Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As CUSP approaches its 10th anniversary, I’m struck by a profound (and worrying) shift in the climate of research funding.
We owe our existence to the extraordinary foresight of the ESRC’s open, competitive call in June 2014 to establish a multi-disciplinary research centre focussed on what it called at the time 'sustainable prosperity’.
Today, the same funding body which has supported our work for nine of those ten years has introduced ‘a high bar against funding applied projects that advocate for degrowth, steady-state economics and similar agendas’ and declared a 'new commitment... to the promotion of economic growth’.
You could argue of course that science doesn’t advocate for or against anything – growth, degrowth or even ‘sustainable prosperity’. It seeks (as our name implies) to understand. But I couldn’t help wondering if this new position would have deemed our work unfundable if it had been the ESRC’s stated position ten years ago.
So I went back to the original documentation to see what was being asked of us at the time. The call spec spoke of exploring whether a 'growth-based paradigm is still tenable’. It wanted us to look at ‘the viability of alternative approaches [to prosperity] which may include natural capital and ecosystems services models and the circular economy, as well as steady state and zero growth theses.’ It even questioned whether the GDP ‘is a sophisticated enough metric' to meet the challenge of sustainable prosperity.
Radical stuff. Especially by today’s standards.
I looked back over our own portfolio to see if we had stepped up to those demands. For almost a decade we’ve explored the political and moral foundations of prosperity, the psychological and social components of human flourishing, the organisational and institutional structures that embed sustainability in firms and the macroeconomic implications of our dependency on growth.
And yes, we also explored the limitations of and the alternatives to that ubiquitous metric of growth, the GDP, which governments have relied on to mark their own scorecard for more than eighty years now and continue to pledge allegiance to. As you’ll see from the items in this newsletter, that research continues unabated.
So the inevitable question is this: what happened to the need for our research? Did it go away in the intervening decade? Or was it never needed in the first place?
I don’t believe either of those things are true. The ESRC’s 2014 call may have been influenced by the upheaval of the financial crisis, the devastating impact of austerity politics and the immediacy of climate change. But ten years later those problems persist and we’ve gained a few to boot.
This year may be the hottest year on record but progress on climate targets has stalled. Persistent inflation dogs the economy. Instability haunts the bond markets. There’s a rising epidemic of chronic disease. Young people in particular are living with a crisis of psychological wellbeing. And rather than focussing on what needs to be done, our governments seem intent on ramping up the rhetoric of militarisation and violence.
It’s all the very opposite of what I have come to call The Care Economy. And it has little or nothing to do with prosperity.
ESRC Director Stian Westlake argues that this is happening because successive governments have failed to take economic growth seriously. Perhaps I’ve been living in a different UK. From Margaret Thatcher to Liz Truss and from David Cameron to Keir Starmer, the obsession of our politicians with growth is legendary. Chancellor Rachel Reeves' determination to prioritise growth over almost every other policy goal has been the defining feature of this Labour government. Today even our long-suffering NHS is supposed to become an engine of growth.
But what happens to our economy when growth itself is increasingly hard to come by? What happens to our politics when we have no policies for a post-growth world? What happens to our economics when it refuses to contemplate that world? And what happens to our science when such questions are deemed to be outside the remit of inquiry?
Those questions were central to the ESRC’s call for funding ten years ago. They are as relevant today as they ever were.
Best wishes,
Tim Jackson
CUSP Co-Director
