Carlota Sanz On Doughnut Economics and Becoming A Regenerative Global Society

Carlota Sanz is the Co-Founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) and DEAL’s Strategic Lead; a role that combines her background in corporate management consultancy with her passion for regenerative economics.

Her work focuses on enabling the concepts of Doughnut Economics to be turned into transformative practice, while ensuring they spread wide and with integrity.

From 2017-19, Carlota was the co-director of Economy for the Common Good UK – an international social movement promoting new economics – during which time she co-designed ECG UK’s start-up strategy and led the design of individual and business membership programmes. She continues to be a member of ECG International’s Knowledge Hub, which continually refines ECG’s standards for business accreditation and transformation.

Prior to this, she worked as a management consultant in the financial sector and studied economic transformation at Schumacher College in the UK.

Carlota discusses discusses how embracing the Doughnut model can lead to positive development globally that is within our planetary boundaries.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in the Doughnut Economy?

[Carlota Sanz] - I studied Economics in Madrid, and I actually worked for my first 10 years as a business consultant within the financial sector. There was a moment, especially when the financial crisis in 2008 was hitting hard, where I became extremely disillusioned with what I was seeing and with the system that was clearly not working. I was seeing that so close to me, as the financial crisis hit really hard in Spain at that point. I started questioning everything that I had learned at university and also while I was working in the corporate world. I realised that I wanted to change things and I wanted to be part of creating the new system.

For me, a big moment was actually when I quit my job in the corporate world five years ago, because this really allowed me to fully get immersed in the ideas of new economic thinking and practice.

I became really active in different movements and initiatives. I was a very active member of Common Good as you just mentioned. In 2008, I went to Schumacher College in the UK and this is the place that really gave me the opportunity to explore and study these new ideas and more importantly to meet changemakers and thinkers all over the world who were also committed to doing similar things. It's there where I met Kate Raworth, my colleague, friend and co-pilot. She's the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways To Think Like A 21st Century Economist. By that time, I was a huge fan of her work, and I think that I met her at a critical moment where the ideas of the book were really ready to jump out of the page and be put into action and practice. We really very quickly realised that we were sharing a vision on how we might want to make this happen. We came together and we co-founded the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, and since then, I've been pretty much immersed in imagining designing and bringing to life this project. It's just been an incredible journey also of exploring what does it really mean to turn a radical idea, like the Doughnut model into transformative action. It's been a journey from what I like to call the dark side to actually putting my energy into really bringing about the change that we need in the world.

What is the theory of Doughnut Economics in a nutshell?

The starting point of Doughnut Economics is that we need a new vision for the 21st century. As funny as it sounds, we offer this vision in the shape of a doughnut. Let's think of the doughnut as a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century, where the aim is to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. The Doughnut consists of two concentric rings, a social foundation to ensure that no one is left falling short on the essentials of life. No one is falling short of water, food, health, education and housing. But at the same time, it's got an ecological ceiling to ensure that humanity does not collectively overshoot the planetary boundaries that protect Earth's life supporting systems.

Between these two sets of boundaries lies a doughnut shaped space, that is both ecologically safe and socially just. It's a space in which humanity can thrive.

If this is the goal, we also need to think what is the new economic mindset that takes us there? Doughnut Economics asks us to think about the big picture and recognise that the economy is embedded within and dependent upon society and the living world.

We need to transform today's degenerative economies into regenerative ones, and divisive economies into more distributive ones.

Lastly, I think that Doughnut Economics also recognises that growth is a healthy stage of life, but nothing grows forever. Things that succeed do so by growing until it's time to thrive instead. For us, it's really important to think of ourselves as being agnostic to growth, and we need economies that are thriving independently of whether they are growing or not.

Carlota, you are a co-founder of DEAL, which is the institution helping entrepreneurs to apply Doughnut Economic principles to spark transformative action. What activities and programs are facilitated by DEAL, and importantly, what are actions that impact led individuals can take now to transform our systems?

DEAL works with change makers in communities, education, cities, businesses and national governments to turn ideas into action. It's important to understand our name, the name is very intentional.

We are about action and we're about learning with and from others through experience with co-creating a new economy. Our main focus is precisely to work with these pioneers in co-creating tools and methodologies that turn the ideas of Doughnut Economics into action, and to make the stories of people who are doing it visible. At the heart of our work lies the community platform, which is a space for these emerging communities of practitioners to connect, learn and be inspired. This platform contains open access tools and stories created both by the DEAL team and by members of the DEAL community. On the one hand, the tools seek to equip everyone who wants to put these concepts into practice. On the other hand, stories of how other people are adopting these ideas and turning them into practice inspires others to make their stories visible, which is for us at DEAL key. In the work that we do, we think that people are often inspired by others just like themselves that are doing things that maybe they thought were not possible. But, just by seeing them doing those things, they then just jump and do them. We're seeing mayors being inspired by other mayors, teachers being inspired by teachers, and community organisers being inspired by other community organisers that are taking these concepts into their work.

We've been working a lot in the space of cities for the past year, so we co-created a framework to downscale the Doughnut to a city level.

Amsterdam was the first city to apply it and embrace publicly that they would use the Doughnut as their conceptual framework to transform the city. We've made this methodology public in our platform, explaining precisely in Amsterdam how we did it initially so that other places can pick it up and adapt it for themselves. Again, what we're seeing is that the inspiration between some places and others is just incredibly powerful. There's already towns and cities around the world that have just followed the example of Amsterdam and are creating their own methodology and their own adaptation. This is also not only in cities, but at different scales. We're seeing neighbourhoods for instance in Birmingham [adopting the Doughnut], as well as regions or nations such as Costa Rica and Curacao working with this methodology.

These are not only led by governments or policy officials, but we are also seeing emerging energy of self-organising groups of individuals that have chosen to come together and start putting these ideas into action. A lot of work that we do is about supporting all of these places and cities that want to engage with the concepts, and we continue to iterate and learn from the practices and tools out there so that this can be put in practice by other change-makers worldwide. You also mentioned individual action, and so I really like to remember the work of brilliant system thinker Donella Meadows, because she says that if we want to change the system, we need to change the paradigm. I think it's really important that we put our energy in bringing this new paradigm into people's minds, and this can be made in many ways.

It can be done by having a conversation for instance, or just questioning many of the things that we've learned, especially regarding our economic system.

I think that just having conversations, joining groups and collectives that are seeking this type of change is something that people can just do right now. More practically, if you're interested in what I've just shared, of course join the DEAL community. There's a lot of people there to connect and to get inspired from that are doing amazing work.

Where do you see opportunities globally for the impact space to expand and effectively address broader social issues over the next five years?

I think there's a huge opportunity in strengthening and deepening what we consider impact and to really be ambitious about the world that we want to have in the future. I think we need to aim fundamentally to transform the dynamics of our economies, and there's a great opportunity right now to create economies that are distributive and regenerative by design. I mentioned this very briefly before, and I wanted to draw on this to what I think really is the opportunity that we have to go one step beyond. In terms of becoming regenerative by design, I think we've inherited degenerative traditional systems that take Earth's materials, make them into stuff, we use them for a while and then we throw them away.

This linear make, use, lose dynamic is what's pushing us over planetary boundaries. I think there's a real opportunity that we have to actually turn this system into a regenerative cyclical system by design.

We can use resources far more carefully, creatively and collectively so that we can live with and within the cycles of the living world. It's about using the resources in a much more careful and collective way. The second opportunity is we need to create economies and dynamics that are distributive by design. We have inherited 20th century economies that have been designed through technology and regulation in a way that tends to concentrate value and opportunity in the hands of a few. This is why in the last decade we are also seeing the number of billionaires in the world going from 1000-2000 people, because opportunity on value is being concentrated in very rich sets of hands. These patterns are being replicated, so what we need is societies that are distributive by design so that the opportunities and values are shared far more equitably with all in society who have co-created it. I think that these are big concepts and are very ambitious, but we have a unique opportunity at this moment to really embrace them and make it real if we really want to have a chance of living in that space that the Doughnut model proposes.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which are creating a positive social change?

I'm going to speak about three, but of course there are many. CIVIC SQUARE in Birmingham is definitely one, they are a locally grounded example. In their community, they are working to reframe, rematch and rebuild the 21st century neighbourhoods with and together with neighbours and residents. A lot of the work that they're doing is about rethinking and remaking what good infrastructure might look like and to reimagine what community participation might look like. I think they're really going above and beyond with our work with them by also implementing the concept of Doughnut Economics at a neighbourhood level.

They are applying it really deep in the way they are designing this neighbourhood in Birmingham, but also in the way they are designing themselves as an organisation.

It's really truly inspiring the work that they're doing. We have a story about them in our platform, so I really invite people to check them out. Secondly, I'm going to mention Preston in the UK as a powerful example of how local governments are using their power of procurement to actually build the fabric and web of local businesses and enterprises within the community. I think it's a great example of how you can use budgets, city administration, hospitals, schools and museums to really enrich that local economic activity in a way that really distributes ownership of businesses in the first place. Finally, I'm going to bring up a business example, a social enterprise I'm a big fan of called Last Forest based in India. It was set up to pioneer sustainable living choices by connecting Indigenous producers within the market. They focus on market opportunities for producer groups and communities that are working on forest and cultural produce that are natural, wild and local. What I find really interesting is they're not only transforming products or services, but they're also transforming the way they're designing themselves as an organisation.

All profits are reinvested in the business with a focus, of course, on growing social impact, investing into other social impact projects or distributing income among producers and staff.

I think they're also going one step beyond and really thinking internally about what this concept of being distributive by design means. I just think also that the sheer energy and take up of these ideas is really inspiring. We're seeing people all over the world getting inspired by each other and making really amazing things happen. I think this is key to what's to happen in the next years.

What books of resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I'm going to list four! One of them is kind of cheating because I've been speaking about it all the time, it's Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways To Think Like A 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth. Small Is Beautiful is the second book, [and it's written] by Erin Schumacher. It was written in the seventies, and I think it's probably the first great book about rethinking economics. He was one of the first modern economists to really reclaim economics for people and for the planet. I think it's been a crucial inspiration to the current movement of new economic thinking and practice that we're seeing right now in the world. I would then say Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows is the classic system thinking book which really helps you think and reflect about what does it mean to intervene in a system.

When you're trying to really change and transform a system, what is the most effective place for you to be intervening? This has really inspired DEAL and help contextualise a lot of the work that we're doing.

Lastly, I would recommend The Framework of Three Horizons by Bill Sharp, we are big fans at DEAL of this framework. It's a framework that invites you to ask yourself when you're putting a disruptive idea out there in the world, like the Doughnut for example, how do we make sure that it gets harnessed to bring about that new economy that we want to create, rather than being captured and co-opted by the old economy and the old system that we're trying to prevent? This has also really been crucial to the work that we're doing, because at DEAL, we are putting ideas out there in the commons and we are inviting people to take them up and make them their own with a lot of openness. But of course, we need to make sure that they're not co-opted or greenwashed.

For us, the balance between openness and integrity has always been very important in how we're designing ourselves. This framework has been incredibly inspiring, and I know that many people love it when they see it. If you want to know a bit more about this framework, then the book of Transformative Innovation by Graham Lester talks about the framework very much in detail. I definitely invite you to check that book out as well.