How the Doughnut is reshaping Melbourne: Pathways to a safe and just future
It’s been almost a decade since Kate Raworth published Doughnut Economics, permanently shifting the way we think about the purpose of our economy. As we mark the release of Doughnut 3.0, RM’s Systems Lab Director, Alison Whitten, reflects on how the Doughnut continues to shape Regen Melbourne’s work.
Five years ago, Melbourne was deep in pandemic-induced lockdown and the future of the city felt unknown. Sitting at home, I received a curious email from a colleague. Attached was the just-released City Portrait for Amsterdam, which provided a vision for the city that centred on social and ecological wellbeing – the earliest example of a city “downscaling the Doughnut.”
It was the first I’d heard of Doughnut Economics, and I was intrigued. I bought a copy of Kate Raworth’s foundational book and started to get a sense for the model, which implores us to look at the economy as being in service to social and environmental wellbeing, rather than the other way around. The Doughnut goes beyond the typical “do more better” frame to show how social and ecological objectives are often in tension – we can’t just remain on our current trajectory and expect the planet to support us. This was obvious to us in Victoria at the time, where the double whammy of the 2019/20 Black Summer fires and COVID-19 reminded us how fragile our place really is.
“We can’t just remain on our current trajectory and expect the planet to support us.”
There was something in this reframing of economic purpose that made particular sense as Melbourne was trying to land on a new post-pandemic identity. Before long, I was starting conversations with new virtual friends and collaborators. We began to explore what it could look like for the Doughnut to guide an integrated response to the pandemic and climate emergency in Melbourne.
The world has changed dramatically since 2020. This seems like an obvious statement, but it’s still overwhelming to consider how much has happened in that time. Sitting in lockdown, I impatiently hoped that the change we'd see off the back of a global pandemic would be for the better – the momentum of a green and just recovery felt palpable. We weren’t going to waste this crisis, we couldn’t afford to. But the economic and political forces of the preceding decades were stronger, and our broader systems were ready to kick back into gear as soon as enough people were vaccinated.
Our return to “normal” didn’t erase the need for change. And it didn’t entirely subdue the possibilities for a more regenerative future, which felt so clear during lockdowns. The growing familiarity with the Doughnut is a great signal of this. Interest in Doughnut Economics has evolved into a community that spans the globe. We have connected with peers in cities from Grenoble to Nairobi, and beyond. The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) now celebrates Global Doughnut Days, this year marked by 150 global events from 14-17th of October.
Doughnut 3.0
The Doughnut itself has also evolved, with ‘Doughnut 3.0’ recently published in science journal Nature. The new version, which I helped review, includes updated dimensions and disaggregated analysis showing the social and ecological performance of low, middle and high-income countries. Unsurprisingly, high-income countries are faring well socially, but our high-consumption economies are creating enormous pressure on natural systems as a result. The model’s data reflects our own Melbourne story. It’s a continued and clear reminder that we need to address these pressures both globally and locally.
A Melbourne-shaped Doughnut
Melbourne’s relationship with the Doughnut has changed over the past five years. After releasing the qualitative Melbourne Doughnut in early 2021, Regen Melbourne kicked off the first Global Doughnut Day in 2023 with the launch of the Greater Melbourne City Portrait, an incredible milestone representing a hugely collaborative effort.
A year later, the 2024 National Economic Development Conference was oriented around alternative economic models that prioritise the wellbeing of people and planet. It was exciting to see the sector’s genuine enthusiasm for the model, and gave me the chance to share the ambitions of the Doughnut with a whole new audience.
The Doughnut is also part of a growing field and family of frameworks that orient the economy as being in service to the wellbeing of people and place. At Regen Melbourne, we see the need for this “yes and” approach to tackling big challenges locally and globally. Our last two Global Doughnut Day events are an indication of this: in 2024, we co-hosted a Walking Together event with the creators of an Australian Indigenous Doughnut that places Country at the centre; and this year we presented a screening of the film Purpose, which follows the journey of global leaders Katherine Trebeck and Lorenzo Fioramonti as they advocate to bring wellbeing economics into the mainstream.
How is the Doughnut showing up in Regen Melbourne’s work?
Since the launch of the City Portrait, much of Regen Melbourne’s energy has focused on developing our three Earthshots: Swimmable Birrarung, 300,000 Streets and Nourished Neighbourhoods. These serve as nested pathways towards the holistic vision laid out by the Doughnut. We’ve also established the Systems Lab, our action-research platform exploring how we can begin to shift underlying conditions in our current systems.
Within the Systems Lab, the Doughnut plays a key role in our ongoing Measuring What Matters work. Our aspiration for change is to move decision-making towards holistic measures of progress that centre long-term social and ecological wellbeing. It’s also central to our framing of new narratives of place: there, we seek to demonstrate new approaches to defining social, economic and political narratives that empower local communities and prioritise values that enable people and planet to thrive in balance. We’ve seen the Doughnut picked up by others to support these themes: At a local level, the Kensington Food Forest has integrated the Greater Melbourne City Portrait into its framing of indicators valuing local leadership in neighbourhood regeneration; and the Resource Smart Schools program in Victoria has also introduced the Doughnut to schools to help inform their sustainability practices.
Together with our City Portrait collaborator, Dr Michael Dunbar, we are continuing to experiment with how the Doughnut – and the City Portrait as the measurable manifestation of it – can increasingly inform decision-making and prioritisation within Regen Melbourne’s work. We started with the creation of an impact visualiser tool that allows users to map a project, strategy or plan onto the Doughnut. Initially, we applied the tool as part of a number of policy submissions. This helped to highlight gaps in state and national urban policies, reinforcing to policy-makers that cities are about more than physical infrastructure.
Earthshots with a Doughnut lens
This year, we’ve brought the tool closer to home by running a series of workshops with Regen Melbourne’s Earthshot leads. We’ve used these sessions to map how each Earthshot is contributing to Greater Melbourne’s movement towards the Doughnut’s safe and just space. These mappings show different patterns across the three Earthshots:
The Swimmable Birrarung relies on movement in some social dimensions, such as political voice, to open up pathways towards both social and ecological health. While the regeneration of the river won’t directly influence all dimensions of the Doughnut, we anticipate that flow-on impacts will emerge as a result of this work, such as changes to land conversion across the Birrarung’s catchment.
300,000 Streets could, on the one hand, represent a further downscaling of the Doughnut to a street or neighbourhood level, making the whole Doughnut relevant to the Earthshot. In fact, earlier this month, we did just that, featuring the Doughnut at the City North Shared Futures Festival as the O-racle of what the precinct could look like in 2050. The Earthshot’s framing is interesting, though. Its primary focus is on civic participation in ways that can directly shift some social dimensions of the Doughnut. In turn, these shifts are expected to have flow-on effects for human liveability and environmental wellbeing across the city.
Food might show up as one dimension on the Doughnut, but our food system intersects with nearly all of it. The orientation of Nourished Neighbourhoods means that this work is expected to have a direct impact on many social and ecological dimensions of Melbourne’s Doughnut. This is reflected in the nature of the interventions emerging through this Earthshot.
While these maps are informative, they’re not our end goal. They form the foundations for narratives, helping us to refine the stories of each Earthshot and its supporting projects. Once we have done this, we anticipate that we’ll see a clearer picture of where the work needs to go. Using the Doughnut as scaffolding reinforces the systemic and long-term aspirations tied to each Earthshot. It shows us the deep value we know is possible as we work collectively towards them.
Our experimentation with the Doughnut is not limited to Melbourne. We’ve been supporting a range of places in their own City Portrait creation, including Gippsland, Seattle and Glasgow. And I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to shaping the new Doughnut 3.0 as a reviewer, with the most recent publication also citing Melbourne’s City Portrait as an example of Doughnut localisation.
Our compass: The Doughnut
Since opening that email in 2020, I’d have hoped that we (and the rest of the world) would be further along our regeneration journey. But change takes time and requires patience, even when its need is felt urgently. We are now seeing the growth of all the seeds planted over the last five years. In the coming year, we anticipate that Regen Melbourne’s Earthshots will gain traction in ways that accelerate our movement towards the regenerative future that we desire.
And along the journey, the compass of the Doughnut continues to guide our direction through the winding rivers, hidden laneways and local food delights that continue to make Melbourne a special place.
We’d love you to join us as we continue to ground the Doughnut in practice in Melbourne. If you’d like to explore the Doughnut in relation to your own work, please reach out to Alison at alison@regen.melbourne
