Introduction: New Economies for Sustainability: Limits and Potentials for Possible Futures

This book brings together different perspectives on economy and organisation in a debate about sustainability and the role of economy, politics and society in working towards a more sustainable future. The ecological crisis, accompanied by increasing global inequality and the realization that financial and economics systems are vulnerable, have led to an upsurge of political movements and theoretical interventions articulating possible solutions to the perceived crisis. This includes a manifold of suggestions for how to rethink economy based on representations of more sustainable visions of economy and society. In the age of the Anthropocene humankind is foregrounded as a geological force or agent (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink, 2009), it relevant to consider our dispositions and ways of organizing societies and economies. Climate change is a wake-up call that our economies cannot go on with business as usual (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink, 2011). This new situation calls for scrutinizing and rethinking practices, including economic practices of production, exchange, consumption, as well as distribution, and how we organize these activities. Some advocate “taking back the economy” (Gibson-Graham, 2006, xxii), by giving way to post-capitalist principles of organizing the economy that serve the needs of people and societies and respect ecological concerns, and that radically challenge the existing political-economic order. Another new approach, Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, aims to develop economics and to learn how “to think like a twenty-first century economist” (Raworth, 2017: 4). Such approaches suggest the need for a new economy, one which is based on different principles than those usually associated with the mainstream market economy and the growth paradigm. New efforts entail re-orienting economics towards humanities’ long-term goals and taking explicitly into consideration a social foundation of human well-being and an economic ceiling of planetary pressure (Raworth, 2017:10–11). In other words, it calls for a reorientation of economy towards more sustainable ways for humans, societies and nature as an alternative to the growth paradigm. Amsterdam is the first city in the world to adopt the principles of Doughnut Economics to emerge from the current Covid-19 crisis and “rethink the future” (Perillo, 2020). At the same time suggestions for environmentally attuned and socially oriented economic alternatives come from activists, development agencies, grass-roots organizations (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink, 2011) and from other proponents of greener capitalist alternatives such as green capitalism, Green Economy (Teinharaa, 2014), regenerative capitalism (Sharmer, 2009; Elkington , 2020) alongside more radically alternative visions of economy.