This economic system is utterly mismanaging our planetary home.

We are destroying the life supporting systems of the only known living planet in the universe.

So this system is not working and we need to transform it so that our economy enables us to belong and thrive on planet earth.

"Change the system, not the climate" is a common demand in the climate movement.

But what does systemic change actually mean?

How can we transform the dysfunctional system that we have today to one that can be of service to both people and the planet?

Thank you!

We are going to meet economic thinkers who try to find answers to these questions.

I am an associate senior lecturer in Human Ecology.

When you're an ecological economist, you're trying to study the interaction between the economy and nature.

We will explore new economic models and theories: Doughnut economics, degrowth, economic democracy, participatory economy and the Not-for-Profit World.

You need to have the grassroots.

They represent the seeds of a radically different economy.

BRAC is a development organization that was founded in Bangladesh.

We will visit companies, grassroots organizations and municipalities that are trying to play their part in this large transition.

Can we imagine alternative systems?

And if you can make people feel that they can have an influence on a small scale, then you can make people feel empowered.

Yes, new economic thinking.

Not just thinking, new economic doing.

Let's put this into practice.

The challenges humanity faces today are immense and complex.

The effects of climate change and biodiversity loss are getting more and more severe and are already affecting millions of people around the globe.

Traditional economic theories have treated the environment as an externality, something that is external to the price agreement between consumer and producer, and therefore it has been left out of the calculation.

This means we find ourselves talking about the ongoing death of much of the living world, economists would say "yes, yes, that's what we call an environmental externality."

Well, I'm sorry if we're going to talk about the death of the living world as an environmental externality, that is information enough to me that this framework does not work for our times.

The death of the living world is not an externality.

It is the foundation of all life on which everything depends, including, of course, the success of an economy.

So we need to overthrow that framing and start somewhere else.

But where should we start?

What other frameworks are there?

A common misunderstanding is that there are only two ways to organize an economy.

If you're against the system we have, you're a communist.

Which is like...

Choosing an economic system is not a multiple choice questionnaire with two answers.

It's more like picking a movie on Netflix.

You know, you have everything available and you could have like an infinity of other systems.

We just need to invent them.

So I think today what we need is not one theory to rule them all and just to replace mainstream economics.

We just need to realize that this transition we're talking about is so complex that it will require interdisciplinary thinking.

We can invent whatever economy we want.

Anything that has been socially constructed, can be socially deconstructed.

So if there are other ways, how can we design a system that works for both people and the environment?

One person who has given this a lot of thought is Kate Raworth, creator of Doughnut Economics.

So I worked for many years at the United Nations and with Oxfam, working on issues of human rights, workers rights in global supply chains, working on issues of protecting the environment, stopping climate change.

And then one day I saw a diagram which had been drawn up by some earth system scientists, in fact led by a Swedish scientist who I know is very well known, Johan Rockström.

And this diagram was a circle showing that there were nine planetary boundaries, nine life supporting systems for planet earth that keep this delicately balanced, living planet in a stable state that's so benevolent to humanity, but that we were already overshooting multiple of these planetary boundaries.

A few examples of the planetary boundaries are climate change, freshwater use and ocean acidification.

Sitting at my desk in Oxfam, I was struck by this diagram.

It hit me that economics needs to be practiced within that circle.

We need to create economies that work within the planetary boundaries.

That seems so obvious.

But at the same time, I was thinking, well, if there's an outer limit of pressure that human economies should put on this planet, for each person, there's also an inner limit of resource use that's required to meet our human rights.

And so inside their circle, I drew a second circle and it turned into a doughnut.

So put it in the simplest of terms, here's the goal of the doughnut: Leave no one falling short on the essentials of life in the hole in the doughnut, but don't overshoot the life supporting systems of this delicately balanced living planet.

And when we start there, with that as our goal, the shape of progress is utterly transformed.

It's not never ending growth, it's balance.

It's finding that balance between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling of the doughnut.

Thriving in balance, that's where health lies.

And I believe this is the shape of progress for the 21st century.

The challenge here is if this is progress and the state of balance, we are very far from that right now, as all of the red in this picture shows.

This, I call it the selfie of humanity and our planetary home.

Billions of people in the world are falling short on the essentials of life.

11% of people worldwide don't have enough food to eat every day.

So this little red wedge goes 11% of the way to the center of the circle.

We want to eliminate all of the red, so that nobody is left falling short on the essentials of life.

But we've got to do that while recognizing that we've already overshot multiple planetary boundaries.

Today, a worldwide movement has emerged, where changemakers across the globe come together through the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, turning the ideas of the doughnut into action.

Several cities in the world have passed legislation to implement the model.

Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Melbourne are a few examples.

We are going to visit a newly started initiative in a small town in the south of Sweden, Tomelilla.

This is the first place in Sweden to work with the doughnut model.

Our work with the doughnut model started in relation to adopting a quality of life program in the municipality and that replaced environmental goals and public health goals.

And then we had one complex area with the environment and then another complex area with public health and when you add two complex areas, they don't get simpler, they get even more complex.

So we started to think about how to handle this and work with it in a reasonable way in a small municipality with few resources.

Somehow you want to find a win-win situation, where you can combine agriculture and housing without taking up too much land.

So one track that we are working on is the physical infrastructure and the community planning and another track is about citizen dialogue.

- And then we have Onslunda.

- Good!

- Not just Onslunda... And then we discuss what we have in Tomelilla today, that can contribute to a better quality of life inside the limits of the doughnut.

And then we look at it on a local and a global level, looking at what exists now, and what is missing in Tomelilla today.

And then we try to find different initatives that citizens can run and that the municipality can support.

Look at your wildland next door.

What they mean is look around Tomelilla and see what is... What do we have here?

We have maybe forests, I heard about wetlands or maybe other types of... By starting with the rights of every person and the integrity of the living planet.

This just changes the economic conversation.

Because the first question we ask is: What kind of economy can we design, that will actually bring humanity into this space?

And it sets a completely different vision for what success looks like.

Economy.

The word means household management.

To manage scarce resources.

But how well do we actually manage our resources right now?

An economy, and that's in the word, it's supposed to economize resources.

Now, I look like I'm saying something that should be obvious to anyone.

But like, if your economy does not economize resources, then it's not working well.

What does that mean to economize resources?

It means that year after year, as we better organize together to have this thing we call an economy, we should be able to work less.

We should be able to safeguard natural resources so we can have national parks and beautiful forests instead of having to cut them down.

So over years, we should see this economy actually getting smaller, because it's getting more efficient.

So we have to dedicate less and less of our lives and natural resources to that very, you know, material thing, that is the economy, which is just here to coordinate the satisfaction of our needs.

It's not like the end purpose of civilization.

Who cares about the economy?

It should be something peripheral in social life.

The problem today is that we've inverted this.

We've considered the economy the pinnacle of human civilization, and we tend to subordinate the social, the cultural, the political, and especially the ecological to the economic.

In the mainstream debate, a common position is to advocate for so-called green growth.

Statistically, there is a tight bond between economic growth and increasing climate emissions.

Proponents of green growth believe that it's possible to disconnect these two so that the economy can keep growing, while the emissions go down.

This is called decoupling.

When I was a kid, I believed in the Loch Ness Monster.

I really liked this.

It was a nice story, but... At some point, growing up as an adult and facing the lack of evidence concerning the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, I mean, I had to give it up.

I think green growth is precisely the same.

It's a nice and appealing story because it doesn't force you to change anything to the system.

Just something, at some point in the future will happen, that will just green the economy.

You will have just people, profit, planet, everything, triple bottom line, win, win, win.

You don't have to choose.

Everything is fine.

All scientific evidence we have on decoupling, and we're talking about around 900 empirical studies since the emergence of the term in the 1990s, has shown us that this green growth politicians and corporate leaders believe in does not exist.

How do we build a sustainable society without economic growth?

And that is a huge problem, because we have gotten used to it.

Our structures, the pension system and everything is built on that.

But at the same time we know that it's impossible in the long run.

Even reading the National Encyclopedia, it says; the gross domestic product, GDP, that which measures economic growth, is measured exponentially and it's impossible in the long run.

Well, then let's take that into account.

And considering the gap between, you know, the gains we're having and the gains scientists tell us we should be having, to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, for example, that requires nothing less than total systemic change.

Even when I was in the parliament, in the sauna of the parliament, when the male politicians sat there all naked, then everyone understood this.

Then they put on their suits and ties, and then suddenly they understood nothing on the speaker's podium.

But in reality, everyone understands this.

You understand it.

But then they say: We can't change it right now.

We'll do it later.

Degrowth is an idea that criticizes the current system's need for constant growth.

The degrowth movement is made up of researchers and activists, who advocate for societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being over corporate profits, overproduction and excess consumption.

Timothée Parrique is an economist, specialized in degrowth.

We need another economic system and we need it to be way smaller.

So we need that process of degrowth as a biophysical diet applied to rich, high income, large GDP economies, so that they can reach a sustainable, steady state, where these economies could prosper without growth.

It means that right now the goal is to shrink the footprint, to stabilize it to a sustainable level.

And then we'll be shifting to a post-growth economy, where actually production will fluctuate.

If there's a new need emerging at some point, then we can produce more.

We can mobilize a bit more of our time and resources to match that need.

But when that need is matched, or if we find new technologies to produce more efficiently, then we can do what an economy is supposed to do: economize resources.

And you know, we can have, instead of a 40 hours workweek, we can transition to a 30 hour workweek and to a 20, into a 15... And I call that economic progress.

An economist would be: "Oh, my God, that's terrible.

That's unemployment."

But from our community economics perspective, we would see, that time we managed to free, means you can start a sports association.

You can teach badminton to kids in your neighborhood.

You will be able to be more active in local politics, which would enrich democracy.

You would like volunteer to different NGOs.

You would start to, you know, spend more time with your neighbors, which would increase trust systems in a specific city.

You would do all these kinds of stuff, that creates huge amount of value, even though there's no money numbers on it.

So when I look at this, I don't see like, just all of a sudden, the economy stops.

No, the economy shifts.

We would shift from this pursuit of abstract monetary values, to the pursuit of concrete needs satisfaction.

So we would be forced to ask ourselves the very deep question of political economy: What do we want to produce?

And how?

What do we value?

What do we really need?

Another important aspect when talking about our economic system is the question of democracy.

Who is actually governing the economy today?

The thing that you become very clear about is that multinational corporations control our global economic system and are governing our global economic system and every government is just trying to compete against one another to attract or appease these giants.

And so we have a system now where nearly every sector in the world is now controlled by less than a handful of corporations.

So the bigger a company becomes, the more profit it can get.

So there's a built-in incentive for companies to become quite large and powerful.

And there's also a built-in incentive to use that wealth and power to influence policy in order to protect the profits of the company.

And we're seeing that as well all over the world, that companies are investing in lobbying politicians in order to get subsidies or fight down regulations and taxes that would take away from their profit.

And so we've got this state of what Oxfam and others have called political capture.

And we have these global legal instruments, I don't know if you're familiar with the ISDS, the investor state dispute settlement system.

It sounds like it would be super boring.

And I think that's intentional, because it is a clause that is written into hundreds, like all of the trade agreements and bilateral investment agreements that allow for multinational corporations to sue governments, for the right to impose any policy that might infringe on their profits.

Ecuador, for example, got sued for the right to not drill in the Amazon, and they had to pay the equivalent of their entire health budget for the right not to do that, because they had signed on to these agreements.

And it makes you realize that we have this global economic architecture that is working in service of multinational corporations, that could be used to actually hold them accountable, but we're not using it that way.

For me, that political capture is something that's very prevalent and very clear and the sort of the limited policy space that a lot of governments even have for sort of economic self-determination.

Let alone the people, and the communities that are really trying to just have a voice over their livelihoods.

The problem today is that if you have companies that are ruled very hierarchically, where you have boards sending down directives to managers, who send down to middle managers and further down, and those at the bottom have no possibility to influence upwards.

What kind of citizen does that create?

Is that a good school for democracy?

I think that it fosters a hierarchical thinking, that then spills over on the bigger political landscape, contributing to what we call "the threat to democracy" or that democracy isn't functioning that well, because people are not used to, and are not allowed to take part in decision-making in their everyday life.

A recurring idea when talking to economic thinkers about systemic change is that the economy needs to become more democratic.

Where and by whom should decisions be made?

What resources should we use and for what?

Today these decisions are often made in closed boardrooms of large companies, with little to no possibility for influence from the general public.

These decisions could instead be made democratically, by the people who are affected by these decisions.

Economic democracy is a concept that proposes to shift decision making power from corporate managers and shareholders, to a larger group that includes workers, customers and the broader public.

We're seeing the rise and return of cooperatives, of employee-owned companies, who then have a lot of voice in the governance, in the decision making of the board.

To me, this is a really good example of economic democracy that can arise up from the systems we've inherited, but transforming how things are owned and governed and financed, brings back that democratic voice.

Economic democracy is a theoretical framework with many different branches.

There are different ideas about the market and what parts of society should be under democratic control and not.

A common denominator is that companies should be governed by their employees.

We are going to visit an employee-owned company in Sweden, called Tjeders.

Since we are employee-owned, the decision making processes are a bit different from traditional companies.

As soon as you are employed at Tjeders, you get co-determination rights, since you become a part of our foundation.

No one can own a stock in Tjeders unless you are an employee, or one of the external board members, they also have the right to own stocks, as long as they have the assignment.

In the last decades a whole field of research has emerged, where they look at how these companies work in practice.

So not in theory, but empirically.

One thing that has been observed is, maybe contrary to common belief, that they are actually more productive than comparable conventional companies.

That the employees are more motivated and you don't need as many monitoring middle managers, this has been observed.

Because the employees have a direct incentive to care about their own company.

In larger companies, we can see economic democracy beginning to come into play of bringing the workers voice, the union voice, into the board, into governance, into decision making.

We can also bring in the voice of nature.

How can nature have a seat at the table?

How can future generations have a seat at the table?

So that things are governed not only for the short term interests of the financial owners, but for the long term interests of society, of the workers, of the living world.

There is a difference if a company is owned by people living nearby the company, or if it's owned by people living 5 000 km away and sit on an island, somewhere.

Because if it's people living close by, then maybe you think twice, before polluting the local lake with toxins, where you take your kids to swim on the weekend.

We are not owned by a venture capital company, which might want to make money for a while and then shuts down or moves abroad.

Here it's us taking the decisions, close to the costumers, and close to the company.

I think that if we weren't in this position now, then we would have been bought up, and shut down.

Then the head office would not be in Malmköping anymore, I am pretty sure about this.

I think we would get better companies, more long-sighted companies, not just looking at the next quarter.

With lower wage differences between bosses and workers.

In Mondragon, the CEO is not allowed to make more than 6 times more than the lowest earning person.

And today in Sweden, in the big companies, a CEO makes about 60 times more than an industry worker.

And then of course the dividends of these companies wouldn't disappear away to other countries, but it would stay in the local area, and be dispersed pretty evenly among the people working close to the company.

And the companies would become more locally oriented.

They would grow roots, where they are.

One branch of economic democracy that goes further than the others, is called participatory economy.

It proposes to replace the market with a participatory, decentralized planning process.

Participatory economy is unusual as an alternative to capitalism and central planning, precisely because it does try to propose a third way between markets and central planning to get the business of economics done.

Reconciling supply and demand in a different, participatory way that puts workers, as both producers and consumers, front and center in the decision making process.

There is a need in any economy to balance aggregate supply and demand, to figure out what goods need to be produced and where they need to get to.

In a participatory economy, there would be a recurring planning procedure.

Such a procedure is coordinated by consumer councils that express what is needed and worker councils that propose what they can produce.

This information, what they want to produce and consume, is then compiled by a facilitation group and the prices of products are calculated and sent back to the councils, who then revise their suggestions.

This process is repeated over several rounds until a plan is attained.

It's producing data based on what people say they want to do and what they want to consume and it's producing the data in a format that allows workers to see the big picture, right, to allow them to make an informed decision.

What we have managed to do is to figure out how could this process, of workplaces proposing what they want to do, neighborhoods proposing what they want to consume, how could this process arrive at a feasible plan, where everybody could finally do what their final proposal says?

And under what conditions would that feasible plan be efficient?

Would it use the scarce, productive resources in the economy efficiently?

So you need a mechanism that is going to adjust pricing, which is basically just a quantified way of attaching social and labor costs to things and ecological costs to things.

So you need a way to do that, that's not relying on markets, because markets systematically misvalue crucial prices.

And so a participatory planning mechanism is designed to reconcile these kinds of things in a way that values people's actual interests and needs and desires, instead of maximizing the profits of an owning class or shareholders.

It allows people to participate in the way that makes sense to them.

They're making decisions about what affects them the most, what goes on in their workplace, what goes on in their neighborhoods.

And that's an important thing because for us, economic self-management is having input or decision making power about decisions to the degree you're affected by those decisions.

Some decisions affect us all, but a lot of decisions affect some people a lot more than others.

And that's the trick.

How do you actually manage to at least approximate decision making input in accord with how much people are affected?

So that was part of the motivation for proposing the planning work the way that we proposed.

We were also taking into account, workers have been discouraged from time immemorial.

Not just in capitalism.

In feudalism and slave systems... People have lived, you know, in complex human societies for eons now.

And we wanted to take that historic legacy into account when designing our proposal for how things would be done.

To make it painfully obvious, this is really different.

Another aspect that is key when redesigning a system is equality.

One thing that we need to bear in mind is that in this globalized world, we have these deep and embedded structures of inequality that come about from historical processes such as colonialism, but are continued and perpetuated today through the very economic system that we have.

There's a recent Oxfam report that came out that shows that ten men, ten billionaires, doubled their wealth during the pandemic while 99% of humanity was left worse off.

And this is also showing that this is not: "Oh, we're all growing and some people are accumulating more."

It's like, no, some people are making more at the expense of everyone else.

They have yachts and private jets and several homes and even private islands.

While we have, I think the last time I looked at the statistics, it was 800 million people who aren't even having their basic nutritional needs met.

We constantly hear that we don't have enough food to feed the world's population.

But the reality is we do actually have enough food.

It's a lot about how is that food distributed, how much that food costs, what food we choose to eat and where and those issues we need to tackle first.

And then actually we might have more than enough food for everyone who exists in this world.

So why do we have such inequality in the world now?

According to one theory, a force that is driving inequality is the profit motive, which is the ruling principle of companies and other financial institutions today.

The Not-for-Profit World proposes to remove the profit motive and replace it with a social benefit purpose.

Jennifer Hinton is one of the creators of the model.

The model I've been working on for the past ten years or so, we call it the Not-for-Profit World model, and it's basically a model of a not-for-profit market economy.

So in the for-profit way of organizing the economy, the purpose of economic institutions like businesses and banks and financial institutions, is to enrich their owners, to seek financial gain for private investors and owners.

And so that's one of the key purposes embedded in these institutions.

A not-for-profit market economy, on the other hand, would have the key purpose of social benefit.

Of meeting people's needs and even meeting environmental needs.

And so that difference in purpose really changes the structure of the economy and accordingly the outcomes and the consequences of the economy.

It would be a market, that is selling goods and services to meet people's needs, but again, needs can be fulfilled.

So there's this ethic of enough.

There's a constant sort of monitoring of the needs and challenges in the community and whether people have enough or not.

So once we have enough, maybe we don't have to produce more goods and services, maybe we don't have to sell more stuff.

We can sort of have this steady state economy, or even a shrinking economy if we've sort of gone too far.

The Not-for-Profit World is based on existing types of businesses, not-for-profit companies, sometimes called social enterprises.

These companies have a social benefit purpose as their driving force and all of the surplus goes towards this mission.

We're going to visit BRAC, one of the largest NGOs in the world.

BRAC owns several social enterprises.

Some of the things that they produce and sell are artisanal clothes, dairy products and seeds.

BRAC is a development organization that was founded in Bangladesh, but we now work in about 14 countries outside of Bangladesh as well.

The way BRAC, we look at social enterprises, first of all, it has to solve a social problem.

It's there to make social impact.

Our social enterprises make surpluses and we reinvest 50% in the growth of the social enterprise itself.

So we retain 50% and we give 50% to BRAC.

And BRAC then uses it for its development programs or to pilot it or innovate a new idea.

So it spends the money in its development programs.

So we are not here to sort of sell products, make money, and therefore produce where it makes sense or where it makes the most financial benefit or sell things that have the highest margin.

We take these decisions based on who we are trying to support.

Over 65,000 artisans are dependent for their livelihood on our own and all of our decisions, we have to navigate so that their interests and what we really want to do, our mission is always intact.

People, often coming from the private sector, when they come and work in social enterprises, something changes within them.

And people who are sort of arguing with me, you know, when they first joined about, you know, okay, why don't we do this?

You know, why don't we import milk powder and sell more?

Because, you know, instead of... you know, because milk is cheaper now in the global market, it's cheaper than collecting from the smallholder farmer.

And then now the same person is talking about how, we need to sort of, you know, build our, collect from more smallholder farmers, go to more remote areas, a complete change in sort of the person's thinking and understanding and therefore action and decision.

And it's it's absolutely fascinating to see.

We would have much more equality in a not-for-profit type of economy because we wouldn't have private owners accumulating wealth from businesses and we wouldn't have the built-in incentive to keep wages low.

There wouldn't be a built-in incentive to expand consumption and production constantly to deliver profit to owners.

So it would align much better with redistributional taxes and environmental protection regulations and regulations to protect workers, for instance.

So it could actually serve to solve a lot of the problems that we're facing today in a very systemic way by changing the goal and structure of the economy.

In a Not-for-Profit World, there would still be a market, but it would play a smaller part in society.

The size of the market would be determined by how to best meet everyone's needs within ecological limits.

Unlike now, enterprises would not feel an inherent pressure to grow.

It's not always easy to approach the large and complex topic of economics.

How can we make it more accessible?

One of the biggest challenges with changing the economic system is that people feel powerless.

And they think that it's very complicated, that you need specific expertise or a university degree or something, which I think is not correct, because economics is really about resource management.

And who are more adept to managing resources than the people who are close to the resources and are active at the location.

And that's why for me, a lot of my passion is around trying to demystify the economy and really making it clear that, like we are the economy, you have a right and a responsibility to have an opinion on it.

Right.

And you should be engaged in these sort of decision making processes, because so often it's it's riddled with a lot of jargon and a lot of really complex ideas that can feel really intimidating and therefore, as if it's beyond the scope of influence.

We have looked at different economic models and concepts.

The Not-for-Profit World, economic democracy, doughnut economics, degrowth, participatory economy.

All of these models have a lot in common, but they also differ in some aspects and they are not the only ones.

There are a myriad of examples popping up everywhere right now.

Collaborative economy, solidarity economy, regenerative economy, community wealth building, positive money, economy for the common good.

One organization that has tried to gather many different perspectives and ideas under one umbrella is the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance, or WEAll, started about four years ago now and it was originally a group of a lot of like new economic thinkers that were working in doughnut economics or regenerative economy or circular economy, degrowth, post growth, like a lot of these different conceptual ideas, and who recognized that there was more that unites us than divides us, but that if we're really going to build this alternative paradigm and mainstream it, then it's really important that there's more collaboration.

The thing that unites us is a recognition that we have to stop treating people and planet like they're here to serve the economy and start treating the economy like it's here to serve us.

And so that sort of shift, just in terms of our understanding of the economy, is what connects us.

Even if there are a lot of different strategies and approaches for getting there, we feel like they all hold a piece of that puzzle, of that different sort of economic system.

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance is a global network with 19 hubs spread over the world.

Susan Joy leads the East African hub.

One of the issues they are tackling is landgrabbing, a problem many smallholder farmers face all over the world.

Large corporations come and take control over their land, often through the use of corruption or force.

So with all this land grab, it has become completely extremely hard for farmers to survive.

And most of these farmers are poor.

They are poor farmers.

It's very few smallholder farmers who can actually support, feed their families.

You find the farmer that has roughly three acres of land, but this farmer is eating one meal a day.

The climate has changed.

Things are not how they should to be.

There is longer drought, there is pests and diseases.

There's all these factors that come in on top of that, plus also the land grab.

We are working with activist groups and organizations that are doing a lot of work around land, For example Solidarity Uganda, they do a lot of work with communities that are facing landgrabbing in various parts of the country.

And at the same time there are lawyers that have also been able to support these communities as well, to offer pro-bono work, so that these communities are able to protect their land as well.

It really is about building economies that are locally rooted and are a reflection of our unique cultures and contexts, geographies and histories, and also that is molded and directed by our voices and by our active participation, whilst being connected globally and recognizing that we are also, you know, one species on a shared planet.

The science is clear.

Continuing with business as usual is no longer an option.

We need alternatives.

In different parts of the world, changes are already in motion.

But we still have a long way to go before we reach a truly sustainable economy.

What is needed now?

Where do we go from here?

When I say I think economic systems need to be transformed, I'm not saying scrap everything we have and start again.

We can't do that.

Because we need to eat every day.

We need energy and travel and connection every day.

We need to transform these systems by working with them, transforming them deep within.

And I think we need to go for the deep design of the systems we've inherited.

Let's redesign the future of business by redesigning the deep design of companies in the world.

That will take us a long way to the future we need and while we're there, we need to redesign the regulatory environment in which business happens.

So we need governments to incentivize and encourage and enable companies to be purpose driven.

We need governments to make it possible for them to be incorporated in ways that are owned far more socially and community like a co-operative or an employee-owned company or a socially purposed enterprise.

We need finance that is not there to serve itself, but it's there to serve the real economy.

So reinventing the finance of the future is key to making it possible for business to help bring humanity into the doughnut.

There are a lot of social entrepreneurs that would like to start not-for-profit types of businesses, but they're not sure if they can or how they can.

So we can support them by identifying them, mapping out the not-for-profit businesses in our communities, shifting our consumption to support them wherever we can.

And, you know, working for them, maybe even volunteering with them and raising awareness about them.

A new sustainable economic system is not something that will be built from above, it's not the United Nations who will create this for us.

But if we want a sustainable economic system I think there will have to be a social movement with lots of different initatives, cities, activities who create this sustainable relationship economy in one place after another and that is what will build a new system.

I mean, I think it's always going to be a multi level process.

Right?

And so you need to have the grassroots movement and examples and local transformations.

But I do think that there is a very real constraint to how much any local community or national like entity can really meaningfully transform the economy, because we're so globally interconnected.

Right?

And all of our production systems and consumption systems are really interwoven with one another in a way that requires a certain level of global economic reform, even to just make space for self-determination.

So for some people, it's about doing the care work, doing the emotional labor of taking care of our family and friends, of building community together, that is having agency.

For others it might be through art, the art that they create, which can give us a sense of other futures, that can be really important.

And for some it is about doing the hard work of protesting or writing policy or building houses, whatever it is.

Find the different ways, but understanding that our impact is through what we do as a collective.

Step one is just talking about the economy, right?

And demystifying the economy, encouraging people to feel like they have... their lived experience, their common sense has a place in this sphere and in these discussions, because I feel like that's step one and then expand it.

Once you have opened people's minds to really even consider what the economy is or can be, then you can really start to advocate for a different vision for it.

And we should spread the information, raise awareness, have these discussions, create social momentum, because the more social momentum we have, the more we can pressure economic actors and policymakers to move in the direction that we need them to.

These practices that are today a minority, they are happening in the cracks of capitalism.

They represent the seeds of a radically different economy.

What we need today is to give them space and resource and to water them so that they can become the main way of organizing an economy.

Yes, new economic thinking, not just thinking, new economic doing.

Let's put this into practice.

But let's get started where we can get started.

And I think we can get started at every level, right from my own personal life, from my household to my street, to my town and my city and my region and my nation and the world.

We need change to be happening at every one of those places.