Towards post-growth policymaking: Barriers and enablers for wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives

TL;DR

This paper analyzes barriers and enablers for post-growth wellbeing policies across different governance levels, highlighting the importance of political agency, framing, and structural changes for advancing post-growth initiatives.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of post-growth policymaking barriers and enablers across multiple countries, emphasizing the limited impact of current policies within the growth paradigm.

Findings

Polity-related factors are main barriers.

Political agency and positive framing are key enablers.

Structural changes are necessary for effective post-growth policies.

Abstract

Providing wellbeing for all while safeguarding planetary boundaries may require governments to pursue post-growth policies. To understand how post-growth policymaking can be fostered, we examine wellbeing economy and Doughnut economics government initiatives across governance scales in Europe, New Zealand, and Canada. To identify political dimensions of barriers and enablers as well as priorities for future action, we apply a framework that distinguishes polity, politics, and policy to analyze the data. We find that the main barriers are polity-related contextual factors while the main enablers are the political agency of key individuals and positive framings of post-growth visions. Despite the focus of the post-growth literature on policies, our results suggest they have limited transformative potential in the current system. The overarching economic growth paradigm severely limits the initiatives' scope of action. Highly motivated individuals and high-level political support are more essential in driving initiatives than pressure from civil society. Practitioners who promote growth-critical perspectives often face tensions: they need to appeal to broad stakeholder groups while avoiding cooptation. Overall, our findings suggest that further structural changes are required to support post-growth initiatives: a greater presence of post-growth approaches in economics education and the media is required for post-growth discourses to become more accepted, and to build understandings of how growth dependencies can be addressed.