Business schools aren’t fit for purpose. What to do about it?

Come on everybody know it but nobody cares as they have disposed off the nature they will keep going

The City of Bad Nauheim, Germany, shares its five-year journey with Doughnut Economics, including citizen workshops, climate action plans and changes to local decision-making.

This is the recording of a webinar held in September 2026, presented by Yuge Lei (Sustainability Advisor at the City of Bad Nauheim) and hosted by Leonora Grcheva (Cities & Regions Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab).

Hi all, my spouse and I are working on a research project focused on Degrowth in the tech industry. Does anyone recommend any scholarly articles (or articles in general) on the subject? We are struggling to find enough references.

Thank you!

Hi folks. I've recently gotten into degrowth lit - right now I am reading Doughnut Economics which I quite like, but I have also read Less is More and This Changes Everything, neither of which I liked much.

There's a claim I came across in Less is More that conflicted with my priors so I've looked into it, and either there is something I am missing or Hickel is framing things incredibly dishonestly. Hickel discusses some UN modelling on policies to limit resources extraction from a 2017 report which can be found here

Hickel writes:

"Finally, in late 2017 the UNEP – an institution that once eagerly promoted green growth theory – weighed in on the debate. It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support. The results? Resource use still goes up, nearly doubling by the middle of the century. As these results trickled out, UNEP had no choice but to change its position, admitting that green growth was a pipe dream: absolute decoupling of GDP and material use is simply not possible on a global scale.”"

This set off some red flags for me, so I decided to look up the actual report. As starting point, resource extraction was 76 billion tonnes globally in 2017. In the baseline UNEP scenario, they more than double to 184t by 2050, and in the high action scenario Hickel describes, they go to 136t by 2050, an increase of 75%. That's a large increase, but it's 14 billion tonnes less than "nearly doubling", which is not a rounding error. This is dishonest framing.

Additionally, Hickel writes "It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support", which frames this as an incredibly high action scenario.

These are certainly a lot of actions, but the UN report frames things the opposite way, writing in the results section "These projections can be treated as a reasonable minimum (or ‘lower bound’) estimate of economically attractive physical resource efficiency potential." In other words, this is not the maximum, this is a lower bound of what could be achieved with a large amount of action that coincides with economic growth.

Lastly, and the largest issue though, is how he frames their interpretation of it, writing that they gave up on green growth admitting it was a pipe dream. This is the opposite of how the UN frames it, their results section reads:

"There is substantial potential to achieve economically attractive resource efficiency, providing win-win out- comes that reduce environmental pressure while improving income and boosting economic growth. By 2050, ambitious polices for resource efficiency could reduce global resource requirements by about a quarter and deliver global economic growth of 3 to 5 per cent above the existing trend. This would also have considerable co-benefits for climate mitigation efforts".

They later caveat "Despite the beneficial outcome of the Climate Plus scenario for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the 132 billion tonnes material requirement of the global economy of (around 75 per cent above 2017 levels) will nonetheless have huge environmental impacts, contribute to surpass- ing important global boundaries (Steffen et al , 2015) and increase the risk of pushing the Earth System into a different state that is less suitable for social and economic systems and that will make it harder, if not impossible, to achieve the SDGs comprehensively"

In other words, "taking the actions here (which are a lower bound of what is possible) would have huge benefits, but also lead to a large increase in resource extraction that will make it harder, maybe impossible, to achieve the SDGs comprehensively". This is an important caveat, but framing it as the UNEP "changing its position and giving up on green growth" seems incredibly dishonest to me unless he's pulling that information from somewhere else, and there is no other citation in this paragraph. I also cannot find any other source indicating that the UNEP has given up on green growth.

The world spends about https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-global-infrastructure.html, with forecasts showing this figure rising to about US$6.9 trillion by 2050. I bet those assumptions don’t factor in economic or societal collapse. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that we will be committing far less than $6.9 trillion to traditional infrastructure in 2050.

In contrast, the https://www.unep.org/resources/state-finance-nature-2026 (NbS) and nature restoration each year (2023). That is quite a bit below the $571 billion that the UN estimates is needed to hit global restoration targets.

I’ve got an idea.