Kate Raworth's Blog

Launching Doughnut Economics Action Lab!

This week is a big week for Doughnut Economics.

It’s the online launch of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) – and at the heart of it is the Community Platform, a place for the growing worldwide community to connect, share, inspire and get inspired by the many ways people are putting the ideas of Doughnut Economics into practice.

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The growing community of change-makers

To get the ball rolling, DEAL is launching with more than 40 open-access tools and stories that have been written by community members and by the DEAL Team. These are a mix practical guides that everyone can use to take action, and captivating initiatives from around the world that will engage and inspire others.

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Inspiring stories from the community in action

Doughnut Economics began nine years ago as an idea on the back of an envelope. Now we are turning that idea into action with a fast-growing global community. It’s a perfect moment to reflect on the journey, and all that we have learned so far about what makes an idea fly.

Here are Six Insights, as set out in my latest blog, posted on Poverty to Power.

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We hope you’ll join us in the community at Doughnut Economics Action Lab!

The post Launching Doughnut Economics Action Lab! first appeared on Kate Raworth.

So you want to downscale the Doughnut ? Here’s how.

Today is the launch of Creating City Portraits – a methodological guide for downscaling the Doughnut to the city and turning it into a tool for transformative action.

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The Doughnut is a compass for 21st century thriving – one that aims to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. It’s drawn at a global scale, and ever since it was first published in 2012 people have sought ways to downscale it.

Over the past year, we at Doughnut Economics Action Lab have collaborated with Biomimicry 3.8, C40 Cities and Circle Economy – through the Thriving Cities Initiative – to downscale the Doughnut to the scale of the city. In 2019 we piloted the approach in three cities of the global North: Philadelphia, Portland and Amsterdam. In April 2020, Amsterdam published the Amsterdam City Doughnut and adopted it as a vision and model for shaping the future of the city.

The City Portrait invites every city to ask itself this very 21st century question:

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And this overarching question – which combines local aspirations with global responsibility – can be unpacked and explored further through four questions, or lenses, which together create the city portrait.

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If you are interested in diving deeper into this approach, here’s a 12 minute introductory video to downscaling the Doughnut to the city, exploring how it can be turned into a tool for transformative action.

Since the publication of Amsterdam’s City Portrait, we have been contacted by people in cities, towns, villages, nations and regions, in the global North and global South, who – inspired by Amsterdam’s example – want to create downscale the Doughnut locally, as part of transforming the future of the places they live.

Today we are delighted to make this methodological guide available, with the aim of ensuring that it is as simple as possible for changemakers to downscale the Doughnut in a way that is relevant and useful for their own context.

This first version of the methodology was developed with a focus on cities in the global North, due to their responsibility to act first and fastest in transforming their social and ecological impacts. Future iterations of the methodology will be created with a focus on the context and priorities of cities in the global South, and will likewise be adapted to other scales – from neighbourhoods to nations and beyond.

Creating City Portraits is published today along with some of the supporting worksheets used in the process, to illustrate how our team of researchers organised the information: we hope that these background documents will also be useful to others seeking to replicate and adapt the approach.

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Supplementary worksheets for people who like data (you know who you are)

We welcome comments, suggestions and lessons learned from changemakers applying the City Portrait methodology in other places, so that we can co-create and continually improve its design and usefulness.

Cities that are members of the C40 and are interested in downscaling the Doughnut to their own context are welcome to contact the Thriving Cities Initiative (TCI) through C40’s Knowledge Hub, where the TCI will also make tools and resources available to all cities, as they are created.

In September 2020, Doughnut Economics Action Lab will (we can’t wait!) launch our website and collaborative platform, with the aim of bringing together like-minded changemakers who are putting Doughnut Economics into practice in five broad thematic areas: 

communities
cities and places
education and research
business and enterprise
government and policy

We invite you to join DEAL’s Community Platform as soon as it is launched – and if you fill in this quick little form you will be among the first to know when it is live online.

DEAL will be running webinars, starting in October, for people who want to learn more about the methodology and we will hear examples from changemakers who are already putting the Doughnut into practice to remake the future of the places they live – from Amsterdam to Colombia to Costa Rica.  Do join us.

Seeking graphic designers for Doughnut Economics…

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At Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), our small team will be continually making presentations, publishing reports, creating videos, running workshops, and turning new concepts into icons and diagrams. We know the power of pictures – they are at the heart of our work – so we are aiming to do all this in a visually brilliant way.

And that’s why we are seeking to build long-term working relationships with 2-4 fabulous freelance graphic designers, based anywhere in the world, whose skills will collectively cover the following:

designing and laying out DEAL’s online reports and publications
creating visual images (graphic and photographic) for our website
designing icons and diagrams based on our concepts
designing slides for presentations and videos
visually scribing during online workshops
creating videos from supplied footage 

We are looking to work with designers who are:

aligned with DEAL’s values and purpose, and excited about being part of this work
open to working closely with us, co-creating designs in an agile and iterative way
ready to design in a style that reflects our logo and brand guidelines
occasionally available at short notice and for quick turnaround on small design jobs

If this sounds like you (or someone fabulous you know), and if you would like to collaborate with DEAL in turning Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action, do get in touch with us soon, and before 15 June 2020, via this simple form (please don’t email us as well – this form is by far the best way for us all!)

Doughnut Economics Action Lab is a mission-driven organisation set up in 2019 as a UK Community Interest Company. We work with others to create regenerative and distributive economies that meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. If you’d like to know more about us – our purpose, our plans, and our ways of working – you can read more in DEAL’s Strategic Plan 2020-22. 

We look forward to hearing from you, and seeing what you do. Bring on the designers! 

 

Introducing the Amsterdam City Doughnut

Today is the launch of the Amsterdam City Doughnut, which takes the global concept of the Doughnut and turns it into a tool for transformative action in the city of Amsterdam. It’s also the first public presentation of the holistic approach to ‘downscaling the Doughnut’ that an international team of us have been developing for more than a year. We never imagined that we would be launching it in a context of crisis such as this, but we believe that the need for such a transformative tool could hardly be greater right now, and its use in Amsterdam has the chance to inspire many more places – from neighbourhoods and villages to towns and cities to nations and regions – to take such a holistic approach as they begin to reimagine and remake their own futures.[image error]

The Doughnut was first published in 2012, proposing a social foundation and ecological ceiling for the whole world. Ever since then people have asked: can we downscale the Doughnut so that we can apply it here – in our town, our country, our region? Over the past eight years there have been many innovative initiatives exploring different approaches to doing just that – including for the Lake Erhai catchment in China, for the nations of South Africa, Wales and the UK, and for a comparison of 150 countries.

Today sees the launch of a new and holistic approach to downscaling the Doughnut, and we are confident that it has huge potential at multiple scales – from neighbourhood to nation – as a tool for transformative action. Amsterdam is a great place for launching this tool because this city has already placed the Doughnut at the heart of its long-term vision and policymaking, and is home to the Amsterdam Donut Coalition, a network of inspiring change-makers who are already putting the Doughnut into practice in their city.

When the Doughnut meets Biomimicry

This new holistic approach to downscaling the Doughnut started out as a playful conceptual collaboration between the biomimicry thinker Janine Benyus and me, as we sought to combine the essence of our contrasting ways of thinking about people and place. It then became a collaborative initiative, led by Doughnut Economics Action Lab (we are so new we don’t have a website yet – but watch this space!) working very closely with fantastic colleagues at Biomimicry 3.8, Circle Economy and C40 Cities, all collaborating as part of the Thriving Cities Initiative.

The result is a holistic approach that embraces social and ecological perspectives, both locally and globally. Applied at the scale of a city, it starts by asking this very 21st century question:

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It’s a question that combines local aspiration – to be thriving people in a thriving place – with a global responsibility to live in ways that respect all people and the whole planet. As Janine put it in her characteristically poetic way, ‘when a bird builds a nest in a tree, it takes care not to destroy the surrounding forest in the process’. How can humanity also learn to create settlements big and small that promote the wellbeing of their inhabitants, while respecting the wider living communities in which they are embedded?

To dive into these issues, we explore four interdependent questions, applied in this case to Amsterdam:

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These questions turn into the four ‘lenses’ of the City Doughnut, producing a new ‘portrait’ of the city from four inter-connected perspectives. Drawing on the city’s current targets for the local lenses, as well as on the Sustainable Development Goals and the planetary boundaries for the global lenses, we compared desired outcomes for the city against statistical snapshots of its current performance (see the published tool for full details).

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To be clear, this city portrait is not a report and assessment of Amsterdam: it is a tool and starting point, ideal for using in workshops to open up new insights and bring about transformative action. The current coronavirus lockdown means that such workshops are on hold at the moment, but changemakers in the city are already finding creative ways to sustain momentum, including through many of the 8 ways that set out below.

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Our team at the Thriving Cities Initiative has also worked with city staff to create city portraits for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Portland, Oregon (these are not yet published) and the initial workshops that have been held to date in all three cities have brought together policymakers and change-makers in dynamic and thought-provoking discussions.

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Workshops for city officials and community representatives in Philadelphia, Portland and Amsterdam, 2019

And here’s what we think is the real opportunity. The City Portraits that our team has made are what we call public portraits of the cities – made using publicly available targets and data. What if a city were to turn this into its own self portrait, gathering together residents’ lived experiences, their values, hopes and fears, their ideas and initiatives, their own understanding of their deep interconnections with the rest of world? The process of creating such City Self Portraits is, we believe, what will make this tool really take off.

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Imagining Amsterdam’s City Selfie…

The likelihood of this happening in Amsterdam is high, thanks to the newly launched Amsterdam Donut Coalition: a network of over 30 organisations – including community groups, commons-based organisations, SMEs, businesses, academia and local government – that are already putting Doughnut Economics into practice in their work. Working together they are becoming a catalyst for transformative change, generating inspiration and action within Amsterdam and far beyond.

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The Amsterdam Donut Coalition, founding meeting, December 2019

If you are interested in applying this tool for downscaling the Doughnut to your own place – your neighbourhood, village, town, city, region, nation – please do let us know by filling in this short form. Doughnut Economics Action Lab is already working on creating version 2.0 of the methodology and, once ready, we plan to share it on our forthcoming platform, which will make working collaboratively like this far easier and more effective. Our newly created team at DEAL is currently focused on setting up this platform, so please be a little patient, and by the end of May we will get in touch with our plans for taking this downscaling work forward.

Everyone is likewise welcome to leave responses and suggestions about Amsterdam’s City Doughnut, and the City Doughnut tool, below in the Comments section of this blog. I am currently focused on working with DEAL’s fast-growing team, as well as homeschooling my two children, and looking out for my local community – so please do understand that I may not be able to reply to comments personally, but you are of course welcome to comment and discuss with each other.

As we all start thinking about how we will emerge from this crisis, let us seek to be holistic in how we reimagine and recreate the local-to-global futures of the places we live. I believe this newly downscaled Doughnut tool has a great deal to offer and I look forward to seeing it turned into transformative action, in Amsterdam and far beyond.

Read The Amsterdam City Doughnut: a tool for transformative action

The tool is not really designed for printing out at home – it is far easier to read it on screen – but here is a single-page view of it for anyone who might prefer.

Media coverage in The Guardian, Parool and VPRO

Ecological economics in the time of coronavirus

Dear Friends of Doughnut Economics,

I hope you and your family and community are well, safe, and looking out for each other.

The need for new economic thinking is most evident than ever. I’m planning a series of video blogs exploring the coronavirus crisis through the lens of Doughnut Economics, but am struggling to find the time to get started – between working, homeschooling, housework, community care, and sleep. But these blogs are on the way. If you have any ideas or examples for them, please do share below or on Twitter.

Herman Daly, founding father of ecological economics, is one of my paradigm-changing heroes, so it was a huge honour to be in conversation with him and Andy Revkin on 31 March, talking about big-systems thinking, resilience, and the power of pictures in the time of coronavirus. Catch up with our hour-long video conversation and do check out the many other fascinating conversations on Andy’s #SustainWhat video series in response to coronavirus. 

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We’re recruiting! DEAL’s Digital Communications Lead

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Are you passionate about creating a world in which people and planet can thrive in balance?

Do you have fantastic skills and experience in managing collaborative digital platforms and creating thriving online communities?

Can you write clear, compelling text for websites and social media?

If the answer is yes, yes and yes, then we’d love to hear from you! (or please do forward this to others who might be great for this role…)

Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) is a new organisation working with innovative cities, community groups, enterprises and teachers worldwide to co-create and spread brilliant tools and resources that turn the ideas of Doughnut Economics into practice.

We are now ready to hire an energetic and agile person to lead DEAL’s digital communications work – in terms of designing and managing the collaborative platform that will soon be central to our work, as well as writing press releases and newsletters, and being the voice of DEAL on our social media accounts.

The role is a one-year full-time post, with potential for extension once we have secured long-term funding, and it is based in our office at Makespace Oxford.

In order apply please download the full job description and the required application form.

You can also find out more about DEAL’s vision, purpose and strategy in our Strategic Plan 2020-22.

 Deadline for applications: 12 midnight, Friday 6th March 2020.

Interviews: 17th or 18th March 2020, in person in Oxford or by Skype

If you have any questions about the application process, please write to team@doughnuteconomics.org

We’re recruiting! In search of DEAL’s Communities Lead…

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Are you passionate about creating a world in which people and planet can thrive in balance?

Do you want to work with community-led organisations to turn the ideas of Doughnut Economics into transformative action?

If yes and yes, we’d love to hear from you!

(or please do forward this to others who might love this role…)

Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) is a new organisation working with innovative cities, community groups, businesses and teachers worldwide to co-create and spread brilliant tools and resources that turn the ideas of Doughnut Economics into practice.

We are now ready to hire an energetic, agile and creative person to lead DEAL’s work with community-based organisations that are drawing on the core concepts of Doughnut Economics to respond to the climate and ecological emergency and extreme social inequalities.

The role is a one-year full-time post, with potential for extension. You will be based at our office at Makespace Oxford, but there’s some flexibility to work from home in agreement with the rest of the team.

In order apply please download the full job description and the required application form.

You can also find out more about DEAL’s vision, purpose and strategy in our Strategic Plan 2020-22.

 Deadline for applications: 12 noon, Friday 7th February 2020.

Interviews: 25th or 27th February 2020, in person or by Skype

If you have any questions about the application process, please write to team@doughnuteconomics.org

Hive mind! What’s the 8th Way to Think Like a 21st Century Economist?

Back in January, Rethinking Economics and Doughnut Economics launched a competition asking: What’s the 8th way to think like a 21st century economist? We got over 250 responses and our fantastic judges selected their favourites, from school students, university students, and everyone else.

Now we are thrilled to turn from competition to collaboration, with this brilliant visualisation of all the entries. Follow the link below and dive in…

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Every green bubble is someone’s idea (we’ve included all entries that we were given permission to publish – thanks everyone for being so willing to share), and the blue bubbles are the big themes that connect them all together: the bigger the bubble, the more ideas are linked to it.

The result is a wonderful hive-mind insight into what many people clearly think economics needs to rethink for the 21st century.

Click on a green bubble and you’ll see the idea’s author(s) and summary, plus a link to the complete submission, be it text, video, audio, slideshow.



Click on a blue bubble and you’ll see all of the submissions that are linked to that theme.

Huge thanks to Hugo Araujo and our friends at 7vortex.com for devising this brilliant software and for helping us to create our 8th Way visualisation.

We hope you enjoy exploring it. Search for your own submission (with the search box), see who else is thinking along those lines, or who is thinking differently, or synergistically. Who knows, it could lead to some real collaboration…

Just to top things off, we also made this (appropriately shaped) word cloud of all the keywords featured in the short summaries that people submitted alongside their entries. Follow the link to zoom in…

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We want to end with a huge thank you to everyone who has participated in bringing the 8th Way to Think Competition to life!

First, thanks to everyone who submitted an idea (over 250 in total!) and so contributed to the ecosystem of rethinking that is so very needed. Here’s to the power of ideas and collaboration! Look what we all created together…

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Huge thanks to our fantastic team of judges for their timely insights and valuable feedback on their favourite submissions.

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Many, many thanks to the wonderful team of artisans – Teresa Ruiz, Maite Blanco and Jose Martinez – who handcrafted our fabulously unique crocheted doughnut trophies in Tudela, Spain.

[image error]Teresa, Jose and Maite – the Doughnut Trophy Makers!

A huge thanks of gratitude to Hugo Araujo and the team at 7Vortex for the beautiful ecosystem of ideas – working with you has been a great example of collaboration in practice!

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And a very big thank you indeed to the team behind the scenes – Ali Al-Jamri, Hannah Dewhirst and Cameron Fay at Rethinking Economics, everyone who contributed to the design of the competition at the Rethinking Economics Summer Gathering 2018, and Dana Pop, Hallina Popko and Carlota Sanz at Doughnut Economics Action Lab for their tireless team-work in making this competition and collaboration such a success.

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So, who’s up for doing it all again next year?!….

Everyone else! The Winners of the 8th Way to Think Like a 21st Century Economist

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Back in January, Rethinking Economics and Doughnut Economics got together and launched a competition based on the ‘seven ways to think like a 21st century economist’ set out in Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. The challenge that we threw down was this:

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We’ve been amazed and delighted to receive over 250 entries across three categories – schools, universities, and everyone else – covering a very wide range of themes. And we have been sent a brilliant array of ideas, perspectives, formats and presentations – from text, drawings, audio, and video, to animations, cartoons, prezis, and more.

In other words, we’ve been bowled over by the response. So here’s a very big thank you to everyone who has entered and shared their ideas so generously and creatively. Over the last two days, we have announced our fabulous winners in the School Student and University Student categories – do check them out.

Today we are delighted to announce the winners of the ‘Everyone Else’ category. We want to thank and congratulate everyone who entered the competition – we were really impressed and inspired by the conviction inherent in the ideas you submitted, and the brilliant ways you shared them. We hope that every one of you will keep on rethinking economics to help make it fit for the century ahead.

As for our winners – here’s goes, with a big drum roll……!

FIRST PLACE: ‘From Business Case to Systems Case: Make Better Decisions’ by – Camila Pestana, Abha Lakhotia, Kate Watson, Ann Main, Johanna Hofmann, Marlies Wisse, Nicol Mayr, and Tom Rippin.

Our judges say:

Very well-presented and sensible (and much needed) focus on systems thinking – Steve Keen

Changing our decision making processes to take a systems perspective is important – Eric Beinhocker

Good idea and execution – the challenge is introducing the systemic incentives to adopt this approach! – Indy Johar

Really essential look at the systemic issue behind a lot of the social and ecological problems we see today. Thank you! – Ross Cathcart

***

Three Runners up (in alphabetical order)

RUNNER-UP: ‘Changing the purpose of money’ by Jan Kubben

Our judges say:

That money is designed and can be redesigned has to be one of the great messages of our time, and you tell it beautifully here – Kate Raworth

Technology gives us the means to re-imagine currency – and money. An interesting subject in real need of a radical shake-up! – Indy Johar

Clear, effective, engaging and hopefully achievable! A very impressive entry to the competition – Ross Cathcart

***

RUNNER-UP: ‘Radical Transparency’ by Anna Murphy (Project Heather)

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Our judges say:

There is currently very little transparency through supply chains to the consequences of decisions we make, more transparency would certainly have an impact, and this entry effectively argues for that – Eric Beinhocker

Love this idea, and the audio presentation of it – congratulations – Kate Raworth

A good governance frame to drive equitable economies. Congratulations – Indy Johar

***

RUNNER-UP: ‘Time matters: Acknowledging comprehensive well-being’ by Jorge Rosales-Salas

Read the entry here

Our judges say:

Time is our ultimate budget constraint, yet it is little taken into account in either economics or theories of well-being – Eric Beinhocker

Time as tool of equality, an area too often under presented in economics! Thank you! – Indy Johar

Time is the ultimate constraint! Something too often overlooked in a world with a ticking ecological clock – Ross Cathcart

***

So congratulations to all our winners – now let’s get to work turning these ideas into reality.

Tomorrow (Friday 7th June) we’ll be turning all the submissions for this competition into a fantabulous collaboration, so look out for a brilliant ecosystemic celebration of all of the ideas submitted!….

University Winners of The 8th Way to Think Like a 21st Century Economist!

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Back in January, Rethinking Economics and Doughnut Economics got together and launched a competition based on the ‘seven ways to think like a 21st century economist’ set out in Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. The challenge that we threw down was this:

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We’ve been amazed and delighted to receive over 250 entries across three categories – schools, university students, and everyone else – covering a very wide range of themes. And we have been sent a brilliant array of ideas, perspectives, formats and presentations – from text, drawings, audio, and video, to animations, cartoons, prezis, and more.

In other words, we’ve been bowled over by the response. So here’s a very big thank you to everyone who has entered and shared their ideas so generously and creatively. Yesterday we announced our amazing winners in the School Student category, check them out here. Today we are delighted to announce the winners of the University Students category.

We want to thank and congratulate every single university student who entered the competition – we were really impressed and inspired by the conviction inherent in the ideas you submitted, and the brilliant ways you shared them. We hope that every one of you will keep on rethinking economics to help make it fit for the century ahead.

As for our winners – here’s goes, with a big drum roll……!

UNIVERSITY – FIRST PLACE: ‘Legal Right for Nature’ by James Lee-Bagg

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Our judges say:

Excellent explanation on how economies are ’embedded’ in legal structures. We must reinvent what the legal rights are of nature and eco-systems – Mariana Mazzucato

We will need to reserve large swathes of the planet for the wild world in future, and this is a step in that direction – Steve Keen

A critical transformation is seeing moral rights for nature, legal rights would be an important first step – Eric Beinhocker

***

Three runners up (in alphabetical order)

RUNNER-UP: Imaginaries: the 8th Way of Thinking like a 21st Century Economist, by Sam Earle

Read the entry here.

Our judges say:

This is powerfully argued and a very distinctive and invaluable 8th way to think to add to the set – Kate Raworth

Intellectually rigorous and with an impressive vision. Congratulations! – Ross Cathcart

RUNNER-UP: Rise of The Machines: Work Must Not Determine One’s Value and Self-Worth by Max Klymenko

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Our judges say:

Robots may take our jobs but do not have to take our lives! Great point. And good explanation of why this will need new policies to help work be dignified (and we should never stop fighting for that) but also not be the way we define ourselves. Interesting to hear how you might think about UBI in this context – Mariana Mazzucato 

This entry shows an astute awareness that labour would cease being a defining feature of existence in a good future society, and demonstrates the need to think differently about labour today – Steve Keen

***

RUNNER-UP: Be Positive About the Future, by Conor Lawrenson

Read the entry here

Our judges say:

Inspiring example of how mission oriented, outcomes-based thinking, can transform economies to achieve concrete social goals – Mariana Mazzucato

Agree entirely with the point about “agnostic about growth”, this needs to be complemented with being positive about the future – we can still have progress in a sustainable world – Eric Beinhocker

What an important and inspiring argument to make, with a very compelling example of it in action in Cape Town. We do indeed need this way of thinking – Kate Raworth

***

So congratulations to all our University winners – now let’s get to work turning these ideas into reality.

Tomorrow (Thursday 6th June) we’ll be announcing the winners of the Everyone Else category.

On Friday 7th June we’ll be turning this competition into a unique collaboration, so keep a look out for a brilliant celebration of all of the ideas submitted…