PUBLICATIONS

This report reviews the relationships between the different aspects of wellbeing, productivity, and productivity growth. It is the culmination of a desk-based evidence review, survey, and a mapping workshop held with experts from backgrounds including psychology, sociology, economics, and design. The focus is on wellbeing and labour productivity.

This article emphasises the tension between environmentalists’ radical ambitions on the one hand, and pragmatic organisational considerations on the other. The paper suggests that competing arguments about (de-)politicisation can be reconciled first by considering that ‘the political’ has at least three different dimensions, and second by taking account of how activists reflexively navigate the different challenges posed by each of these dimensions in their strategising.

Rapid decarbonisation of the UK energy sector demands high levels of investments into low carbon energy infrastructure, which are currently not undertaken at required scale. In a new paper, CUSP researchers Sarah Hafner, Aled Jones and colleagues explore a theoretical framework for investigation of and possible solutions to key investment barriers, drawing on a review of academic literature and policy reports, and interviews conducted with financial investors and experts.

This report describes the integration of mapping methods and desk-based research used in the ESRC funded Powering Productivity research project. The project applied a mixed method combination of thematic literature review with expert elicitation within a participatory systems and knowledge mapping process to survey and visualise the evidence base and the links between 1) energy and productivity and 2) wellbeing and productivity.

It is clear that the larger the economy becomes, the more difficult it is to decouple that growth from its material impacts… This isn’t to suggest that decoupling itself is either unnecessary or impossible. On the contrary, decoupling well-being from material throughput is vital if societies are to deliver a more sustainable prosperity—for people and for the planet. (This article is posted on the Science website).

This working paper presents a stock-flow consistent (SFC) simulation model of a national economy, calibrated on the basis of Canadian data. LowGrow SFC describes the evolution of the Canadian economy in terms of six financial sectors whose behaviour is based on ‘stylised facts’ in the Post-Keynesian tradition. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, the results indicate the feasibility of improved environmental and social outcomes, even as the growth rate declines to zero.

What are the capacities of the state to facilitate a comprehensive sustainability transition? This paper argues that structural barriers akin to an invisible ‘glass ceiling’ are inhibiting any such transformation. First, the structure of state imperatives does not allow for the addition of an independent sustainability imperative without major contradictions. Second, the imperative of legitimation is identified as a crucial component of the glass ceiling.

In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of planning and conducting the International CYCLES project involving photo elicitation with young people in Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. While some issues such as varying access to technology for taking and sharing photos and diverse cultural sensitivities around the use of photography were anticipated in advance, others were more unexpected.

What might break the ‘glass ceiling’ that has so far prevented a deep sustainability transformation? In this paper, Marit Hammond considers the cultural dimension of such a transformation, adding nuance to the debate around democracy and sustainability.

Despite the development of the environmental state, climate change is accelerating. The concept of the ‘glass ceiling’—denoting an unexplained barrier, impeding the state from using its powers effectively to mitigate threats that it acknowledges should be addressed—has been put forward to account for this. In this paper, a structural account of this phenomenon is advanced with a view on the ‘growth imperative’.

Robert Shiller’s new book probes how social behaviour trumps statistics in determining the fate of economies—Tim Jackson weighs it up. (This article is posted on the Nature website).

There is growing awareness that business and investor plans need to better address the growing physical and regulatory risks arising from climate change and climate policy. This policy briefing is discussing how businesses and investors can improve their understanding of these risks and ensure this results in better informed decision making.

Earlier in 2019, the UK Treasury Select Committee launched an inquiry into the decarbonisation of the UK economy and green finance, set out to scrutinise the role of the Treasury department, regulators and financial services firms in supporting the UK Government’s climate change commitments. Drawing on recent CUSP reports, Tim Jackson, Aled Jones and the Aldersgate Group submitted evidence.

It has been posited that the health and social care sector may become a ‘sweet spot’ of good work, in that it will provide plentiful, good quality jobs that are associated with low environmental impacts. To explore this hypothesis, this paper addresses two questions: to what extent will jobs in the health and social care sector be displaced through technological advances such as in artificial intelligence (AI) and robots? And to what extent may the remaining jobs provide ‘good’ work?

The Climate Innovation Insights Series are analytical pieces that draw lessons from a diverse set of case studies on pioneering projects and start-ups in the EIT Climate-KIC community. The third collection is co-edited by Geraldine Brennan, and reflects the recognition that the circular economy agenda and low carbon agendas are interlinked and mutually reinforcing—making scaling up the circular economy an urgent imperative.

While the consumerist approach to what living well can mean permeates traditional media, the extent to which it appears in people’s own depictions of the good life is unclear. Using multimodal discourse analysis, this article uses a sample of posts tagged #goodlife and variants collected on Instagram to explore which understandings of the good life can be found on the platform, and what their wider implications in the consumer society are.

The so-called ‘creative economy’ model has been one of the central tenets of urban restructuring over the past forty years. This paper focuses on the ‘Ten Streets’ redevelopment project, a recent and ongoing effort to construct a ‘creative quarter’ on Liverpool’s North Shore Dock that the city’s mayor, Joe Anderson, has declared will ‘redefine Liverpool’s economy over the next thirty years’.

Since its development in the 1930s, GDP has been the most widely used measure of the health and progress of an economy, being adopted as the principal policy objective of countless national and international bodies across the world. Its many shortcomings as a measure of progress are well documented, and the alternative indicators of progress developed in response to these shortcomings have been diverse and numerous. This paper synthesises the literature, highlighting the importance of context and purpose in determining what makes a ‘good’ indicator.

This briefing paper summarises the dilemma associated with using mainstream, macroeconomic models to guide disruptive, transformative change such as those that might occur under ‘deep decarbonisation’: a rapid transition to a net-zero carbon economy. Some form of macro-economic modelling framework is essential to enable policy-makers to exercise short- and long-term fiscal responsibility. Incremental models based on historical behaviour, however, are a poor guide to outcomes under circumstances of disruptive change.

Journal paper by CUSP researchers Robert Pasqualino, Aled Jones and WU colleague Irene Monasterolo, analysing impact scenarios of exogenous price, production, and subsidies shocks in the food and/or energy sector. By merging structures of the World3, Money, and Macroeconomy Dynamics (MMD) and the Energy Transition and the Economy (ETE) models, this work presents a closed system global economy model, where growth is driven by population growth and government debt.

CUSP briefing addressing the question of when the UK should aim for zero carbon emissions. In it, Prof Tim Jackson is making the case for a (fair) zero carbon target of 2030, calling for a policy strategy not only on zero carbon targets, but emission pathways, with a defined level of negative emission technologies. It is notable that reduction rates high enough both to lead to zero carbon (on a consumption basis) by 2050 and to remain within the carbon budget require absolute reductions of more than 95% of carbon emissions as early as 2030.

The RSA Food, Farming & Countryside Commission with CUSP director Tim Jackson as Commissioner and Chair of the Research Advisory Group have published their final report, calling for radical 10-year plan to transition to sustainable food system with more government support for healthy produce.

This paper seeks to illuminate a ‘green populism’, using Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the tension between science and politics. In Arendt’s account, Western philosophy and science is predicated on a rejection of the mortal realm of politics, in search of eternal laws of nature. However, the pressing mortality of nature has pushed it back into the political realm, turning it into a political actor in its own right, Will Davies argues. Where nature itself is defined by its mortality, environmentalism and political action acquire a common logic, that could fuel a participatory, egalitarian, green populism.

A multi-country collaboration report, with contributions from CUSP researchers Joost de Moor and Brian Doherty. The team of social scientists from universities across Europe organised a survey of the global Fridays for the Future strike events on March 15. The team surveyed protesters in 13 cities in nine European countries using the same research design to collect data, following the well-established protest survey methodology.

In his essay for CUSP, Simon Caney argues that existing political systems are resolutely focused on the short-term and that this both harms current generations and is leading us to bequeath a deeply unfair and dysfunctional world to our descendants. To address this, we need to re-imagine ways of organising our political life to make the ‘future’ salient and visible, to jolt us out of our fixation on the present, and to induce us to look ahead and give the ‘future’ its due.

As ecological disaster looms, and states scramble to fend it off, the idea of external constraint, of ‘making’ people and firms behave sustainably, is often touted as the only way forward. In her essay, Isabelle Ferreras is making the case that it’s not less democracy that is needed, but more. She argues for the democratisation of firms as a key component of the sustainable prosperity agenda. A radically democratic conception is needed, one that takes into account goals of both efficiency and justice.

Our understanding of the world is not a spectator sport, but more like an active ingredient in societal renewal, Jonathan Rowson writes in his essay. The premise of this essay is that we need to reconsider Bildung today: to make it about our responsibility for and participation in an evolving process of social maturation that reimagines culture, technology, institutions and policies for the greater good.

The finance sector has engaged with policy development processes around climate solutions for well over a decade, with the aim of overcoming barriers to investment. In this paper we analyse practice-based policy reports, highlighting key barriers to such investing.

Tim Jackson contributing to a new edited collection by the European Think tank DiEM25: A Vision for Europe. “With contributions from some of the world’s foremost thinkers, artists and politicians covering the full spectrum of concerns for the future of the Union, A Vision for Europe presents realistic and viable alternatives to the mainstream barrage of dreadful prospects—a true vision for Europe.”

To combat climate change, carbon emissions must be radically reduced. Technological change alone will not be sufficient: lifestyles must also change. Whereas mainstream strategies generally address the challenge of reducing carbon emissions through reviewing consumption, approaching it through the lens of how we use our time, in particular, leisure time, is a promising complementary avenue.

In her essay for CUSP, Professor of Theology Celia Deane-Drummond explores an approach to the meaning of the good life and environmental decision-making that takes account of the human capacity for practical wisdom. Through a distinct theological lens, she is exploring how we might begin to re-channel and re-orientate our basic human self-interested desires.

Challenges to sustainable prosperity cannot be addressed successfully through a top-down approach when this enjoys no political support, nor will simply letting people take care of their own environment do the trick. The problem requires us, instead, to appreciate the negative externalities we impose on distant, unknown others and to be politically motivated by the aim to avoid that.

Why do we no longer trust experts, facts and statistics? Why has politics become so fractious and warlike? What caused the populist political upheavals of recent years? How can the history of ideas help us understand our present? In this far-reaching exploration of our new political landscape, CUSP co-investigator Will Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world.

Sluggish recovery in the wake of the financial crisis has revived discussion of a ‘secular stagnation’. These conditions have been blamed for rising inequality and political instability. Tim Jackson contests this view, pointing instead to a steadfast refusal to address the ‘post-growth challenge’. (An earlier draft of the article was published as CUSP Working Paper No 12.)

Revised second edition of Peter Victor’s influential book. Human economies are overwhelming the regenerative capacity of the planet, this book explains why long-term economic growth is infeasible, and why, especially in advanced economies, it is also undesirable. Simulations developed with Tim Jackson, show that managing without growth is a better alternative.

In this paper, Simon Mair, Angela Druckman and Tim Jackson explore how paying a living wage in global supply chains might affect employment and carbon emissions: Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 13.