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