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To achieve the Doughnut, countries need to abandon economic growth. Doing so would be a declaration of war on the global economy.

At first glance, the Doughnut hardly resembles the beginning of a global revolution. Named after a simple treat, its diagram appears mundane, almost sterile. Most of its advocates are academics, activists, and local government leaders focused on meeting needs within environmental limits. Yet beneath this calm exterior lies a radical proposition.

If any country truly embraced Doughnut Economics, it would disrupt political and economic systems worldwide, creating a potential shockwave that could destabilise the global status quo.

Kate Raworth’s model may look benign, but its implications are no less revolutionary than Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Marx argued that history progressed through distinct stages, making it all but inevitable that the working classes in one country would rise up and replace capitalism with socialism, setting in motion a domino effect where the rest of the world would follow suit.

The same logic applies here — except this time, the rupture would arise not from class struggle, but from the global pursuit of sustainability.

Understanding the Doughnut

The Doughnut is a vision of a sustainable society. It combines two boundaries.

The inner boundary is the social foundation people need to live a fulfilling life. Below that foundation are shortfalls, where people lack access to essentials — such as food, water, energy, education, housing, healthcare, etc.

The outer ring comprises nine planetary boundaries. These are ecological limits essential to maintaining current environmental conditions.

The more pressure we place on a boundary — for example, by increasing carbon emissions, which leads to climate change— the greater the risk that it breaches the ecological ceiling.

Breaching the ecological ceiling leads to overshoot. Overshoot increases the risk of the boundary changing. The further a boundary overshoots the safe space, the greater the chance it transforms the environment into a new, unknown (and likely hostile) state.

Between the boundaries is a safe and just space, the sweet spot in between where human needs are met within planetary limits.

While the Doughnut’s vision of sustainability may not seem revolutionary, achieving it would require fundamentally dismantling capitalism and redesigning the global economy. In other words, true sustainability cannot be achieved within the current economic system. Here’s why.

The global north

The critical starting point is that different parts of the world are at very different stages of development. This leads to a very different picture when we measure current impacts against the Doughnut.

When assessing impacts in the global north, we find that countries such as the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and Japan have achieved high living standards. This means that on the inside of the doughnut, they’re close to meeting every social foundation. But on the outside, they’re ecological disasters.

All of the planetary boundaries are being breached because high living standards are fuelled by consumption.

We can’t meet current living standards in an ecologically safe way. Yet, the perception is that the more someone consumes, the higher their living standard, which enhances well-being and happiness. The problem is that the more we consume, the greater our environmental impact.

The global south

The picture looks very different in the global south, where countries like India, Indonesia, and Nigeria sit well below ecological thresholds in many areas.

Their citizens consume far less, but also fall short on nearly every social indicator. On the inside of the doughnut, there are massive gaps in health, education, income, infrastructure, and security.

Worse, even these lower-income countries often overshoot multiple environmental boundaries. In other words, they don’t meet needs but still degrade ecosystems.

The global south is home to billions of people whose needs are not being met. Rightly, these countries are pursuing the same development path as the global north, because it has been proven to work.

But if they follow that path — fossil-fuelled industrialisation, mass consumption, carbon-intensive lifestyles, meat-heavy diets — it will accelerate overshoot rapidly.

The development paradox

This is why the implications of achieving the Doughnut are so radical. We are currently faced with a development crisis. Our current approach to social development creates a ‘just’ space at the cost of creating a dangerously unsafe environment.

By raising living standards now, we undermine future generations’ ability to maintain them — because we’re destroying the environment they need to survive, let alone thrive.

The challenge we face looks even worse when broken down by country. Not one country is meeting human needs within planetary boundaries. Not one country is living sustainably.

Countries like Sweden and Finland often rank high on sustainabilitymetrics. But they overshoot planetary limits by huge margins. While they appear ‘green’, the very high living standards enjoyed in the Nordics are the result of importing goods and services and outsourcing the environmental harm to the poorer nations that produce them.

It’s the same model followed by all countries in the global north — internalise the social benefits, externalise the environmental costs.

This suggests we need a different development model. But no such model exists. We don’t know whether theory can translate into practice when it comes to a sustainable development path because we’ve never tried.

But we’re going to have to because overshoot can’t be sustained for long without consequences. Eventually, we’ll trigger tipping points that lead to devastating changes.

Given the risks, change is not an option; it’s a requirement to ensure humanity’s survival. The scale of the changes we need suggests a global transformation of our political, economic and cultural systems is required to achieve sustainability.

But you can’t just transform highly entrenched, complex global systems.

Taking the leap

The characteristics of overshoot make the challenge even harder. Changes aren’t happening in some linear, gradual process, which means it doesn’t feel like we’re in the midst of a global emergency. If normality is being maintained, what possible reason would there be to change anything?

Any calls for radical change feel disproportionate to the problem being faced. But, naturally, as soon as the emergency feels like one, we’re done for. It will be way too late to adapt.

Let’s imagine a scenario in which a political party in Costa Rica (one of the world’s most sustainable countries, at the top left of the graph above) elects a government on a wave of populist support, determined to create a sustainable society.

As soon as they’re in office, what policies would they need to implement?

At the heart of the current development path is economic growth. Achieving growth requires increasing overall economic output. To do that, we need to produce more goods and services than the year before. This requires more energy and resources. In other words, growth is incompatible with achieving a safe space, because growth increases overshoot.

The number one policy change Costa Rica would need to implement, therefore, is a shift to a post-growth economy. This involves abandoning the pursuit of increasing GDP as the primary economic goal and replacing it with improving human well-being, social equity, and ecological health.

Abandoning growth would influence everything from employment to social goals, welfare, and pensions. It would influence the roles of government and the private sector. It would influence the distribution of wealth and how we socialise.

In other words, it would influence our very reality.

Now, imagine a few years down the line, Costa Rica is making significant progress against the Doughnut. Inequality is down, crime rates are down, poverty rates are down; happiness and well-being are up.

And it all comes without growth.

Policy makers, economists, and politicians flock to see this new economic model in action. It increases in popularity as social media is abuzz with excitement about what can be achieved without growth.

There is another way. And it works. People would think.

Costa Rica would become a beacon for how the Doughnut can be achieved in practice. But one small Central American country could only do so much. The environment is connected globally, so sustainability can only truly be realised if every country meets its needs within environmental limits.

And that is why the Doughnut is so revolutionary. Achieving it requires every country to shift to a post-growth economy.

The real controversy

The consequences of giving up growth are monumental. National debts help explain why.

Every (and I mean every) country has a national debt. Countries borrow debt at interest from lenders. The fact that countries pay interest on their debts creates a growth imperative in the global economic system, as growth is needed to finance those payments.

Interest on US debt in 2025 was an enormous $1.2 trillion. Imagine the US abandons economic growth. If the economy stops growing, debt will increase as a proportion of dwindling GDP.

The US will then face a choice: make massive cuts to public services to reduce spending, or stop servicing its debt repayments.

Given the whole point of giving up growth is to increase human needs, the former option of brutal cuts is likely to undermine needs, so the reality is there is no choice. A country abandoning growth is essentially abandoning its debt because debt repayments can’t be repaid.

US interest payments have soared as the national debt has increased. Source: US Treasury

By abandoning growth, a country severs its umbilical cord to the global economy. In essence, giving up growth is tantamount to declaring economic war — a prospect arguably more destabilising than any threat posed by terrorist organisations or despotic leaders.

To put it another way, it’s politically, socially and economically unviable that a country can, or would be allowed, to abandon growth.

It’s unsavoury to acknowledge, but our path is predetermined. Growth will be maintained, and overshoot will increase. And therefore, it’s a matter of time before we’re faced with a global emergency of incomprehensible proportions because capitalism has become maladaptive. The better it works, the stronger it reinforces its own destruction.

Counterintuitively, therein lies hope.

Once overshoot triggers dramatic environmental changes, it will translate into wave after wave of social crisis.

Countries won’t voluntarily abandon growth; they will be forced to give it up because overwhelming environmental change will make it impossible to sustain.

Without growth, capitalism and the current global economic system collapse. We’ll then be left with a vacuum that will need replacing.

That’s when advocates of post-growth economics will have an opportunity to redesign sustainable societies. Achieving the Doughnut is possible, but it would be foolhardy to think that getting there will be smooth sailing. What’s clear is that achieving a sustainable society is, by quite some distance, the hardest challenge humanity has ever faced. That will make it all the more satisfying when we eventually get there.