflation and real resources. The Sustainable Development Goals camp promotes sovereign green bonds and retooled central bank mandates to close the vast financing gap, particularly the pandemic recovery gap widening between rich and poor nations.

On fiscal instruments themselves, the convergences are striking. Nearly every framework endorses progressive, equity-oriented taxation: shifting the tax base away from labour and toward wealth, resource extraction, rent, inheritance and ecologically harmful consumption. Degrowth scholarship adds minimum and maximum income thresholds, universal basic income, and shorter working weeks, though a systematic review of fifteen years of degrowth research found concrete, empirically grounded proposals remain scarce. Here the author identifies a critical blind spot: mainstream degrowth and post-growth literature often defaults to orthodox fiscal framing, assuming wealth taxes must precede public spending. MMT dissolves that sequencing problem. Eco-social policies can be funded directly through sovereign monetary capacity, with taxation serving afterwards as the instrument for demand management, inflation control and redistribution, tools of governance rather than prerequisites for action.

The paper is candid about limits. Monetary sovereignty is not universal: Eurozone members, low-income countries and states burdened by foreign-currency debt cannot simply spend their way to sustainability, raising urgent questions about how non-sovereign nations can expand fiscal space without deepening vulnerability. The author also acknowledges omitting important perspectives, including the Wellbeing Economy, commons-based approaches, the care economy, and Latin American Indigenous frameworks such as Buen Vivir, and points to the Porter Hypothesis tradition in arguing that well-designed environmental regulation can enhance, rather than erode, competitiveness and innovation.

The implications, if the synthesis gains traction, are significant. Fiscal policy would be repositioned as the central engine of socio-ecological transformation: public investment steered toward renewables, low-carbon infrastructure and social services; subsidies and taxes aligned with throughput limits rather than GDP targets; democratic oversight and international cooperation securing coherence between national development needs and planetary ceilings. The Sustainable Development Goals, recalibrated to shed their internal contradictions, could serve as the institutional scaffold for a global consensus. What emerges is not a single doctrine but a pluralist meta-framework, one that treats Green Growth, Degrowth, Post-Growth, Doughnut Economics, MMT and the SDGs as complementary lenses on a shared problem: how to raise and allocate public resources so that economies serve people and planet alike, within the biophysical limits of a finite Earth.

Subject of Research: A comparative analysis of six sustainability-oriented economic frameworks and their integration into a meta-framework for sustainable fiscal policy

Article Title: Sustainability and fiscal policy: bridging economic frameworks for global equity and ecological balance

Article References: Sustainability and fiscal policy: bridging economic frameworks for global equity and ecological balance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00549-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00549-7

Keywords: fiscal policy, green growth, degrowth, post-growth, doughnut economics, modern monetary theory, sustainable development goals, planetary boundaries, steady-state economy, just transition, ecological macroeconomics, monetary sovereignty