Doughnut Economics as Policy Framework

• see Doughnut Economics for the general introduction

Examples

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

1. Daniel Boffey:

"the model will be formally embraced by the municipality of Amsterdam as the starting point for public policy decisions, the first city in the world to make such a commitment.

“I think it can help us overcome the effects of the crisis”, said Amsterdam’s deputy mayor, Marieke van Doorninck, who joined Raworth in an interview with the Guardian via Skype before the launch. “It might look strange that we are talking about the period after that but as a government we have to … It is to help us to not fall back on easy mechanisms.”

“When suddenly we have to care about climate, health, and jobs and housing and care and communities, is there a framework around that can help us with all of that?” Raworth says. “Yes there is, and it is ready to go.”

The central premise is simple: the goal of economic activity should be about meeting the core needs of all but within the means of the planet. The “doughnut” is a device to show what this means in practice.

...

Raworth scaled down the model to provide Amsterdam with a “city portrait” showing where basic needs are not being met and “planetary boundaries” overshot. It displays how the issues are interlinked.

“It is not just a hippy way at looking at the world,” says Van Doorninck, citing the housing crisis as an example.

Residents’ housing needs are increasingly not being satisfied, with almost 20% of city tenants unable to cover their basic needs after paying their rent, and just 12% of approximately 60,000 online applicants for social housing being successful.

One solution might be to build more homes but Amsterdam’s doughnut highlights that the area’s carbon dioxide emissions are 31% above 1990 levels. Imports of building materials, food and consumer products from outside the city boundaries contribute 62% of those total emissions.

Van Doorninck says the city plans to regulate to ensure builders use materials that are as often possible recycled and bio based, such as wood. But the doughnut approach also encourages policymakers to lift their eyes to the horizon.

“The fact that houses are too expensive is not only to do with too few being built. There is a lot of capital flowing around the world trying to find an investment, and right now real estate is seen as the best way to invest, so that drives up prices,” she says.

“The doughnut does not bring us the answers but a way of looking at it, so that we don’t keep on going on in the same structures as we used to.”

(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/08/amsterdam-doughnut-model-mend-post-coronavirus-economy?)

2. Federico Savini:

"An example of synergy and regionalization: Amsterdam’s doughnut

To pursue synergy and regionalization, degrowth planners face one main challenge: creating and mobilizing tools that convey the idea that less is more or, in other words, that the reduction of production and consumption opens spaces for health, care, wellbeing, and prosperity. The task is to popularize the message that limiting unnecessary consumption and production promises liberation from the biophysical, economic, ideological, and financial constraints of economic growth, thus improving ecological and social conditions. To date, no planning strategy has unequivocally embraced such a narrative, although there are many degrowth-inspired social practices that contest the current system of compulsive consumption and profit.

The following example shows an attempt to popularize an agenda of reduction, building on prefiguration and diffuse agency, to create a planning vision of the Amsterdam city-region. Due to these goals (e.g., prioritizing reduction), the strategic process aimed for a deep social value shift, placing reduction at its core and building wider consensus around it. However, the heterogeneous network of actors, with no single dominant force, meant a linear policy-to-implementation approach was not feasible.

It is generally known as the ‘doughnut strategy’ of Amsterdam, because, in its making, planners have used the model developed by Kate Raworth in her book (2017) and her work as a consultant for city governments. The ‘doughnut’ is a metaphor for a model of economic development that rejects the possibility of infinite growth. According to this framework, the economy is enclosed by an ecological ceiling – the conditions necessary for humanity’s survival on the planet – and a social foundation – the minimum living standards required for a thriving human life. When applied to policy making, the doughnut model suggests that (governments) need to, on the one hand, reduce the forms of consumption and production that favor ecological overshoot (i.e. fossil fuels) and, on the other, increase the provision of services to those social groups that do not meet basic living standards (i.e. health care or access to education). It couples ecological reduction with social justice targets.

In 2018, the municipality of Amsterdam (led by Marieke van Dornick, the newly appointed, green-left alderwoman in spatial planning) explicitly adopted this framework to combine the goals of sustainability and social justice in one urban strategy.5 Although this strategy has not reduced flows of materials (Municipality of Amsterdam, 2020),6 the doughnut metaphor triggered synergetic and regionalizing processes that permeate the city’s political discussions on sustainability. Amsterdam set the objective of halving its consumption of primary abiotic materials by 2030, a decrease of 2.3 billion kg each year (for historical background see Savini, 2019). For planners, to adopt this framework meant to take the perspective of satiation for new regulations and land use policy. At the same time, they needed to create public pressure towards this goal. To do so, they had to survey and connect the multiplicity of prefigurative practices in the city that already embraced this goal, catering to a diffuse agency. They built synergies among them and took the city as the boundary within which to do so. This process, reportedly, popularized the idea of reduction and reportedly created the conditions to pressure the municipality to reach reduction targets. This process can be traced by looking at three key processes that underpinned the ‘doughnut strategy’ between 2018 and 2019.

Amsterdam’s spatial planning department and a consultancy firm (Circle Economy) sponsored a process of identifying commonalities and conflicts among the city’s ongoing sustainable development projects. Four workshops were held to establish whether and how hundreds of projects were contributing toward meeting ecological and social targets. The ecological indicators chosen included CO2 emissions, raw materials input to stock, and ocean acidification. The social indicators included physical and mental health, loneliness, mental stress, and access to housing and healthy food. The result of this process was Amsterdam’s so-called circular strategy (Municipality of Amsterdam, 2019), which linked existing projects and identified the conditions for their success. It also revealed that improvements in the city’s economic indicators between 2012 and 2018 (e.g. employment) came at the cost of worsening social-psychological indicators (e.g. loneliness) (Municipality of Amsterdam, 2020).

The legacy of Amsterdam’s doughnut strategy includes self-organized processes of synergy and regionalization. In 2019, an NGO active in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods (ie. Zuidoost) initiated the so-called ‘Donut deals.’ These were intended to create synergies among municipal offices, civic organizations, and businesses to help poorer social groups while simultaneously developing ways of reusing and reducing materials. The first deal involved schools developing repair skills with reused materials, a self-managed biogas facility, and citizens learning how to install thermal insulation to their homes. Nine deals have been signed to date. They combine social and ecological targets, even if they do not identify with degrowth.

The doughnut metaphor stimulated the emergence of the so-called ‘doughnut coalition (Donut Coalitie), a synergy among 400 projects in the Amsterdam city-region that share a common understanding of sustainability as reducing ecological overshoot and increasing wellbeing. It includes NGOs, firms, social projects, and professionals engaged in urban gardening and sharing mobility, and encompasses issues from feminism to plastic reuse. The coalition is more symbolic than political: it reflects a diverse landscape of practices that recognize the idea of limits as central to their work. It also regionalizes an existing network of actors within the Amsterdam city-region. In 2022, the doughnut strategy was included as one of the key choices taken in the city’s Comprehensive Vision Amsterdam 2050 (Omgevingsvisie, 2050; City of Amsterdam, 2022). In seeking to orient Amsterdam’s future development, this strategic document encompasses transportation, green space, health, housing, renewable energy, and water, among other things. Its fourth strategic pillar recognizes that urban growth (understood as growth in jobs and houses) cannot continue as it is and that economic expansion must be in the sectors of care, sport, housing commons, participation, and education.

As these examples demonstrate, synergy unfolded through the planners’ engagement with the multiplicity of prefigurative practices already occurring in the city. This engagement was built through stable networks of support between public officials, civic and market organizations. It made the doughnut metaphor popular in the public debate. This process was possible, however, by taking the city-region as the boundary of interaction and coproduction, what I understand as regionalization.

It is important to stress that these processes have clear limitations. Many of the projects touched on above overlook the relations between consumption and growth, power, and techno-fixes (Calisto Friant et al., 2023). Moreover, the initiatives I have described scarcely question major polluters, developers’ profit-seeking strategies, or spatial concentrations of excessive wealth. At the moment, these initiatives seem to frame the problem of growth as being the responsibility of urban dwellers, who should better manage their daily consumption. The doughnut trajectory neither considers the politics of environmental (in)justice nor attempts a dialog with especially radical socio-ecological grassroots movements. These are major shortcomings in terms of socio-ecological justice, which might compromise this policy's long-term viability.

Here, I did not intend to celebrate the initiative undertaken in Amsterdam but to unpack how synergy and regionalization work in practice. By engaging with prefiguration, planners can always exclude the most radical voices, focusing on areas that do not present socio-ecological challenges, and pursue synergy and regionalization in a superficial way. If this happens, strategic planning will inevitably empty degrowth of its radical potential and make it ineffective in achieving either social or ecological targets."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14730952241258693)