A Hole in the Middle? The challenge of downscaling Doughnut Economics as a local development framework

The extraordinary growth of the world economy has dramatically transformed the context within which all humans live. It also introduces several interrelated challenges: providing for the basic development needs of people, reducing global inequality, and avoiding further degradation of the biosphere. Numerous frameworks have been developed in recent years to address these challenges, including Doughnut Economics, a sustainable development framework that combines several development indicators of human wellbeing with the planetary boundaries to define a “safe and just space” as the goal for global development. In this study, I present a concrete quantitative approach to operationalize Doughnut Economics for use at the local level and within a high-income context, the United States, to address the question: How are U.S. cities and counties performing on the social and ecological indicators of the Doughnut? I collected social and ecological data across 27 U.S. localities and find widespread variation in levels of social shortfall and greenhouse gas emissions between them. My findings suggest that previous Doughnut Economics research at the national level obscures patterns of intra-country social shortfall and inequality, underscoring the need for ongoing local data collection and analysis. I integrate my findings with a comparative case study of Amsterdam’s local application of Doughnut Economics to identify key challenges of applying a global development framework at the local level. My discussion of the shortcomings of these different methodological approaches to downscaling Doughnut Economics underscore how methodological diversity and triangulation are needed to effectively formulate and evaluate local policies based on Doughnut Economics.