Earth for all: Five policy turnarounds for a sustainable world

The review

In 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows and their co-authors Jørgen Randers and William Behrens released The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), a groundbreaking and controversial report to the Club of Rome, warning humanity that 'business as usual' was carrying us towards economic and environmental collapse. It argued for humanity to constrain growth so that we could attain a state of equilibrium – what might now be called a sustainable future. Its message – hotly debated in the newspapers and popular magazines of the time - has reverberated through the decades and given rise to ever more sophisticated assessments of human impact as we move beyond planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023).

Fifty years later, a new report to the Club of Rome, led by its current president Sandrine Dixson-Declève, takes a similar approach but goes much deeper into the nature of the transformations needed to achieve a sustainable future. Framed as 'a survival guide for humanity', Earth for All (Dixson-Decleve et al., 2022) uses the kind of computer modelling pioneered by Limits to Growth to develop a ‘Giant Leap’ scenario. In this scenario, humans deliberately transform our global trajectory by committing to ‘five extraordinary policy turnarounds’: ending poverty; addressing gross inequality; empowering women; making our food system healthy for people and ecosystems; and transitioning to clean energy. It is ‘an aspirational, stubbornly optimistic guide to the future’ (p. 26).

Why the focus on these five turnarounds? The authors do not claim that these are the only issues that we need to work on. Rather, they argue that focused, large-scale investment in these five areas is the minimum required to create sufficient economic momentum to break us out of the destructive pathway first modelled in Limits to Growth and into a new paradigm. Action on these five issues would create the foundation to tackle other key challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and conflict.

This focus on creating economic momentum is important, and something that sets Earth for All apart from most other mainstream speculations on pathways to a sustainable future. All too often, questioning the dominant economic paradigm is seen as taboo. Earth for All explicitly recognises that achieving its five policy turnarounds will require re-programming of our economies to work for both people and the planet. Its commitment to transformation of economic systems was so central to the project that it convened a ‘21st Century Transformational Economics Commission’ to help guide the work, alongside modelling, coordinating and campaigning teams.

The Commission is made up of 41 of the most innovative economic thinkers of our time, committed to exploration of new economic ideas, from wellbeing economics and doughnut economics, to green growth and degrowth.

The book is supported by a series of 15 ‘Deep Dive Papers’ that further explore the necessary transformation of our economic system, on topics such as just transition, energy transformation and regenerative agriculture. Readers of this journal may particularly enjoy Otto Scharmer’s Deep Dive Paper (Scharmer, 2022), where he sketches out a new ecosystem economics paradigm with a primary goal of regenerating living systems and delivering wellbeing for all. Scharmer points to the need for societal learning infrastructures to democratise transformation literacy, advocating for practices that are very consistent with action research for transformations.

Much of the book’s length is taken up with detailed articulation of system change policies that we could implement right now to get started on the five policy turnarounds. They include

• Cancellation of the debt of low-income countries; increased taxation of the rich,

Most of these ideas are not new and face powerful resistance. Nevertheless, the articulation of which of the many policy options are most crucial to get us started on economic transformation is a valuable contribution in a complex world.

Something that didn’t work so well for me in the book was its attempt to make its scenario descriptions more engaging by introducing relatable characters - four girls born on the same day in 2020. While this is potentially an excellent idea to make the book more relatable for a wider audience, the book ends up underusing this device and drifting back into scenario descriptions that are heavy on policy and technology descriptions.

In addition, when the report is making its way through the many policy solutions that are its primary focus, the role of human agency in realising its vision of the future can be a bit lost. It’s not always clear what we readers can do to help. For example, when describing the necessary economic transformation, the report states:

To make this happen, two players wake up: The government takes a stronger role to encourage the shift, and citizens start viewing themselves as a public whose future is worth investing in (p.155).

How exactly does this waking up happen? What can we action researchers do to facilitate it?

Implications for action research

Responding to the questions above is, of course, the reason that a review of Earth for All is appearing in Action Research - because there is much that action researchers can do to support the vision articulated in the book. Much more than just a book, Earth for All is a campaign and a call for action. Its website includes resources for starting conversations with citizens worldwide. These are tools that action researchers can use with communities during research engagements. There are guides for hosting workshops to imagine stories about the future, a card game to help groups rethink priorities, guides for hosting book clubs, and more. No doubt, action researchers can think of other ways to introduce the ideas from Earth for All into existing community engagements and processes and practices to lead from reflection to action.

Earth for All recognises that the changes it proposes will require the support of the majority of citizens. Yet our starting point is one of deep division and political polarization with growing authoritarianism. As such, it sees a key action as bringing citizens together around a common agenda, for example through citizen assemblies that can overcome conflict/polarisation. Here too, action researchers can help. Our deep experience with engaging citizens in participatory conversations can help to get the five big turnarounds on the agenda and our experience in creating 'brave enough’ spaces for dialogue and agonism (or positive conflict) can help to heal or work with division.

At a larger scale, this is a call for action research for transformations to do its part to create momentum behind these five extraordinary policy turnarounds. Many of us are already working on these issues; in 2019 this journal called for such focus among action researchers (Bradbury et al., 2019). If we are serious about achieving the transformation we need to regenerate the planet and deliver social justice for its people, perhaps more of us need to consider refocusing our action research to tackle these five challenges.