This book provides insights into alternative approaches to economics that are sustainable and just for both society and the planet in the long term. In twenty-four essays, internationally renowned economic thinkers like Kate Raworth, Charles Eisenstein, Clair Brown, Helena Norberg-Hodge and Daniel C. Wahl share the alternatives that are available to us such as doughnut economics, wellbeing economics, common good economics, regenerative economics, buddhist economics, commons economics, local economics, bioregional economics, indigenous economics and degrowth economics. Each of these approaches provides a realistic and enticing vision of a thriving future.

In this paper we identify two missing dimensions of the Human Capabilities Approach (HCA) – the collective and the productive – and in doing so we advance a ‘productionist’ perspective on development, centred around the idea of ‘collective productive capabilities’. Bringing production back to the core of the development agenda calls for an integration of the HCA and those contributions which have focused their attention on the social, economic and institutional processes of learning, centred
around productive organisations and systems. The lack of this focus on collective productive capabilities undermined the Millenium Development Goals Agenda and is still having negative impacts on the ways in which the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda is understood and implemented.

The paper offers a wide-angle view of ethics and welfare through the lens of ‘moral economy’. It examines economic activities in relation to a view of welfare as well-being, and to ethics in terms of economic justice. Rather than draw upon abstract ideal theories such as Rawlsian or Capabilities approaches, it calls for an evaluation of actually existing sources of harm and benefit in neoliberal capitalism. It argues that we need to look behind economic outcomes in terms of how much money different people have, examine their economic relations to others, and evaluate the justifications of these relations and their associated rights and practices. It distinguishes three sources of income – earned income, transfers, and unearned income, and argues that the last of these has no functional or ethical justification but has major implications for welfare. It then comments on the policy implications of the argument, including brief comments on asset-based welfare and universal basic income policies, and concludes.

While the notion of degrowth has gained traction in recent times, scholarship on degrowth transformations has yet to provide a conceptualisation that captures key attributes of what such transformations entail: (1) the reduction of some items and the expansion of others and (2) profound changes in various dimensions of social being, including in how humans interact with nature, non-humans, and one another, changes in social structures and changes in how we are as human beings. The present paper develops a comprehensive and non-reductionist conceptualisation of degrowth, understanding it to involve deep transformations on four interrelated planes of social being: material transactions with nature, social interactions between persons, social structure, and people's inner being. On each plane, these transformations consist in reducing, and ultimately absenting, some currently existing items while expanding others. The paper considers the implications of the conceptualisation for degrowth practice and theorising, focusing on top-down eco-social policies, bottom-up initiatives and self-transformation. It is found that degrowth would benefit from considering more seriously the effects of policies and initiatives across all four planes and from acknowledging diversity on each plane. Moreover, it is concluded that more attention should be paid to the plane of peoples' inner being.

This paper addresses the role of neoclassical methodologies in ecological economics and the contradictions these methodologies pose to the field's critical founding principles. We first consider Robert Costanza's treatment of Nicholas Stern's Global Deal and then survey climate change-related articles published in this journal over the past five years. This survey reveals how mainstream (neoclassical) methodologies dominate discourse, and do so by marginalizing more critical (political economy) analyses. This situation imperils the field's founding vision of a no-growth ‘steady state’; it also fails to address the (related) growth dynamics of capitalism. Without such a critical treatment, the field's formal embrace of ‘methodological pluralism’ actually entails an ideological empiricism that renders ecological economics theoretically incoherent. This situation undermines the field's historical promise as an alternative economic paradigm. Ecological economics now faces a problematic future. Its survival in a form faithful to its founding vision will require an explicit choice to address its internal contradictions, and reinvent itself in ways relevant to our contemporary context. Without such a choice, ecological economics will likely succumb to an implicit acceptance of the hegemony of mainstream economic methodologies and their pro-growth imperatives.

This essay reviews the development of approaches within the comparative capitalisms (CC) literature and points to three theoretical innovations which, taken together, define and distinguish these approaches as a group. First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional configurations that generate a particular systemic “logic” of economic action. Second, the CC literature suggests a theory of comparative institutional advantage in which different institutional arrangements have distinct strengths and weaknesses for different kinds of economic activity. Third, the literature has been interpreted to imply a theory of institutional path dependence. Behind these unifying characteristics of the literature, however, lie a variety of analytical frameworks and typologies of capitalism. This paper reviews and compares these different frameworks by highlighting the fundamental distinctions among them and drawing out their respective contributions and limitations in explaining economic performance and institutional dynamics. The paper concludes that the way forward for this literature lies in developing a more dynamic view of individual institutions, the linkages between domains, and the role of politics and power.

Scholars and activists mobilize increasingly the term degrowth when producing knowledge critical of the ideology and costs of growth-based development. Degrowth signals a radical political and economic reorganization leading to reduced resource and energy use. The degrowth hypothesis posits that such a trajectory of social transformation is necessary, desirable, and possible; the conditions of its realization require additional study. Research on degrowth has reinvigorated the limits to growth debate with critical examination of the historical, cultural, social, and political forces that have made economic growth a dominant objective. Here we review studies of economic stability in the absence of growth and of societies that have managed well without growth. We reflect on forms of technology and democracy compatible with degrowth and discuss plausible openings for a degrowth transition. This dynamic and productive research agenda asks inconvenient questions that sustainability sciences can no longer afford to ignore.

The concept of ‘wellbeing economy’ (WE), that is, an economy that pursues human and ecological wellbeing instead of material growth, is gaining support amongst policymakers, business, and civil society. Over the past couple of years, several national governments have adopted the WE as their guiding framework to design development policies and assess social and economic progress. While it shares a number of basic principles with various post-growth conceptualisations, the WE's language and concepts tend to be more adaptable to different social and economic contexts, thus penetrating into policy processes and connecting to a variety of cultural traits, not only in advanced economies but also in less industrialised nations. In this paper, we describe the key features of the WE, including its approach to key concepts like work, productivity and technology and several examples of its policy impact. We conclude by positing that the WE framework may be one of the most effective bases to mainstream post-growth policies at the national and global level.

The paper deals with the recent resurgence of interest in the concept of “socialism” from an economic perspective. The most significant contemporary proposals for a new model of socialism are surveyed across five major thematic areas: socialism as a voluntary endeavor and socialist ethics; socialism as a process of democratization; socialism, efficiency and profit maximization; the problem of planning and the new calculation debate; and, socialism as a means versus socialism as an end. A common framework to assess the new blueprints is constructed to identify the likely directions of the research on these themes in the near future.

To explain the frequent failures of current CSR practices and to explore the possibilities of remedying them, I examine the close relationship between CSR, the persistent expansion of capitalism, and the pressure that capitalism puts on companies to legitimize their business operations. My analysis shows that the failure of CSR to serve as a corrective to the problematic effects of capitalism is, in fact, an inevitable consequence of the problematic dynamics of the capitalist system. On this basis, I suggest that capitalism limits the possibilities of making CSR more effective, argue for change on the systemic level of capitalism, and explore the ways in which CSR research can contribute to this political endeavor.

Universal ownership theory proposes that widely diversified investors, who own a broad-based stake in the economy, can have a financial self-interest in reducing market-wide risks relating to environmental or social (ES) issues. Universal owner theory therefore provides a way to justify the active pursuit of ES goals, without the need for an explicit ES mandate from clients. This paper sets out a double test for determining whether universal owner theory justifies investor action in a given case. First, the outcome sought should have a credible pathway to enhance risk-adjusted returns at the portfolio level. Second, investors must have efficacy to achieve the outcome without exposing clients to excessive costs and risks. We examine these tests in the context of climate change. When applied to the case of the commonly adopted goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, universal owner theory runs into problems on both tests.

In this paper, I analyze the moral responsibilities that companies have with regard to the development of their sector, especially when there are path dependences that can lead sectors on more or less morally acceptable paths, e.g., with regard to market access for disadvantaged groups. The interdependencies between companies in a sector are underexplored in the literature on
corporate social responsibility (CSR). Reflections on the normative status of profit-seeking and on the normative bases of CSR, however, provide us with reasons for seeing sector-related responsibilities as an important component of CSR.