A SUFFICIENCY VISION FOR AN ECOLOGICALLY CONSTRAINED WORLD
Owing to the limits of eco-efficiency and the need to liberate environmental space for the global poor, new policy instruments should be designed to bring about ecological fair sharing between countries and a new economy based on the concept of sufficiency.
EU economic policies should pursue an equitable downscaling of Member States’ environmental ‘throughput’, namely the rate at which they use energy and raw materials. Since a constant increase in the transformation of natural resources into goods and services is ingrained in our current economic system, this downscaling challenges the dominant economic belief in the feasibility and desirability of infinite economic growth. This implies a new direction for societies, one in which they will organise and live differently from today.
The sufficiency transformation would mean that people work fewer hours in paid employment, share jobs and services, and lead more social and less materialistic lifestyles. Although economic activity would be more localised, the state would have an important role both to limit material and energy use, and redistribute income and wealth. Many new policy ideas for an economic paradigm shift have been developed and discussed at the academic and grassroots levels in recent years. And finally NGOs have started talking about this too with Friends of the Earth Europe recently publishing the booklet Sufficiency: moving beyond the gospel of eco-efficiency which includes several policy proposals to advance the debate towards a post-growth economy.
Why the economics of enough
We live in a world where more than 2 billion people still live on less than 3.10 international dollars per day. While the global share of people living under this poverty line has been in steady declinefor the past few decades, there is very little hope that this trend can continue without a change of paradigm.
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