Ep2: Regenerative Futures with Kate Raworth
“If you begin to understand the fundamentals of the living planet and the vulnerable interdependence of the living world, what kind of economic system would be in service to that?”
Kate Raworth, renegade economist and author of Doughnut Economics, joins Flourish Systems Change to press the case for rethinking the entire global economic system. Drawing on insights from emergent schools of thought—including complexity, ecological, feminist, behavioural and institutional economics—she argues that today’s economies are divisive and degenerative by default, and must become distributive and regenerative by design.
Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist is an international bestseller that has been translated into 20 languages, and was long-listed for the 2017 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year award. She is co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, working with cities, businesses, communities, governments, and educators to turn Doughnut Economics from a radical idea into transformative action. She teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and is Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Show notes
Sarah and Michael’s book, Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency is now available at Triarchy Press
Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways To Think Like A 21st Century Economist, is Kate Raworth’s internationally best selling book and offers seven shrewd lessons about economics in the 21st century that point the way to a balanced future
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) aims to rethink 21st century economies as regenerative and distributive by design in order to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet
Janine Benyus is the Co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8. She is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature in which she names an emerging discipline that emulates nature’s designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves) to create a healthier, more sustainable planet
George Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher. We recommend his books, Metaphors We Live By, written with Mark Johnson and The All New, Don’t Think of an Elephant - a guidepost for developing compassionate, effective policy that upholds citizens’ well-being and freedom
Read George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage : A New Politics for an Age of Crisis where he explores the power of stories and makes the case for a new 'politics of belonging'
You can download a PDF of Freya Mathews’ essay, Towards a Deeper Philosophy of Biomimicry a key source for Flourish’s view on designing as nature.
The Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles is referred to in Chapter 3 of Michael Pawlyn’s book, Biomimicry in Architecture, 2nd edition
Superuse Studios is an international architecture collective for circular and sustainable design
Read Donella Meadows’ seminal essay Leverage Points on how best to intervene in a system in order to make change happen
In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer uncovers how other living beings such as ‘asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass’, offer gifts and wisdom, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices
Read about Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing the Commons here
Transcript Episode 2 : Kate Raworth : Regenerative Futures : 53 minutes
Sarah Ichioka 00:02
Hello and welcome to the Flourish Podcast where we discuss design for systems change. I'm Sarah Ichioka. I'm an urbanist, strategist, and director of Desire Lines based in Singapore. I'm delighted to co-present Flourish with Michael Pawlyn, who is the founder of Exploration Architecture, and a leading architect in regenerative design based in London.
Michael Pawlyn 00:50
So, in today's episodes, we're going to talk about the paradigm of planetary health, and in our new book, Flourish Design Paradigms For Our Planetary Emergency, we assert that adopting this living holistic goal is essential for creating a truly regenerative economy.
Sarah Ichioka 01:06
And as such, we are absolutely thrilled to have as our guest today, Kate Raworth, a renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st century realities. Kate is the creator of the donut of social and planetary boundaries and co founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, her internationally best selling book, Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways To Think Like A 21st Century Economist has been translated into over 20 languages, and has been widely influential with diverse audiences from the UN General Assembly and Pope Francis to Extinction Rebellion and indeed, our own book, Michael.
Michael Pawlyn 01:44
You couldn't get much wider than that, could you? So Kate is also a senior associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, where she teaches on the Masters in Environmental Change and Management. She is also Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. We're honoured that she's made time to join us. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Kate, it's is really brilliant to be talking to you
Kate Raworth 02:15
A big pleasure.
Michael Pawlyn 02:16
When we met in the summer, you mentioned a lovely anecdote about when you were writing Doughnut Economics and you received an email out of the blue. And I wonder if you could just recount that because I think it'd be a really good way into some of the things that we are keen to discuss with you.
Kate Raworth 02:30
So I was in that midpoint of writing the book Doughnut Economics thinking ‘What have I done?’ I've said I want to write a book about new ways to think like a 21st century economist and how absurdly ambitious is that? And suddenly, I got an email, dear Kate Raworth, my name is Janine Benyus and I've seen the Doughnut and I would love to use it in one of my presentations. I had that moment. Hang on. Thank you for introducing yourself, Janine Benyus. Yes, I definitely know who you are. You're writing to me? And I was blown away that she was writing to me saying I've seen the Doughnut. I think this is useful. I want to bring it into my work. And it was one of those very fundamental moments and Okay. Janine Benyus thinks it’s useful. Keep going, keep going. And we had a really fantastic conversation. We've never actually met a person. But we've subsequently had several conversations that just really grounded me and connected me to somebody who was standing in the space of biomimicry. Standing in the space of working with developers, with architects aiming to bring these ideas into practice and finding herself held back - stuck - by the old economics. So it was an extraordinary bridge that connected us and it gave me new fire in my belly to keep going and to make sure that the Doughnut was a useful tool - to not only to rethink economics - but rethinking the spaces we live in.
Sarah Ichioka 04:08
So beautiful. I absolutely love that story. We're aware that ecological economics is an emerging field. And I think in a recent interview, you referred to the connections between the human body and the planetary body. Would you be able to explain more what you meant by that Kate?
Kate Raworth 04:31
Well, I've got 13 year old children and so I'm watching two young people get an education and thinking about my own education and what we are taught. And every child in the world is taught about the systems of the human body. They learned that we have a muscular system and a skeletal system, digestive system, nervous system, respiratory system, and we learn about the limits of pressure that we can put on each of these systems. That we must have enough food but not too much, that we need oxygen, but not too much, that we need warmth, but not too much heat. So we learn at the level of our own bodies, that health lies in balance, and that it's a balance between multiple complex interacting systems, that we don't fully understand, but that we know depend upon one another. And that we know we must keep them in this zone of not too little, but not too much. Our bodies are complex, adaptive living systems, and that's what keeps us alive. And I thought, well, we really want to get this at the level of our own bodies. And if we can take that understanding of complexity that is literally inside us. If we can take that understanding and take it from the human body to the planetary body and say, well, just as we have multiple systems in our body, the planet has multiple systems, there's a carbon cycle, there's a hydrological cycle. There's a nutrient cycle, there's a web of biodiversity, there's a protective ozone layer overhead. And we need to, first of all recognise that all of these together, enable the planetary body to thrive, but also that there may be limits of pressure that we could put on any one of them before we begin to kick that system out of balance. So I think there's a huge opportunity to connect what we deeply understand of the human body, take that understanding to the planetary body, and we give ourselves a phenomenal opportunity to quickly catch up about understanding the dynamics of our living, planetary home. Because I think metaphors are our best friends. We know that we speak in metaphor, right. And our language is full of metaphors all the time, even though we might not realise we're being metaphorical. But also using metaphor to understand the wider world I was hugely influenced by a book by George Lake Lakoff and Mark Johnson, I think called Metaphors That We Live By, that explains the very deepest metaphors that we use, from our very own bodily experience to try and understand the phenomenal complexity of the world. So if we can tap into metaphors that already deeply resonate with us and say, yes, just as we understand our own bodies, think too of the planetary body that way. Then I think we give ourselves an accelerated opportunity to jump into an understanding because, again, thinking back to when I was a kid at school, we all learned about the biology of the human body, but I didn't learn ‘diddly squat’ about the planetary body. I didn't learn anything about the Earth system. So we need to do that now.
Michael Pawlyn 07:40
I found their work really revelatory, actually just understanding how much metaphors influence the way that we behave at a societal level. And it's been really interesting to see how other writers have picked up upon that as well, like Jeremy Lent, also, George Monbiot in Out of the Wreckage. And I'd love to pick up a bit more about growth. But first of all, in your book, you talk about a shift away from a monopoly of GDP to a panoply of living metrics. And that's such a condensed bit of wisdom, can you expand on what you mean there?
Kate Raworth 08:18
So the monopoly and the Monotheism of the one number of GDP began in the 1930s, Simon Kuznets was asked to come up with a single number to measure the output of the US economy. He did that. He said, ‘Well, you know, this hardly measures the welfare of a nation’. So he gave us all the caveats from the beginning of the dangers of using a single number that was converting everything into a common metric, which is money, really useful, if you want to add stuff up and very tempting if you want to compare one year to another one country to another, but you get caught up in a horse race of the very narrow metric. Now, I think if Simon Kuznets, who was brilliant economist if you were alive today, and he saw the multiplicity of data sources that are available, now we can measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can ask people through their own phones, their self reported well being their sense of connectedness, if they have others to rely upon, we can measure the connectedness of ecosystems and the health of soils, we have such a rich alternative source of data. Can we not move away from thinking that the best metric is the single number where everything has been simplified and combined and added into one? Can we move from that to recognising that actually, dashboards are really valuable, that we want to see the diversity of what's going on. Recognising things are complex and interdependent, and so can't all be reduced and added up and turned into one? So I think we're entering an era in which the dashboard of metrics is going to be the true valuable method by which we measure and assess the state of health whether it's the human body or of the planetary. And that means we need to learn which numbers to bring together, how best to represent them. Because of course, the danger of a dashboard is it's too much information. So that's what the Doughnut aims to do in a very simple visual show with red, red lines falling short into the centre or red lines overshooting on the outside. This is a visual readout of the state of humanity in the living world. And we can read visually much quicker than we can read lots and lots of individual numbers. So I think there's a huge role for data visualisation, to make it very, very accessible, so that we can get a quick sense of the state of health of a system
Sarah Ichioka 10:37
That very powerful visual you've just referenced has completely captured the world's imagination. Most recently, I noted that classic British soap opera EastEnders even worked it in as a plotline. And I know that you've been doing loads of work with your team at the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, looking to localise some of its principles, given that a lot of our listeners for this podcast will be working in a built environment context, could you share with us what the donut looks and feels like when it's applied in the context of, say, a neighbourhood?
Kate Raworth 11:16
So at the Doughnut Economic Action Lab - we’ve been really struck that people in communities and neighbourhoods in towns and cities have said, Hey, this looks like a useful tool for us, So we call it downscaling the Doughnut or unrolling the Doughnut locally? And here's the question that we invite every neighbourhood or town or city to ask themselves: How can our place, our neighbourhood, be a home to thriving people, in a thriving place, while respecting the wellbeing of all people, and the health of the whole planet? So, that question has got four parts? First of all, what would it mean for everybody in this place to thrive? And who are all the people of this place and their full diversity? What would it mean for us to thrive here to have the food, health education, housing, community income, social support, equity, that enables everybody here to have a life of dignity and opportunity? That's an open local conversation and a great starter to ‘what does a thriving life look like here and I think it's going to vary by culture, by history, by values, by geography around the world.. The second part of it is, how can this place be a thriving place and this is where Janine Benyus’s inspiration comes in. So the question we ask is, how can our locality be as generous as the wildland next door? So if Janine were with us today she’d sayight. Take me to where nature is in its whole healthy habitat of this place. And let's study what nature is doing. Because nature has a genius of thriving everywhere. In each location on planet Earth nature figures out how to cleanse the air and house, how to store biodiversity, how to store carbon and how to store water after a storm. She makes us feel at home. She harvests the energy. So how can we take nature's generosity and what Janine calls ecological performance standards? Exactly how much carbon does nature sequester here? per hectare? How much water does she store still? What if those natural standards and they're utterly literally natural? What if those standards become the standards for our place that we are aiming to match or even exceed, so that the way we build our neighbourhood actually is as generous as nature? Now I find that mind blowing. I want to know before I go on, I want to know what that sounds like to yourselves as people working in building and constructing and imagining built environments.
Michael Pawlyn 13:57
Well, I really like the way Janine has moved into using the term generous because architects get so frustrated with the sort of mean spiritedness of developers. And ultimately, I think we do need to learn how to be generous. One of the questions partly inspired by Janine and partly by a philosopher, called Freya Matthews, and one of the questions that we've condensed in our book, Sarah and I, is what solutions already exist in this place. And I think that's something that all designers should ask when they they're coming into to a place and, and that means that the solutions that exist in the kind of evolved ingenuity of all the species that that live there, as well as the ingenuity of the human beings, the indigenous peoples that have lived in that place, and ideally, we would not see those as dualistically two realistically split, but as just the kind of accumulated ingenuity of, you know, 3.8 billion years of evolution.
Sarah Ichioka 14:56
Absolutely. I think one of our key premises in Flourish is that regenerative design practices will be modelled on and rooted in natural systems, including, as Michael mentioned, Indigenous human cultural practices. That means both the very direct interaction in a functional sense. Kate, you know, you mentioned also thinking about what metaphors nature and spending time in nature can offer us just fire our imaginations. I think we're really moved by the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. In particular, she has that beautiful essay about learning from the serviceberry and its ecosystem as a model for gender or generous economic practices. So I think what you're talking about absolutely resonates with Michael’s and my thinking.
Kate Raworth 15:52
Great. And this is what I profoundly learned from Jeanine. In fact, the framework I'm talking through right now came as a sort of conceptual mashup between Janine saying, Hey, can I pick up the Doughnut, and she sort of flicked it inside out and started using it in this way. And then I thought, Oh, we can combine that very local generosity of nature here, her way of using it, I combined it with the global donut so that we came up with this framework that we now call the four lenses of looking at a portrait of a place. So we start with what does it mean for the people of this place to thrive? What would it mean for this place to be as generous as the wild land next door, so that's what we call the local aspirations for the place, socially and ecologically. And then we have to recognise that every place is connected to a much greater whole, it's embedded in parts of networks that connect it to the whole world. So we also, along with the place’s local aspirations, to be politically generous, and to be socially thriving, we have to recognise it has global responsibilities. So we ask how can our neighbourhood respect the health of the whole planet. And one way in here is to think about all of the global supply chains that connect our neighbourhood to the whole world. So all the construction materials that come in when we build new buildings, or roads, all of the food, the consumer goods, everything that comes in and fits together and makes life work materially in the place, and then the stream of waste, of course that flows out. And so how can we create places that massively reduce their impact on Earth’s planetary boundaries, reducing their carbon impact worldwide, reducing their water and land and nitrogen footprints, reducing their material footprints. And of course, one way to address this is creating a far more circular economy. So the resources are used again and again and recirculated and up-cycled and refurbished and repurposed rather than used once thrown away, streamed out. And then I'll just connect the last piece, which is thinking while we think of those global supply chains, also thinking of the people, so the people who pick and pack the food, who stitch the clothes, who dig and transport the construction materials, How can their rights be respected through those same global supply chains? And I'm really interested to know, again, in Flourish and in your own thinking, how that connection to the world comes in, and how that can be a much more intentional part of the built environment.
Sarah Ichioka 18:31
Absolutely. I mean, it connects with the paradigm shift from competition to symbiogenesis. We think that it's high time that we listen to all the social scientists who show us that actually, humans have an amazing capacity for altruism, and that we're stronger through collaboration. And looking at, how it's a key part of evolution that individual organisms joined together and then eventually, through coevolution become a unified whole. And we think there's huge potential to look at built environment practices. Moving away from a model where clients or built environment designers, even heads of cities, see each other as competitors, and instead see the potential for collaboration.
Michael Pawlyn 19:36
We've also described in our book how the use of ecosystem models to rethink the flows of resources in cities is one of the most under explored and most valuable opportunities to rethink cities. And there been some lovely examples of that and it is slowly picking up but, I remember when I first heard about the cardboard caviar project, which is quite quirky project in that it showed how you could use waste cardboard and go through a number of cycles and end up with caviar that was being sold back to the restaurant. And the guy who created this Graham Wiles, it just turned into this ever growing system. And wherever he saw waste in his area, he would look at that as an opportunity to add something to this system. And there was a real sense in which the more this system grew, the more the potential grew, the more the diversity of the system, the more generous it was becoming, actually.
Sarah Ichioka 20:33
We are really inspired by the work of SuperUse Studios based in Rotterdam - A quick train ride from all of your DEAL locus in Amsterdam, where they've been looking at re-localized in materials streams, both in their own practice, and then consultants to many others, have you have you engaged with them?
Kate Raworth 20:53
No, tell, I'd love to hear some more like own some examples of the kind of materials that they're repurposing
Sarah Ichioka 20:58
They are brilliant. So they so they use a system called Harvest Mapping, which they started in the Netherlands, but then have introduced various models - somewhat along the lines of what Michaels mentioned - working specifically with built environment in mind, and they work with various industries, for example, to see what their localised waste products might be, and then connect them with built environment clients and other practitioners to repurpose them as their core building materials. And they train designers to start from those building blocks to design out from what is already available, as opposed to designing something and then trying to get the materials to fit it, which is just a completely different, new creative way of sparking a design process.
Kate Raworth 21:52
That sounds brilliant. That actually prompts me to ask you two a question. So I'm going to go back to the conversation I had with Janine. She said look here’s an example of how she has been trying to bring these processes into practice. She had been contacted by a developer who'd written ‘Biomimicry’ into a proposal, and they'd won. They won the contract. And so they called and said, Oh, we've written ‘biomimicry’ in our proposal so need to talk to you? I’m sure, that's not unfamiliar. And she said, Oh, look, this is an amazing opportunity in your city. In fact, there's quite polluted air in the city. Look, we can build buildings here as part of your development that draws in that dirty city will create buildings that cleanse the air, circulate it through the building, and then it'll put clean air back out into the city. And the developer said, Why would I do that? And for me, this was the crux of the conversation with Janine, she's like, who's got to persuade who at this point? And of course, he's saying, Well, you know, I'm not sure the economics of that stack up, come back, when you've got better economics on it, when the numbers really add up. And it for me, it was a real turning point in thinking about writing Doughnut Economics about how do we flip this because what we've got at the moment, is the mainstream economics of our times that we've inherited, and the numbers and expectations in the financial returns that are in place, and then we've got regenerative design that actually works with an understanding of this planet. And when regenerative designers bring these ideas, they are met with this doesn't fit financially, this doesn't add up, come back when you can make it fit. Now, how do we get from there to reversing this. Saying ‘No, what fits is what works on Planet Earth”. This actually, naturally, deeply belongs because it works with and within Earth cycles. So now we actually need to transform the financial models, the financial norms and expectations and the designs of business and regulation, so that they actually fit and belong with what we know works naturally. So I want to ask you both that that moment of Jeanine encountering, you know, with a deeply Natural Earth belonging, concept and design is rejected by the artifice of finance, and economics that we've inherited. I'm sure you have encountered this many times in your work. And I'd love to hear what you think is the way how and where do we begin to flip in a systems way in a Donella Meadows Leverage Points way?
Michael Pawlyn 24:37
Yeah, exactly. I've encountered that very often. And actually, that's one of the reasons that I came to write the book with Sarah because I have been working on projects that were trying to be transformative and so on for 10 or 11 years and constantly being told, Yeah, well, these ideas are fascinating but you know, the markets not ready for them yet. And so the conclusion I came to having reread Leverage Points was that the only way we're going to shift this is to look at a larger scale shift in thinking, fundamentally rethinking what it means to be human and what our relationship is with the rest of the living world. And this connects with some of the material that Jeremy Lent has talked about in The Patterning Instinct, how, if we hold a metaphor of conquest of nature, then that leads to very different behaviour than if we see ourselves as embedded within a web of life support systems.
Sarah Ichioka 25:38
We wrote this book and want to have these conversations because we see that work of shifting mindsets as an ongoing process that needs to run in parallel with so many of our peers are doing amazing technological innovations, that, you know, that give a lot of hope, but we feel that we're not going to get where we need to, unless change does happen in this fundamental way. But I, you know, I do think there is something about allowing people to have the lived experience of what a regenerated place feels like, I think it's one of the reasons maybe why Isabella Tree’s, Wilding has been so successful that so many people have been able to go and visit her family's estate and actually see what that looks like in practice. Similarly, with the biophilic design practices here in Singapore, where it's been a 50 year project, to try to integrate architecture into natural systems. And it's an ongoing process. But I still think when people come here, when clients and designers come here and see what it's like to be in one of these buildings, where greenery is everywhere, and it's naturally ventilated, that there can be a bit of a conversion experience. But it has to moving beyond just that. Yeah, just the spreadsheet, just a spreadsheet gone.
Kate Raworth 27:13
Can I ask that?
Sarah Ichioka 27:14
Of course.
Kate Raworth 27:15
What do you, what do you think has made biophilic design, take off, have roots be funded, be built? How did that happen in Singapore?
Sarah Ichioka 27:26
In Singapore, it's a long story. But it initially started as a way for the founders post independence to differentiate themselves from the rest of the region. So there were various landscape interventions that were done to try to create a distinctive visual brand. So that was quite instrumentalist, but actually, there's been a huge amount invested in research about the wellbeing benefits of parks and green spaces. I myself was involved in a project to measure the subjective well being benefits of civic gardening programmes here. And there's been a long study where it's an aging population here. And so it's been a very evidence based process, I would say, from the first, seeing how it correlates with economic inward investment, and then subsequently seeing how investment in greenspace correlates with various metrics of health.
Michael Pawlyn 28:22
So can I turn that question back to you? How, how would you deal with it? If a financier were to say to you, yeah, why? Why is it in my interest to do this?
Kate Raworth 28:33
Well, like you, I think, saying, right, we need to move to a higher level of paradigm change. Because I did encounter that blockage in thinking in economics I studied and millions of students world wide study? It's written into that economics. We start with, you know, economics starts with supply and demand, when it should start with a living planet. I mean, economics means the art of household management, how can you presume, to even begin to manage this household if you don't even understand how it works? So for me, the frustration of finance first, finance has its expectations, expectations have often actually just written, you know, what is a reasonable financial return has in many cases just become the norm of what people expect to earn it's not rooted at all in planet it is actually rooted in in the accumulation of power and privilege of those who own capital and expect to reap the return of its rent. So there's nothing natural as nothing planet bound about it. It's utterly constructed. And once you realise that finance is constructed, then that's a huge opening because we reconstruct it. And let's start with let's start with what we can't reconstruct and what we must respect, which is the actual fundamentals of the living planet. And then to ask yourself a question, if you begin to understand the fundamentals of the living planet and the cycles of the living world and the vulnerable independence of the living world, what kind of financial system? what kind of economic system would be in service to that? I'm still asking that question. But that's the exact motivation for writing Doughnut Economics.
Michael Pawlyn 30:29
The other thing I think you do brilliantly is you ask really enjoyable, challenging questions like, you know, what is your deep purpose as an organisation? And if you can explain to an organisation is the difference between sustainable and regenerative? I think there are surely very few people who would say, Well, yeah, I'm happy with my purpose, being degenerative. And somehow, it all seems very obvious. Now this difference between sustainable and regenerative and I have noticed a big take up in it just in the last two to three years.
Kate Raworth 31:01
Yeah. And there's a danger. Of course, it also sounds better. And everyone's saying it. So let's start seeing it too, without actually really looking at what regenerative would be because it's profound. And it's almost not practised at all, because it's such a profound change and so hard to make compatible with the financial system, the market based system that we've inherited, that there's very little room for it to be made visible. And that's why it's so important when it is made visible. And we can visit it and see it, as you say, Sarah, that we can go to places like the Knepp Estate of re-wilding. But or indeed, Singapore, if people get to visit and say, Oh, it actually exists, it's real.
Sarah Ichioka 31:44
Kate, we both remarked that in terms of how well the doughnut concept has taken off, we can both think of examples of people who've bought, multiple copies of your book to give out to all of their clients and colleagues who, according to, other socio political metrics, one might not associate necessarily with regenerative thinking. And I wondered if you had any thoughts about that - what is it about the donut that manages to captivate people's imaginations?
Michael Pawlyn 32:27
The example I heard … It was a Dutch journalist who told me that a right of centre Dutch politician was so impressed that he bought a copy for every member of the Dutch parliament. That is seriously impressive to be able to write a book that speaks across the kind of conventional divides in that way.
Kate Raworth 32:37
Yeah, that's true. I believe his name is Jan Peter Balkenende. He was a centre right politician and I was in a debate in the Netherlands, I think, in 2018. And an entrepreneur said, we should give a copy to every member of parliament. And they just went ahead and did it. And they stood in the entrance to the Dutch parliament and handed out a copy of the book to every MP, who came through the door. And I was amazed that anybody was doing this across the political spectrum. But that, it was travelling across the spectrum. And I think it's really important, certainly in the UK, and in the Netherlands, there has been interest and uptake and discussion of the concepts across much of the political spectrum, I think that is important because it would be, it would be terrible for these ideas to be pigeonholed as, oh, that's left wing, or that’s just ‘Eco’ or that's 'Deep Green' or just that will be really a narrow waste of the potential for reimagining paradigm. And it's when you know, you're at a kind of paradigm change when people with different political views say Yes, that makes sense to me. And the Doughnut, in a way, makes that irresistible. Let's meet the needs of all people. These are the human rights of all people. That's been agreed for many decades and deeply respected. Let's live within the means of the one known living planet in the universe. What do you want to disagree with about there? So when we take these parameters, of course, different people and parties will have very different policies that they might recommend in order to get there. But if we've got that common vision, that's starting to move us towards a different paradigm. This is true of any idea and how does an idea that aims to be transformative begin in a place, even though that place is embedded in other systems that hold it back and how does change happen? And now we're in the space of just where and at what level? How does change happen? Where do you put your energy?
Sarah Ichioka 35:09
And would you say that your theory of change is that it's best to target that intervention at a city level? That's where, you know, so many people say, that's where the climate crisis will or won't be addressed. for example.
Kate Raworth 35:19
At Doughnut Economics Action Lab, our theory of change is - let's go where the energy is. And I can tell you a quick story. When my book first was coming out in the UK, my publisher said, oh, you know, I'm sure we can get you to do a seminar at the London School of Economics, and wrote to their contacts there. And the reply came back saying thank you very much. We've seen the manuscript, but there's not any interest in these ideas at this time. I remember thinking, right, that is the last time I go knocking on the doors of the institutions and give them the pleasure of saying thank you, but no, thank you. So and, of course, then what happened was the students wanted it, the student movement that was all for rewriting economics, they invited me it was on sale in the bookshop. And actually, we get a lot of invitations from the London School of Economics now. But it made me think, right, don't spend time knocking on shut doors, because there are plenty of other places where the energy already is. So to bring it back to actual places where this change happens. At Doughnut Economics Action Lab, and myself, we've never once asked anybody or targeted anybody or lobbied anybody persuaded anybody to use this idea. Everything that's happening is because, change makers, people in the place, whether they're town councilors, or teachers or community organisers, or parents at the school gate, those people have said, this idea looked useful for what we're doing what we're making happen here. We want to bring this in. So it has picked up up at the level of cities. And I think, as many conversations around what's what's going on with cities, there's a dynamism there's a momentum, is there something about the scale that everybody is reachable? That people I think, certainly in the UK, people are more proud to say the city that they're from, or to identify that than, say, the nation that they're from. There's something about the scale of the city, is it that policies then become tangible, and we can actually ride in the streets and live in the houses and move in the buildings, we can feel the impact of that policy in our place. So we have been doing work with cities and then there's peer to peer inspiration. So when one city picks it up, like Amsterdam put the Doughnut at the heart of their circularity policy, or when they did that and launched it in April 2020. That, of course, has inspiration for other cities like them, and places unlike them, but it's also happening at the level of nations. Small island nations are picking it up Barbados, Curacao. It's also happening at the level of neighbourhoods, phenomenal work being done by an organisation called Civic Square in Birmingham, in just a small district of Port Loop and Ladywood having literally those street to street conversations. What would it mean for us to make this neighbourhood regenerative and this neighbourhood distributed, so it can happen at multiple scales. We are riding with all of these scales because in the spirit of Elinor Ostrom, change is polycentric and governance is polycentric. And who knows which of these levels will kick off that, that transformation that will inspire others that will inspire up the scale and down the scale. So we work at multiple scales.
Sarah Ichioka 38:26
Given that there are opportunities at multiple scales, what sort of skills do you think that we should all get better at or develop, so that we're better able to enable or participate in a Doughnut economy?
Kate Raworth 38:45
Oh, so the skills No, you're not saying the skills to actually bring the doughnut to a place as a tool. But you mean actually to create a Doughnut economy. Well, I think ..
Sarah Ichioka 38:55
You've done a wonderful job of, you know, earlier in the conversation of sharing the sorts of questions that that deal is, is asking together with its partners, but I always wonder, you know, someone who really inspires me is the astrophysicist and intentional community builder, Robert Gilman, and he's pivoted to think he spent so long advocating for external social change now, the work he's doing in his third act is about the internal change that needs to happen within all of us in order to enable and underpin the external change. And I just wondered what would be Doughnut economists or would be Doughnut dwellers? What sort of skills or mindsets can help them to inhabit it?
Kate Raworth 39:37
Okay, so I'm going to pull back to the mindset that we get taught through mainstream economics, which if you study mainstream economics. It’s like ‘Welcome to Economics’. Here's the market and in the market space, who are we told we are in the market space where we show up in the market as either a consumer or producer we're shopping or working. And in producer space, well, are you labourer earning a wage or the capital owner reaping that rent, the traits that we were told are valuable in the space of the market were characterised as rational economic man, this man who has no dependents who's standing alone with money in his hand, ego in his heart calculator in his head and nature at his feet, he's competitive. He avoids work, he loves luxury, he knows the price of everything he's calculating. And actually, the more that students study this very narrow depiction of humanity, the more they aspire to be like him. So there's a real danger that we actually, through old economics, teach students to become more self interested, more competitive, less altruistic. Then mainstream economics also brings in the state. So you've got the public servant, you've got the public good. Now Marianna Mazzucato has done a brilliant job of showing that the narrative has become so tilted as if it's really boring to work for the state and the state’s kind of a bit, technocratic bureaucratic and should sort of get out of the way and make a level playing field for the whiz bang geniuses in the private sector. Right. And she's she's really debunked that and shows actually, we've really required the state to have a mission to have that big purpose, to be in service to take risks where the private sector just won't go until it knows it's going to make that financial return that makes it think that this is the right rate of return. Now, that's the mainstream space. What I want to bring back into economics and feminist economists have been bringing in for decades is the household where we will begin every day, where we may be a parent or partner or relative child. We do that unpaid caring work, both the cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping, but also the raising the kids and caring for each other and building relationships. So the skills of care that are often unrecognised, and they're certainly unpaid, but essential for life. But then also, along with the household, the commons, where people come together, not through the market of the state, but as a community, co creating goods and services that the value. And this is the space that Elinor Ostrom has really brought back a recognition of and celebration of because despite Garret Hardin telling us in the 1960s, that the commons are tragic, and so you should sell them off or or put them under public control. And then Ostrom said, well, funnily enough, I went to lots of commons, and they were working really well. And instead of just declaring that they're tragic. I'm going to study them and see what makes them work well. And it's about having clear membership, regular communication, recognised rules that you get rewarded for following or you get sanctions for violating really clear rules in practice, around being commoners. And this is the space in which we volunteer, where we share, we co create, we collaborate, we steward. To me, this is the space where we need to up our skills, and what are the values and the behaviours and the beliefs and the metaphors and the practices and the cultures and the stories we tell that will enable us to become good commoners again, to me that is going to be crucial.
Michael Pawlyn 43:11
Brilliant, okay, what would be an ideal project for you? What kind of person or organisation would you most like to knock on your door with what kind of project?
Kate Raworth 43:26
In starting to work with cities and organisations and enterprises that say yes, we want to bring about regenerative and distributive design, we've become more and more aware that we can talk or we like about the design of your products or the design of your building and, but what we really profoundly care about is the design of the organisation. Because how the organisation is designed is going to ultimately determine the extent to which you will be generating regenerative designs and distributed designs as a company or as a city. So I was very, very struck reading a book by Marjorie Kelly called Owning Our Future, in which she set up five key design traits of organisations and this is now at the heart of our work. It's not strongly reflected in donut economics, it's hidden in there, but it's actually become much more central to the work we do so with any organisation, whether it's a company or indeed a city government, we'd say write first, what is your purpose? Why do you exist? What are you in service of that big, clear purpose? Second, how are you networking with your employees, with your customers, with your suppliers and how are you ensuring that they share the values that underpin your purpose? How do you make sure that the way you hire the way you contract, the way you appeal to your customers actually shares those values? Thirdly, how do you govern, who has a voice in decision making? What are the metrics of success? How are you locking in your value so that they don't come and go with the whims of the CEO or the founder or the mayor but they are actually learning locked into the purpose. So that's your purpose, your networks, your governance. But let's go deeper. How are you owned as an enterprise? Are you a company that's owned by the founding entrepreneur, by your employees, are you owned by the state, by family, by venture capital, by shareholders, because how your organisation is owned, is going to profoundly shape how it's financed. And what that finance, coming back to that talk about finance, what that finance is expecting and demanding and aiming to extract or reinvest. So your purpose, networks, governance, ownership and finance. So we would love to knock on our door, organisations that say we want to become part of the regenerative future. And we know that in order to do that, we need to put that at the heart of our own design. In fact, this is the exact work we're doing in the space of business. The organisational forms that we need to bring about this regenerative future barely exist. And that's exciting, because it means we can be part of inventing and designing them.
Sarah Ichioka 46:23
That is so exciting. So what is the best way for all of our listeners, including those who may be in a position to want to engage with this amazing new process you've outlined? What's the best way for them to connect with your work Kate?
Kate Raworth 46:39
Is to checkout Doughnut Economics Action Lab. It's at doughnuteconomics.org - It's an online platform, all of our work is in this space online. We welcome people to browse to have a look at the tools that we've created and the stories of people who are using them. We welcome anyone to join as an individual member. That's the way to get in touch, contact us through the contact form. And we would love to have you as part of our community and this learning journey. Because we know that I think 21st century economics is going to be practised first and theorised later. So it's time to hang out with practitioners. And there's some incredible practitioners in this community very generously, through reciprocity, one of those 21st century skills, sharing back their stories, sharing back their learning, and putting it back in the commons.
Michael Pawlyn 47:22
That's fabulous Kate. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. And you're doing such important work, all power to your elbow.
Kate Raworth 47:29
Oh, big pleasure with you both as well, because it's actually when people work with ideas and turn them into material form and make them visible and show them as buildings as spaces that, as you said, we can go and stand in those places and feel that this could actually be. So it takes all of us. It's big team work. And it's great to be on a big team with you.
Sarah Ichioka 47:49
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Kate, it's been wonderful having you on
Kate Raworth 47:53
Big pleasure.
Michael Pawlyn 47:59
Well, what a pleasure. I mean, she's so articulate, the model is so clear. I really hope it just takes off. And every city and country starts transforming towards the Doughnut, what are your thoughts, Sarah?
Sarah Ichioka 48:15
I love the point that she made that we speak and think in metaphors constantly, even when we're not aware of it. And Michael, I know you and I, in our own conversations are always having that catching ourselves, right? Like ‘was that a patriarchal frame we just used?’ or, you know, ‘what's a more regenerative metaphor, or simile that one could use in conversation?’ It's so important to think through the metaphors that we use that completely shaped the way we think and do everything. And that we're taught from a young age, and how we have to actively relearn and pursue new metaphors and models.
Michael Pawlyn 48:58
And the importance of this really came home to me recently, when I was speaking at an event and there was this Futurist called Chor Pharn Lee. He's actually from Singapore. And he was talking about the growth debate and how, in most Asian countries, it would be a complete nonstarter to talk about degrowth, because they're very recent improvements in quality of life that many of them have experienced, that is still very fresh in their minds and are all associated with growth. But interestingly, he was completely comfortable with the idea of planetary limits. And it shows just how important the whole subject of framing and metaphors is.
Sarah Ichioka 49:33
Completely. I also really loved the exchange that you drew out between Kate Raworth and the biomimicry expert Janine Benyus, and just just hearing how their thinking had informed one another's and how it seemed to be an evolving conversation. Connecting the idea of people being able to thrive and then the place itself, thriving in concert with that.
Michael Pawlyn 50:00
It sounds like a really lovely collaboration they've got going in Amsterdam, doesn't it?
Sarah Ichioka 50:04
Absolutely. And I was also really intrigued there at the end, when she was referring to the new work that the Doughnut Economics Action Lab are doing about institutional transformation. I know that's something that my own company has been actively engaged in trying to look at base at how organisations are structured internally and how that absolutely affects the work that they do out in the world.
Michael Pawlyn 50:44
Yeah, interesting to see that they're focusing in - on companies. And after all, you know, the company as it is today, it's deeply dysfunctional, because its purpose is not generally aligned with planetary health at all. It's just driven by shareholder primacy, a kind of fiduciary duty to make as much money as possible for your shareholders. And increasingly, they're not even shareholders, they are share traders.
Sarah Ichioka 51:26
Yeah, that's why it was so exciting to hear about these new models. And it resonates a lot with my understanding of the B Corp movement as well. So for change to happen at the scale and speed that we needed to avert planetary collapse, or civilization collapse, at least, we need this sort of transformative work to be happening on multiple fronts from multiple actors. So I also really appreciated her sense of collaboration and building a movement with many different players.
Michael Pawlyn 52:04
In some of the talks, Kate has mentioned our sponsor Interface’s collaboration with Janine Benyus, on the factory as a forest project as an example of regenerative design. The essence of this is that for any project, whether it is a factory, a house or a city, a designer should start by analysing how a mature ecosystem functions and what the metrics are, for say carbon sequestration, food production, water filtration, etc. And those should become the targets that the design aspires to reach. This is way beyond what most projects designed to conventional rating systems achieved with the living world is proof of the possibility that this could be achieved.
Sarah Ichioka 52:55
The Flourish podcast is recorded at Cast Iron Studios in London and the Hive Lavender studios in Singapore. Our co producers are Kelly Hill in London and Shireen Marican in Singapore. Our research and production assistant is Yi Shien Sim. The podcast is edited and features brilliant original music by Tobias Withers.
Flourish Systems Change is bought to you by Interface
Production credits
Presenters Sarah Ichioka & Michael Pawlyn
Audio producer & composer Tobias Withers
Producers Kelly Hill (London) Shireen Marican (Singapore)
Research & production assistant Yi Shien Sim
Podcast cover art by Studio Folder
