omniharmonicDoughnut Economics
Doughnut economics is a visual and conceptual framework developed by Kate Raworth that reimagines economic purpose as meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. The “doughnut” is the space between two concentric rings: an inner ring representing the social foundation (the minimum conditions for human well-being, drawn from the UN Sustainable Development Goals) and an outer ring representing the ecological ceiling (the planetary boundaries identified by Earth system science beyond which environmental degradation becomes dangerous).
The power of the doughnut model is that it replaces the single metric of GDP growth with a dashboard that makes visible both human deprivation and ecological overshoot simultaneously. Most wealthy nations have breached multiple planetary boundaries while still failing to meet basic needs for significant portions of their populations — the doughnut makes this double failure visible. The goal is not growth or degrowth per se, but to bring all of humanity into the safe and just space between the two rings.
Doughnut economics connects to the well-being-economy as a complementary framework for redefining prosperity, and to degrowth through its recognition that wealthy nations must reduce material throughput to return within planetary boundaries. It shares intellectual terrain with regenerative-economics in its emphasis on economic systems that work with rather than against ecological processes. The framework has been adopted at the municipal level — Amsterdam’s “doughnut city” strategy is the most prominent example — connecting it to bioregionalism and place-based governance. It also resonates with rights-of-nature in its insistence that ecological limits are not optional constraints but fundamental conditions of economic possibility.