Prosperity Without Growth – UK report

Posted on | February 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

The think tank closely related to the British Government, the Sustainable Development Commission, has published the report “Prosperity Without Growth”, analysing the central role that economic growth has taken in our economy and the opportunity to improve sustainability by reducing the pressure to maintain economic growth.

While this is an important issue, and the report is knowledgeable and interesting, we need to keep one thing in mind:

We don’t have any large scale experience in modern times of other economic systems. Economic growth is built into the very fabric of our economic systems, currencies and financial markets. Changing the economic system by taking away the economic growth imperative may be a tempting proposition, but from a change management perspective, it is a much more daunting undertaking than transforming energy systems to renewable fuels and reduced dependence on energy for economic life.

We need to see the large scale transformation of energy related systems as the overall priority over the next decades. We need to develop change management principles for how to accomplish this reasonably fast and at a reasonable cost.

Based on the knowledge that we have of alternative economic systems, we could not even begin to plan the implementation of a system that will work without economic growth. Much less could we develop a workable process for the transformation from our present system to a new system. This type of project would be much more complex and risky than the change to the Euro in Europe, which did not involve any tinkering with the mechanisms of the economic system in itself.

GET Institute argues: We need to stay focused on achieveing Global Energy Transformation within the systems that we currently possess. Transforming both energy systems, and economic systems at the same time will prove too complex and difficult to manage. Unless we absolutely have to combine the two, we should avoid it.

http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/prosperity_without_growth_report.pdf

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