Towards sustainable economies

Alternatives to mainstream economics are many. The criticism of economic materialism as a dehumanizing behaviour that is destructive to Earth, as human habitat, comes from religion and social activism. From the secular perspective, social activism indicates that from consumerist materialism derive crime (which originates from the poverty of economic inequality), industrial pollution and the consequent environmental degradation, and war as a business. ^W

• develop a Mutual aid network
• develop Community Currencies
• encourage business swaps
• encourage e-work, telework clubs and teleconferencing facilities
• encourage Free stuff or the gift economy, sharing and simple living
• microfinance initiatives
• promote fair trade
• set up credit unions
• slow money initiatives
• support cooperatives and social enterprise
• support initiatives to make the wider economy more sustainable such as basic income and ways of redefining progress
• sustain the custom of potlatch
• sustainability awards
• waste exchange schemes

An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant, or citizen’s income) is a form of social security system in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. ^W

Related concepts are Universal basic services ^W and Universal Basic Assets iftf.org

External links

• Project UBU

A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise". Cooperatives may include:

• non-profit community organizations
• businesses owned and managed by the people who use their services (a consumer cooperative)
• organizations managed by the people who work there (worker cooperatives)
• organizations managed by the people to whom they provide accommodation (housing cooperatives)
• hybrids such as worker cooperatives that are also consumer cooperatives or credit unions
• multi-stakeholder cooperatives such as those that bring together civil society and local actors to deliver community needs
• second- and third-tier cooperatives whose members are other cooperatives

Research published by the Worldwatch Institute found that in 2012 approximately one billion people in 96 countries had become members of at least one cooperative. The turnover of the largest three hundred cooperatives in the world reached $2.2 trillion – which, if they were to be a country, it would make them the seventh largest. [need quotation to verify] ^W

• DotCooperation ^W

Maps

• Cooperative World Map, added 17:02, 6 January 2026 (UTC)

This section has been AI generated: AI Overview from a Google search, 18:36, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Empower communities through localized services

• Fund community hubs and organizations: Provide grants and resources for local groups and social enterprises that deliver care services. These organizations often use asset-based approaches, leveraging the existing skills and social networks of residents to deliver better, more personalized, and less costly care.
• Establish cooperative models: Develop worker-led cooperatives and micro-enterprises for care services. These models can offer better pay, stability, and working conditions for caregivers than traditional commercial agencies.
• Co-produce services with residents: Involve community members directly in designing, delivering, and evaluating local care services. This ensures that priorities and solutions reflect what truly matters to the people who need and provide care.

Restructure local labor markets

• Revalue care work: Advocate for higher wages and better working conditions for paid care workers. Fair compensation is essential for addressing the high turnover and recruitment challenges in the care sector.
• Promote flexible and supportive employment: Encourage flexible working hours and paid leave policies that recognize employees' caregiving responsibilities. This is crucial for retaining a diverse workforce and supporting individuals—particularly women—with unpaid care duties.
• Create retraining and upskilling programs: Provide training and career pathways for care workers. This will not only improve the quality of care but also create opportunities for local workers, including those transitioning from contracting or low-paid sectors like retail.

Innovate with funding and policy

• Use anchor institutions for local procurement: Leverage the purchasing power of large, stable local organizations like hospitals and universities. By awarding contracts to local, sustainable care providers, these "anchor institutions" can help build a more resilient local care market.
• Explore new funding streams: Move away from an over-reliance on limited public budgets. This can involve combining public, social enterprise, and community-led models and exploring innovative options like social impact bonds or community investment funds.
• Pilot preventative initiatives: Introduce funding specifically for preventative and well-being programs, such as community transport, fitness, and social activities. This reduces long-term costs on formal care services by keeping people healthier and more connected.

Enhance community infrastructure and capacity

• Build social connection: Facilitate social prescribing schemes, befriending services, and peer-support networks. These initiatives combat loneliness and build strong social capital, which is fundamental to a caring community.
• Improve access to community resources: Use community hubs, mobile clinics, and social spaces to increase residents' access to health and wellness resources. Ensure these resources are inclusive and accessible to all residents, including vulnerable groups.
• Connect local systems: Encourage collaboration between healthcare providers, local government, and the voluntary sector. Developing supportive infrastructures, such as pooled funding mechanisms and shared digital care records, is key to integrating services for a more holistic approach.

TAPAS – “There Are Plenty of AlternativeS!” David Bollier, To Make Hope Possible Rather Than Despair Convincing... David Bollier, 02/13/2015

Green movements, but also thinkers from other areas, are opposed to the focus put on economics. The need for terminology has created familiar ideas such as carrying-capacity, and ecological footprint. ^W

This section incorporates some AI generated content: AI Overview from a Google search, 20:51, 6 January 2026 (UTC)

The main types of alternative economics focus on ecological sustainability, social equity, democratic participation, and valuing human/community well-being over pure financial accumulation:

• Doughnut Economics (Kate Raworth): A visual model aiming to keep economies within Earth's ecological limits (outer ring) while ensuring everyone meets basic needs (inner ring), creating a safe and just space for humanity.
• Solidarity Economy (SSE): A broad sector of organizations (co-ops, foundations, mutuals) that democratically govern themselves and prioritize social/environmental goals, focusing on community empowerment.
• Post-Growth & Degrowth: Seeks to shift away from GDP growth as the primary goal, advocating for reduced material/energy throughput, shorter workweeks, and meeting needs sustainably.
• Well-being Economy: Redefines success beyond GDP, measuring progress by health, happiness, education, and community cohesion, investing in social infrastructure.
• Circular Economy: Aims to eliminate waste and keep resources in use, designing products for longevity, reuse, and recycling, contrasting with the linear "take-make-dispose" model.
• Community & Local Economies: Emphasizes relocalizing production (e.g., food, energy), supporting local businesses, credit unions, and community land trusts to build self-reliance.
• Commons-based Peer Production: Leverages digital platforms for collaborative, non-proprietary creation and sharing of resources (like Wikipedia, open-source software).
• Ecological economics/eco-economics refers to both a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of academic research that aims to address the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems over time and space. It is distinguished from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment, by its treatment of the economy as a subsystem of the ecosystem and its emphasis upon preserving natural capital. ^W

The Doughnut, or Doughnut economics, is a visual framework for sustainable development – shaped like a doughnut or lifebelt – combining the concept of planetary boundaries with the complementary concept of social boundaries. The name derives from the shape of the diagram, i.e. a disc with a hole in the middle. The centre hole of the model depicts the proportion of people that lack access to life's essentials (healthcare, education, equity and so on) while the crust represents the ecological ceilings (planetary boundaries) that life depends on and must not be overshot. The diagram was developed by Oxford economist Kate Raworth in the Oxfam paper A Safe and Just Space for Humanity ^W

Meet the doughnut: the new economic model that could help end inequality, weforum.org, Apr 28, 2017

Downscaling the Doughnut to the City

So you want to downscale the Doughnut ? Here's how. kateraworth.com, July 16, 2020

• Doughnut Economics Action Lab

Post-growth can be distinguished from similar movements (such as degrowth, steady state economics, post-materialism) in that it focuses on acknowledging, supporting and building on the sustainable initiatives, systems and products that are already in place. Post growth advocates try to encourage, connect and further develop these existing ideas and actions. In this way, "post growth" does not specify the answer to the limits-to-growth challenge, as “steady state economics” and “degrowth” do, but rather seek to understand and address this challenge from a complex systems perspective that is constantly evolving. With this holistic complex systems approach, post growth deals with all aspects of self and society (such as psychology, human nature, human evolution, cultures, social systems and economies) and the interrelation of all of these aspects. Accordingly, the post growth concept also advocates solutions that are appropriate with regards to place, time, resource and cultural factors. Therefore, post growth initiatives take shape in very different ways under different circumstances.

Post growth can be considered an asset-based approach to community development, applied not only to community development but across a wide range of categories and in response to limits-to-growth challenges, as it seeks to build on the cultural and technological assets that already exist and are facilitating the emergence of post growth futures. ^W

Degrowth is considered an essential economic strategy responding to the limits-to-growth dilemma. Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption—the contraction of economies—arguing that overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities. Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring and a decrease in well-being. Rather, 'degrowthists' aim to maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, culture and community. ^W

• degrowth.info

A number of countries have introduced wellbeing metrics to guide public policy decision-making and inform budgetary processes with a focus on education and skills, health, gender and inclusion. The approach has been adopted as national policy in a number of countries including Scotland, New Zealand, Iceland, Wales, Finland and Canada which established the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership (WEGo) in 2021.

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) is the leading collaboration of organisations, alliances, movements and individuals working towards a Wellbeing Economy. WEAll was born in 2018 as a time-bound project to catalyse a transition towards a Wellbeing Economy by promoting radical connection and collaboration between different actors of the new economy ecosystem, so they can achieve impact larger than the sum of their parts.

Ambassadors of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance include: Bayo Akomolafe, James Gustave Speth, Darrick Hamilton, Sophie Howe, Katherine Trebeck, Abdul El-Sayed, Ayabonga Cawe, Carolina Urrutia Vásquez, Christian Felber, David Korten, Giancarlo Pucci, Jason Hickel, Kate Pickett, Kate Raworth, Kristin Vala Ragnarsdottir, Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Neva Goodwin, Pedro Tarak, Dirk Philipsen, Peter Blom, Rajiv Joshi, Richard Wilkinson, Robert Costanza, Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, Sharan Burrow, Tim Jackson, Bill McKibben, Victor Mochkofsky, and Michael Mezzatesta. ^W

Main article: Circular economy

A circular economy is a regenerative system in which resource input and waste, emission, and energy leakage are minimised by slowing, closing, and narrowing material and energy loops. This can be achieved through long-lasting design, maintenance, repair, reuse, remanufacturing, refurbishing, and recycling. This is contrast to a linear economy which is a 'take, make, dispose' model of production. ^W

Getting to a circular economy involves a lot of redesign. A question which may not be getting enough attention so far is the extent to which local communities, as opposed to just big business, can influence and be involved in this redesign, although there may be examples of individual communities attempting this path for their own local economic development.

Community-based economics or community economics is an economic system that encourages local substitution. It is similar to the lifeways of those practicing voluntary simplicity, including traditional Mennonite, Amish, and modern eco-village communities. It is also a subject in urban economics, related to moral purchasing and local purchasing.

The community-based economy can refer to the various initiatives coordinated through multiple forms of interactions. These interactions may involve some form of work performance; project participation; and/or relationship exchange. The forms of interaction can exclude the need to contract; can do away with the need to include some form of monetisation; as well as be free from the need to establish a structure of hierarchy. Community-based economies have been seen to involve aspects of social bonding; value promotion; and establishing community-orientated social goals.

It has been suggested that communities that meet their own needs need the global economy less. "Local-economy theory" introduces insights into new economic development that honours ecological realities and finds efficiencies in small-scale, shared knowledge at the community level.

Community-based economies have been seen to focus on the idea that the “local community should be the focal point of development”. In addition, resources and skills which are sourced locally are seen to play a pivotal role in the community. A community economies approach is interested in diverse activities that contribute to the well-being of both people and the planet. Such actions seek to help people survive well; produce and distribute surplus; transact goods and services more fairly; and invest in ways to support a better future. A community economies approach involves identifying and acknowledging the economic activities that contribute to the well-being of people and the planet and considers ways that these activities may strengthen and multiply. Community-based economics starts by acknowledging the local context and valuing the diverse economic activities and possibilities already present.

In the Philippines, the Jenga Community Partnering Project involved working with groups of community members to build on existing individual and community assets. Community economies researchers point out that the 'community' in community economies is not about pre-existing communities (such as those based on a shared identity or location). Instead, the community is a process of being with others, including the world around. ^W

This section has been AI generated: AI Overview from a Google search, 21:30, 6 January 2026 (UTC). Question/prompt: (as heading)

Alternative economic models are generally designed to be more inclusive than traditional systems by prioritizing social and environmental goals alongside economic considerations.

• Participatory Economics is arguably the most intrinsically inclusive, as its core principle is the direct participation of everyone in decision-making processes across all economic functions (production, consumption, and distribution) through self-managed councils, explicitly aiming to eliminate inequality and exploitation.
• Solidarity Economy models, which include various forms like cooperatives, community land trusts, and mutual aid, prioritize values of cooperation, equity, self-determination, and democracy, directly putting communities in control of local wealth.
• Inclusive Economy (as a distinct concept from "inclusive growth") is a framework that seeks to address the fundamental causes of inequality, aiming to reorganize the economy with wider ownership and function naturally to produce social and economic justice and prosperity for all.

Other models also have strong inclusive elements:

• Wellbeing Economy focuses on quality of life and human and planetary health, using broader measures of success than GDP to ensure all citizens benefit.
• Doughnut Economics balances human needs (a "social foundation" including food, water, housing, etc., for all people) with planetary boundaries, inherently requiring an inclusive approach to meet everyone's needs.
• Community Wealth Building is highly inclusive at a local level, focusing on empowering local communities and people by keeping wealth within the area and creating locally-controlled, sustainable economies.
• Universal Basic Services (UBS), by providing essential public services like healthcare, education, and transport to all citizens according to need, offer a substantial "social wage" that is highly redistributive and inclusive.

Ultimately, the most inclusive models are those that fundamentally embed democratic decision-making and equitable distribution of resources and power into their core structures, such as Participatory Economics and the Solidarity Economy.

This section has been AI generated: AI Overview from a Google search, 21:51, 6 January 2026 (UTC). Question/prompt: How could a wellbeing economy agenda be more inclusive and supportive of the action and agency of community based and led economic initiatives?

A wellbeing economics agenda can become more inclusive and supportive of community-based and led economic initiatives by incorporating several key strategies:

Redefining Value and Success

• Move Beyond GDP: The agenda must explicitly redefine "value" to prioritize social, environmental, and community well-being outcomes over mere economic output or profit maximization. This means adopting metrics that measure community resilience, health, social connection, and ecological sustainability, making these the primary indicators of success.
• Acknowledge Non-Monetary Contributions: It should recognize and value the significant economic contributions that are often non-monetary, such as volunteer work, caregiving, bartering systems, and the preservation of local ecosystems. Valuing this "foundational economy" validates community-led initiatives that operate outside the conventional market sphere.

Shifting Power Dynamics and Decision-Making

• Decentralized Governance: The agenda should advocate for decentralized economic governance structures. This involves shifting decision-making power away from national or corporate centers towards local communities, giving them the agency to set their own priorities and design economic models that fit their specific contexts and cultures.
• Participatory Budgeting: It should promote mechanisms like participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies that allow community members to directly influence how public funds are allocated, ensuring that resources are directed towards initiatives they deem most important for their collective well-being.
• Co-design of Policies: Rather than top-down policy creation, the agenda should mandate the co-design of economic policies with community stakeholders, ensuring that initiatives are relevant, culturally appropriate, and have local buy-in.

Providing Tailored Financial and Resource Support

• Flexible Funding Models: It should support funding models that are accessible to smaller, community-based organizations (e.g., co-operatives, social enterprises, community land trusts). This means offering patient capital, grants, and blended finance that prioritize long-term social impact over quick financial returns.
• Capacity Building and Technical Support: Beyond money, the agenda needs to include dedicated support for capacity building, providing access to essential skills, training, and technical expertise (e.g., legal, financial management, digital literacy) that help community initiatives thrive.
• Access to Assets: The agenda could facilitate community ownership of assets, such as land, energy infrastructure, or local businesses, through measures like the Community Right to Buy. This provides a stable economic base and keeps wealth circulating within the community.

Creating a Supportive Ecosystem

• Network Building: The agenda should actively foster networks and peer-to-peer learning opportunities among different community initiatives. This allows them to share knowledge, resources, and influence policy together.
• Local Procurement and Circular Economies: It should promote policies that encourage public institutions (hospitals, schools, local governments) to procure goods and services locally. This strengthens local supply chains and supports community enterprises, fostering a more resilient and circular economy.

By embedding these principles, a wellbeing economics agenda can serve as a powerful framework that not only acknowledges but actively empowers community-led economic initiatives, making the overall economic system more equitable, sustainable, and genuinely focused on the well-being of all people.

local information and news can be found, or shared, via our many location pages

See also: Community involvement, Ethical consumerism, Free stuff, Localism, Sharing, Transition Network, Open Source Ecology, Commons, Green New Deal

External links

• Wikipedia: Basic income, Consumer cooperative, Degrowth, Ecological economics, Grameen Bank, Maker culture ^W, Maker Faire ^W, Mondragon Corporation, Organization workshop ^W, Post growth, Social finance, Solidarity economy

Creative commons

• Center for the advancement of the steady state economy, CASSE
• New Economy Working Group
• OuiShare A French-based non-for-profit aiming to connect efforts within the Sharing or Collaborative Economy to create a global network of collaborators. Having started in France in 2012, they have spread to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. ^W
• Real Economy Lab, interactive platform where the cumulative knowledge, aims, and resources of the new economy movement can be drawn together in order to seek common ground and drive coordinated action

Other

• Schumacher Center for a New Economics, added 15:11, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
• Grassroots Economics, "non-profit foundation that seeks to empower marginalized communities to take charge of their own livelihoods and economic future. We focus on community development through economic empowerment and community currency programs. Beneficiaries of our programs include small businesses and people living in informal settlements as well as rural areas." added 15:44, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
• Econ4
• Grassroots Economic Organizing
• The Preservation Institute
• Slow Money, movement to organize investors and donors to steer new sources of capital to small food enterprises, organic farms, and local food systems. Slow Money takes its name from the Slow Food movement.[2] Slow Money aims to develop the relationship between capital markets and place, including social capital and soil fertility.[3] Slow Money is supporting the grass-roots mobilization of investors through network building, convening, publishing, and incubating intermediary strategies and structures of funding. It is a 501(c)3 non-profit based in Boulder, Colorado ^W