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