Kate Raworth’s 42nd Annual E.F. Schumacher Lecture this past Saturday was positively brimming of energy. With a record-setting 1,400 registrants, the anticipation surrounding “Planetary Economics: New Tools for Local Transformation” was palpable. You can now watch a full recording of the lecture and subsequent Q&A. If you find Kate’s message as inspiring as we do, we hope you’ll share generously.
Highlights from Kate Raworth’s Lecture
Challenging Old Economics in Classrooms
As an Oxford University Lecturer, Kate focuses on making economics fit for the twenty-first century. And college students, she notes in her lecture, have grown increasingly skeptical of standard economics textbooks. She calls the typical market-centered introduction to economics via supply and demand “a very political act,” rendering ecological and social harms as mere “externalities.” Kate credits the work of the late Herman Daly, author of Steady State Economics, as a more sane starting-point.
All Herman Daly asked of us is that, every time you draw a box for the economy, just draw a circle around it and call it ‘the World.’ It’s obvious, but it’s the most radical act in economics, because it changes everything that follows.
Drawing inspiration from Daly, Schumacher, and other “renegade economists,” Kate pithily challenges some of the basic premises of the narrow economics still taught in universities and called on to justify business-as-usual. Through everyday language and visual aids, she breathes new life into the “dismal science.”
We are told we are rational Economic Man. And the model that would be made of us? He would be a man, without caring responsibilities, standing alone, independent of others. He’s got money in his hand—that’s how he interacts with the world—he’s got ego in his heart…a calculator in his head…and he’s got nature at his feet…We will never learn to thrive with 10 billion people on this planet with this model of ourselves.
Envisioning Just and Regenerative Economies
The Doughnut framework visually encapsulates a given economy’s social shortfalls, planetary overshoot, and distance from the middle—the safe zone of thriving within planetary limits. Kate soberly describes a world “dangerously out of balance,” both in ecological terms and in social inequities, with the richest one percent holding roughly half the world’s wealth. But, she stresses, “we can do something about all of this.”
I can’t think of any single nation in the world that has the right to say ‘we are a developed country.’ We’re all developing on a transformative journey… Every country should have an unprecedented level of humility and ambition.
Change From the Bottom Up
Kate sees innovation happening at the local level, not coming from the top down. She relays promising examples of cities and towns adopting the “Doughnut” to guide development toward sustainable, thriving local economies and participatory climate action. Over 40 governments worldwide are already using the Doughnut as a tool:
We started using this tool in Portland, in Philadelphia, in Amsterdam…What they said is: ‘it’s such a relief to be working together in a common framework that lifts us out of our silos…’
Amsterdam was the first city…they put this concept at the top of their circularity strategy, with a commitment to being 50% circular by 2030, a tall order. Then they got going—on housing, on textiles and on food… In Amsterdam it’s been particularly powerful having both the city council and this civic network holding each other accountable and pushing each other along… Within six weeks, the Copenhagen city council had a massive majority vote in favor to say ‘we, too, want to explore the Doughnut!’
Finally, Kate identifies the deep design principles guiding communities in the practical work of transformation. Challenging us all to rethink the design of our institutions and systems, she ticks off particular practices to foster more democratic, innovative policy-making and to diversify ownership.
How do you use pilots to experiment and then scale up what’s working? How do you promote deliberative democracy and citizens’ voices? How do you get people out of those silos and working collaboratively?…Why should all business be profit-driven?
We need to create economies that are distributive by design…
She points to participatory budgeting and citizens’ assemblies as experimental means of granting citizens greater voice and providing room for consensus-seeking deliberation. Community Land Trusts and community wealth building initiatives are identified as practical tools to foster socially-responsible land use and procurement practices.
In other words, there is a wide toolbox available for local economic transformation. Kate’s lecture invites each of us to roll up our sleeves, find collaborators, and get to work redesigning economies from the ground up.
