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Review
. 2025 Jan;9(1):e62-e78.
doi: 10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00310-3.

Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries

Giorgos Kallis  1 , Jason Hickel  2 , Daniel W O'Neill  3 , Tim Jackson  4 , Peter A Victor  5 , Kate Raworth  6 , Juliet B Schor  7 , Julia K Steinberger  8 , Diana Ürge-Vorsatz  9
Affiliations
Free article
Review

Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries

Giorgos Kallis et al. Lancet Planet Health. 2025 Jan.
Free article

Erratum in

Abstract

There are increasing concerns that continued economic growth in high-income countries might not be environmentally sustainable, socially beneficial, or economically achievable. In this Review, we explore the rapidly advancing field of post-growth research, which has evolved in response to these concerns. The central idea of post-growth is to replace the goal of increasing GDP with the goal of improving human wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Key advances discussed in this Review include: the development of ecological macroeconomic models that test policies for managing without growth; understanding and reducing the growth dependencies that tie social welfare to increasing GDP in the current economy; and characterising the policies and provisioning systems that would allow resource use to be reduced while improving human wellbeing. Despite recent advances in post-growth research, important questions remain, such as the politics of transition, and transformations in the relationship between the Global North and the Global South.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests GK, JH, and JKS acknowledge support by the European Research Council funding for the REAL project (grant number 101071647). GK and JH's work is also supported by the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence (CEX2019–374 000940-M) grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. DWO acknowleges support by the EU in the framework of the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement numbers 101094211 (ToBe) and 101137914 (MAPS). TJ and PAV acknowledge support from the ESRC (ES/M010163/1 and ES/T014881/1) and Laudes Foundation. All other authors declare no competing interests.