In Conversation

Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all work together, there is time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility and once in a while, the connections that we make on this podcast drop solid gold into our laps. This is one of those occasions when we are absolutely honoured to bring to Accidental Gods a recording from the Festival of Debate that took place in Sheffield held by Opus Independence. This is a conversation between three of our generations, absolutely leading thinkers.

Kate Raworth is a renegade economist, author of the groundbreaking book, Donut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st century economist, and founder of the Donut Economics Action Lab, which sees companies, cities, and nations around the world, work towards an economy that prioritizes flourishing of people and planet ahead of growth for growth’s sake. Kate teaches at the universities of Oxford in Amsterdam and way back almost a decade ago when I was doing the Master’s in regenerative economics at Schumacher College. Kate was one of the shining stars of that course before her book was published. She came and gave us the edited highlights, walked us through, engaged us in exercises that have remained seared in my brain ever since. She was the one that opened the doors to a different way of being, as well as a different way of thinking in ways that I had really not understood before. There’s something about the way Kate approaches ideas that is totally groundbreaking. So she’s one part of this three-way conversation with her is Indy Johar, who was on this podcast back in episode 205.

Indy trained as an architect, but quite fast, became co-founder of Double Zero on behalf of which he co-founded multiple social ventures from Impact Hub Westminster to impact Hub Birmingham. He co-led research projects such as the Compendium for the Civic Economy, and supported several double zero explorations and experiments, including the Wiki House and the Open Desk. More recently, he founded Dark Matter Labs, which is a field laboratory focused on building institutional infrastructures for radicle spelt, R-A-D-I-C-L-E civic societies, cities, regions, and towns. Dark Matter feels to me like one of those think tanks where the best ideas are generated and then tested. Indy writes a provocative blog over on the Dark Matter website, and he’s also recently started up a Substack, which is absolutely essential reading. I have put a link in the show notes and with these two shining stars, James Locke, co-founder and managing director of Opus Independence, which hosts the Festival of Debate.

As you’ll know if you listened to James on the podcast a few weeks ago, he too is one of these people who has ideas and then brings them to life. He tests them in the crucible of real life with real people in real places, and he makes sure that they work. He builds community, he builds civic structures. He builds the living foundations of that world that we are going to be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. So here we are, three absolutely brilliant minds coming together in a conversation that I’m going to have to listen to many times to sift out the full depth and breadth, not only of the ideas that are laid out, but the emotional literacy of the approach that each of these three bring to the wicked problems of our time.

This is an unflinching conversation. It is not sugar-coated, but it is absolutely at the cutting edge of Imagineering. Of thinking forward to what’s possible of diving deep into the best of who we are. So all we have to do is make it happen. So here we go. People of the podcast, please welcome Kate Raworth, Indy Johar and James Locke speaking together at the Festival of Debate in Sheffield earlier in the summer of 2025.

Joe: Hello everyone. Welcome. Thank you all for coming tonight. Uh, my name is Joe and I’m from OPUS independence for Social Enterprise behind the Festival of Debate. The Festival of Debate runs from the 22nd of April to the 30th of May, and this year features over around sort 60 events. With over 120 speakers, the festival aims to explore the entangled ecological economic and political prices we collectively face. There are no easy answers, but we hope the festival creates a space to explore and hold complexity and uncertainty and brings together a community of people to make change where they are. Tonight’s event will be a little bit different format from others you might have attended previously. At the festival is not a chaired in conversation per se, but will be a conversation between three individuals who are developing frameworks to understand how we chart sustainable, social and ecological paths to safeguard human and more than human lives.

I’m now going to introduce our three guests on the panel this evening. We have an addition to the program which is Mr. James Locke has also joined tonight’s in conversation event. So I’ll now introduce our three guests.

Kate Raworth is an economist focused on making economics fit for the 21st centuries social and ecological realities. She’s the author of the bestselling book, Donut Economics, Seven Ways to Think, like a 21st Century Economist, which has been published in over 20 languages. She’s co-founder of Donut Economics Action Lab and Senior Teaching Fellow at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.

Indy Johan’s work focuses on the strategic design of new super scale civic assets for transition, specifically the intersection of financing, contracting, and governance for deeply democratic futures. Indy is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and of the RBA award-winning architecture in urban practice. Architecture Zero Zero. A founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded Wiki House, which is Open Source Housing and Open Desk, which is an open source furniture company.

James Locke is founder and director of OPUS, the social enterprise that hosts the festival debate alongside many other projects in Sheffield and beyond. He has over 15 years experience working cross-sector in a variety of project development and delivery roles. His work at Opus is orientated around networks and platform responses to poverty, marginalization, biosphere collapse, democracy and media reform. He is motivated by a deep curiosity in how we entangle multidisciplinary responses in the face of the interlinked and compounding problems our civilizations face.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome James, Kate, and Indy.

James: Well, there’s so many of you. Thank you. I’m gonna kick us off. Um, we were talking about this earlier in the green room and I was kind of saying how maybe Indy is a recovering architect of some kind, and Kate is a recovering economist of some kind. And I guess I kind of wanted to ask each of you in turn, what are you recovering from?

Kate: Well, I’m definitely a recovering economist. I studied economics at university in 1990, so I’m 54. Went to university in 1990. Thought I wanted to learn the mother tongue of public policy and ate it up at first because I’d never studied it before. So there were people alongside me who’d done a level. So it’s that kind of catch up and you’re absorbing the theory and then gradually, gradually start to realize there’s no planet and there’s no essential confronting of injustice. We kind of take, take initial conditions as given there are no human rights, no planet, no human rights. And it’s like, damn, these are the things I came here for. They’re not there. I’m really curious, is it, just put your hand up if anybody else would see yourself as a recovering economist. Anybody in the room? Oh yeah, we’re here. We’re here, we’re here. So I did a whole degree in economics and then I did a master’s degree in what they called development economics, which made a lot more sense. It actually started with the work of Amarta Sen about human capabilities. It started with, uh, questions of what is development and like, why do we only do this for developing? Why aren’t we asking the very same thing here? But I realized at the end of my degree that I never wanted to say ‘Hello, I’m an economist’ because most people say, I’m, I’m just going to go get another drink. Uh, so I, yeah, I was embarrassed. I actually was embarrassed because I, I started working alongside actually some sociologists or some, uh, agronomists or people who’d studied different social sciences, and they talked about things like power, like we never talked about power. So I was really embarrassed of the thinness of what I’d been taught. And yet I was aware that in the world people often say, you know, conference room and or a policy discuss, oh, the economists are coming and everybody sort of tightens up, and, oh, the economists are here. Well, they’ll bring us the numbers. And so the, the weird dis-junct between the, the thinness of what I felt I’d been taught, and then the reverence and the importance that’s given to the economists when they come in with their models and numbers. And I felt really, I didn’t wanna have anything to do with it, so I walked away from it for many, many decades. And only came back when somebody said to me, you can be a Renegade economist. It’s like, oh, I can do that. I can do that. I’ll be a Renegade economist. And then people don’t go and get another drink. They say, what’s that? So that’s how I’ve managed to come back closer to being in the realm of anything to do with economics.

Joe: Well, thank God you did! Indy?

Indy: Um, probably, actually not that, that dissimilar. Um, I think I studied architecture at Bath. I didn’t get it I first two years. I really couldn’t understand why a circular window or a rectangular window were really such massive deals or, or the kind of elegant poetry of a wall which goes into infinity, at least down the row of a building. But actually what was more problematic was similar to. Kate’s perspective. There was no planet in architecture. It was just the building. Certainly when I was looking at it. And actually the building was a form, uh, a brief by a client and form follows capital doesn’t follow function or any of the other beautiful words that architects like to use. And actually what I realized was form was largely a function of the coding of capital i.e. the contract. And I started to realize the way we designed contracts. So most people here would say PFI is rubbish. And for good reason it is pretty poor. But PFI changed architecture to make architecture think about time.

So you wouldn’t do painted skirtings because you have to repaint those skirtings every five years. So you use natural timber. You wouldn’t do air conditioning because you would have to repair and maintain that air conditioning, and that was on the due cost. So PFI turned architecture, not from the object, but an organism. What I started to realize was people weren’t thinking about architecture in that way. And not only was the catch one, and fundamentally real estate was optimizing for real estate. It wasn’t optimizing for people. So everyone here has probably seen hot desking. Hot desking has no, no value to the productivity of human beings. Uh, unfortunately, there’s loads of evidence for that. It does not improve communication. It does not improve engagement. In fact, it reduces communication and engagement in places. The only thing hot desking optimizes is the value of real estate. So you suddenly realize there was no humans in this architecture. It was the coding of capital and there wasn’t a planet. So I was kind of following Kate,

Kate: are you’re a renegade architect?

Indy: I think we’re all renegade in some ways. Yeah.

Kate: James, what are you recovering from?

James: Uh, I have to say, I feel deeply uncomfortable about this question. ’cause you guys are…

Kate: it’s gonna come back to you. Feedback loop James feedback

James: Uh, what am I recovering from? I don’t know. Yeah. Well, I suppose I have a degree in sociology, so I’m a recovering sociologist dealing with the failed attempts of social construction. Um, but maybe also a bit of a recovering poet as well. Um, recovering in the sense of, uh, there’s only so many words you can write about the world before you have to get in the mix and do something about it. And for me, um, yeah, for me, I guess there’s this kind of question about what’s meaningful in the world right now, or even then, I mean, I’m 42 now, so. I started doing this work in 2005. So a search for meaning, a sense of, a sense of a deep wrongness. I think we could, we can all get a sense of that there is something not quite right, something that needs to radically change and uh, yeah, I feel that and I want to do something about it.

Kate: Clearly you are doing something about it.

James: Thank you. High praise. Maybe this is a good moment to talk about the moment that we are in, and I’d just be really grateful to hear how you guys are thinking about this moment, 20, 25, 8 years after the publishing of the Donut.

Kate: Well, actually often when I want to think about the moment we’re in, I find the latest words of Indy Johar. So…

Indy: Okay, I’ll play into that. I think we failed and I think it’s really important to look at that properly. Um, I think we’re in a moment when we are being forcibly re entangled at a planetary scale, forcibly re entangled at a planetary scale. CO2, methane -all these gases, which were externalities in our system of single point optimization for goals, are forcing us to recognize our interdependence. And that’s just one thing. I can name a hundred other re entanglements. The Amazon dies, we’re all dead. If one of the great, uh, sort of, uh, ice shelves in the Antarctic fail, pretty much most of the coastal cities are, are done and it’s destabilized by the way, it, it is fundamentally destabilized. So on one hand I think we’re systemically re entangling, and on the other hand, I think what we’re in the middle of is an old idea of freedom in a world that’s entangling. And I would argue what’s happening is an old idea of freedom, which is feeling its future, being re entangled, is struggling against that. Use the word America for that context. An industrial idea of freedom is challenged by the re entanglement of the world. And I also think a question for us is, as we re entangle, is what is our new thesis on freedom? In a moment when actually all of our lives are becoming more precarious, more vulnerable, more fragile, how do we unleash a new type of freedom, which isn’t rooted in the expansion of consumption and the expansion of consumer choice, but the expansion of being radically human. And I think that’s a key thing.

At the same time, I think for me, I think it’s really important. We systemically realize that we are now headed towards systemic war. We’ve already been at war, at the planet and other things, but this is now accelerating and I don’t want to be melodramatic, but you follow the numbers right now, they are all heading us that way. Climate breakdown is going to, and it’s not climate change, it’s climate breakdown is going to in in massively increase. Price inflation. We’re going to see geopolitics, increased prices. Inflation is going to rise, inequality is going to rise. Competition for resources is going to rise in that context. And as we start to do that, we are going to massively increase inequality because actually, food, energy, water, all these things will become more and more precarious driven by climate breakdown. And as we do that, we will threaten the social contract to which we live in. And I say all this, not because I don’t think we can do something about it, but I think we need to recognize the scale of what we need to do in order to do something about this. I no longer think we’re living in a landscape rooted in net zero futures. I think we’re living in a landscape rooted in a new thesis on how we generate security. And not security is a bounded idea of how do we make Sheffield secure or UK secure because our future is entangled at the planetary scale. How do we build security that recognizes our metabolic interdependencies in the planetary scale? And critically, how do we do that in a different way? So this also means security, not in a kinetic sense. I mean security of energy, food, water, critical minerals, information security, and a security that means that we can only thrive not with power over. Power over cannot deal with complexity. Care is the only thing. And care not as a service. Care is a mutuality is the only thing that operates in complexity. Because you need to operate with a degree of unknowingness of the harm that you can do and the good that you can bring. So I suppose what I see is. Is these levels. And, and the final point for me is I think this is also changes where we see value. We’re in a moment when I think we’re going to have to rebuild and reimagine our bio regions, our economy, of our bio economy, more fundamentally our human economy. Because our human economy is fundamentally an economy of slavery. It’s an expansion of slavery. Labor is an expansion of slavery. It is not an inherent freedom of humanity. How do we build an economy not rooted in control, but rooted in learning and emancipation is a different type of economy. And this is not a moral argument for me anymore. In a complex entangled world, you cannot organize through control. ’cause control is too difficult to organize from central points to be able to instruct the world what to do. It is an information impossibility. And if it’s an information impossibility, learning as a means of coordination and citizenship as a methods of being fully present beyond the subject to state and beyond a consumer is a critical part of that reality. And I think we increasingly have the tools and the means to do that as well. I increasingly think we have the means to understand value. We have the means to understand the value of soil. We have the means to understand how critical it is. I think value and price are more visible. The disjunct between value and prices is more visible. And I know I’m using economist language. It’s probably kind of the, but I’m gonna defer to Kate on this stuff. But for me it’s visceral. And I think this, I want to put the examples, two types of examples. I use this example of the shirt, it’s a 45 pound shirt. But if you were to genuinely price the extraction. The externalization of costs, this shirt is between 250 to 450 pounds. Your steak, if you eat it shouldn’t, but if you do $8- $5, it should be about $28 to $30 minimum. What that means is we have been living a consumer life based on the externalization and extraction is of our economy. At the same time, the tree planted outside – and Sheffield’s great for trees – the tree planted outside is only understood through its cost. I.e. it’s insurance costs and its costs in terms of maintenance and more problematically, it’s optimized to reduce the maintenance costs, which is why 97% of trees planted are male trees ’cause they have lower maintenance. Not usually males but male trees. Unfortunately male trees produce pollen, which is why we have the highest rates of asthma. So we’ve offset the efficiency of the environmental, I don’t know, management balance sheet, into the health balance sheet. So we are doing it on both sides. But what’s brilliant is that’s visible. The risks are becoming visible. People are starting to recognize the systemic crisis. Now the challenge is we need a new generation of economists to start to code reality as Kate has been doing into this world. Because now reality is telling us your economy is fiction. Real economy is coming at you whether you like it or not. And it’ll come at us through every sense: Soil, water, hydrological risk, everything you can imagine.

And the final point I’d say is that the value of being human is massively diminished. The reason why you see homelessness everywhere, is because we as a society are subject to an economy that no longer values being human capital has greater value than being human. That is what the economy is coded. And our society, unfortunately, is a subset of that economy because states govern through the subset of eco economic thinking. And that means we are actually devaluing and not only devaluing, we are fundamentally destroying the value of being human. And that is disastrous because that leads us to the idea that war is a permissible act because humans are no longer worth it. There is a long arc to where this leads us. And I pointed out for real reasons because the economy will guide us in a particular way to destruction here, unless we have brilliant people like Kate opening up this conversation and all of you here that are here to open up a quite a different conversation about this. And this is no longer a moral conversation for me. It’s an existential conversation of how we survive and thrive. That is it. And I’m happy to have any debate on this in, in real terms because I think it is fundamental to our coexistence and there is no pathway for the UK to survive if the Amazon goes. There is no divisible pathway. There is no New Zealand strategy for survival. New Zealand in COVID could not produce paracetamol, could not produce any form of antibiotics. Soon as we realize this interdependence, we start to live and act differently. And we recognize the pathway future is either forking between mutually assured destruction or mutually assured thriving. And it is entirely out of self-interest. No moral, no moral invitation.

Kate: So now you know why, when I want lucid words, I turn to Indy Johar. I want to pick up on, actually on the very first things you said, I’ve, I find it really compelling this, this tension between what’s been perceived as freedom and then the recognition of re entanglement. Although I, of course, we’ve always been entangled through extraction, through externalities, through colonialism, and yet it’s become, it’s the world is making it super visible to us. And I, I’m really struck actually what the, the rise of conversations about poly crisis. Are we in a poly crisis, cost of living, climate change? That it is like if you look at the global majority, people who live in countries that we would call the global south, they would say, Hey, this has been our forever reality. It’s just arriving a little bit. It’s just touching you folks. Now it’s just touching you. And now you say it’s a poly crisis. This has been our always, so realizing that we are being touched by systemic impacts that have touched other people in parts of the world forever. But how do we make these entanglements visible and how do we create an economics that does that? And I’m just going to, when I, I hear myself saying that part of me was says, well, why would we even want an economics? Right? Some people say, just get rid of economics. But I want to go back to the roots of the word economics. It comes from Greek, ancient Greek ecos and nomos. Ecos means the household, and nomos means the norms or the art of management. So economics literally means the art of managing the household. And when it was invented 2000 years ago, it was about literally managing your, your own estate, your, you know, can you trust your wife to manage your slaves? How are you going to deal in your cloth and your wine and your crops in ancient Greece? And then it was at the level of a city state, should Athens allow trade and should it allow foreigners to come and work here? And then Adam Smith took it 250 years ago to the nation state. Why does one nation prosper in another stagnate? And in our era, we just have to keep going right from the household to the city, to the nation, to the planet. Obviously it’s the planetary household. So to me, 21st century economics has to be about the planetary household. And that really chimes with what Indy was just saying. It’s like you can’t have a, you know, New Zealand as a nation state is utterly dependent upon the planetary household. So we have to start at that scale.

And then I was really struck by what you said about capital. Humans are not at the centre of value, it’s capital. And that again, goes deep into what I was taught as an economist. So I asked students in lecture theatres like this one, the World over, economic students: What’s the first diagram you ever remember learning and the world over they give the same answer. It’s supply and demand is crisscrossing lines, right? Week one, welcome to economics. It’s the art of planetary management. Here’s the market and, and that is so pervasive and so normal that people, nobody questions it, but it’s a really particular move that why do we start with the planetary household and then go, here’s the market. Because then the centre of our concern is price, right? Suddenly we’re dealing with financial metrics, money. And then suddenly we’re like, we need to be able to monetize everything because it needs to fit, it needs to chime. We need to be able to translate. Before you know it, the art of planetary household management has to be talked about in terms of money. And that leads us exactly to where Indy was just talking. And that’s why for me, when, that’s why I walked away from economics for decades, didn’t want to, you know, hello, I’m an, I’m not, I’m not an economist. I don’t, I’m nothing, I dunno what I am anymore, but I’m not an economist. And it took, I worked in Zanzibar for three years in, in the villages with incredible women who raised their kids and their families on nothing but the forest and their community. I worked at the UN for, for four years on something called the Human Development Report. It was UNDP’s response to the World Bank that were producing the World Development Report, which ranked the world’s countries in terms of their income per capita. And at UNDP, they said, no, we’re gonna rank the world’s countries in terms of human development, life expectancy, education. So I was, had the privilege of being embedded in this place that was sort of steering away from money towards human metrics. I looked at Oxfam for a decade and I got really tired of, in the campaigns we did, we were trying to make, kinda make the social argument, make the environmental argument, and we would sort of go to big business. Sorry to do this for a minute. But just, you know, big, big business, and it’s always like this. Like, please, you know, please could you make, and, and big business would basically say, thank you dear. I love your passion, but come back when you have a business case. And I just thought, I’m, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not playing this game anymore. I’m not going pooring, begging to business. Uh, I, in 2008, I had twins. So I was immersed in the unpaid care economy and I really understood what I theorized about as gender and economic you. I, oh, I understood the unpaid care and the, the housework, right, of raising two tiny babies. And I sat there with my babies watching the global financial crash and the economists saying, oh yes, you know, the queen asked them why didn’t they see it coming? And the economists sort of saying, we must rewrite economics so that it reflects financial realities. And I just remember sitting there with these two babies thinking, I’ll be damned if we’re not gonna rewrite economics for more than that. This is a moment, this is one of those little cracks that opens up. And it was actually at that moment that I thought, I want to come back towards this. I want to come like, there’s so much at stake here. This opening up and, and it was when I went back to work, actually, after being on maternity leave for a year, hadn’t looked at anything to do with work, and someone shoved in front of me this picture of this thing called planetary boundaries. It was a circle with these big red lines coming out. And while I’ve been off having babies, these earth system scientists had come together for the first time and said, we believe there are nine critical life supporting systems that make life work on this planet. But stable climate, abundant biodiversity, fertile soils, healthy oceans, a protective ozone layer of overhead, the recharging of the hydrological cycle and Earth, the only known living planet depends upon the stability of holding the incredible complexity with which these systems work. We need to stay within safe zones on all of these. So like on climate, we shouldn’t go over 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But we were already over that, so we were outside. So they drew this circle as saying, we need to stay within the planetary boundaries that make Earth work. And as you’ve been working beautifully for the last 12,000 years and this incredible planetary balance. But when we actually measure where we are, we are overshooting multiple of these planetary boundaries. And I just remember sitting back down at my desk and it’s that thing where you’ve had a year, a year away and just come back and see things fresh. And I had this visceral feeling of like, that is the beginning of 21st century economics. Because the economists never did it. The economists never bounded the economy. It was always growth, growth, growth. So the earth system scientists, I felt like they stepped in and said, you know, if you guys won’t do it, okay, we’ll do it for you. In fact, here’s one we made earlier, and we’ve quantified it not in your metrics. There’s no dollars here. This is parts per million of carbon dioxide. This is tons of fertilizer. This is metric meters cubed of water withdrawn from lakes and rivers. They quantified the safe space for humanity in earth’s own metrics. So I was just really excited by this and I started doodling at my desk and I was in this big open plan office. It wasn’t hot desking, but it was a big open plan office. And there were at Oxfam and there were campaigners down that end of the room who were campaigning for, actually they were, they were raising money because there was a, there was a drought in and a famine happening in the Sahel people with no food to eat because there was a drought. They were campaigning for health and education of every child in Southeast Asia. So I was surrounded by people who cared about those living in deprivation or real risk of deprivation. I thought if there are these outer limits of pressure on the planet, there are inner limits too. We call them human rights. We’ve been talking about them since 1948. So I drew this circle in the circle and it came out looking like a donut. Like, we need to live in this space. Leave nobody in the hole in the middle, but don’t overshoot earth’s limits. And I found it very satisfying ’cause I like pictures. But actually the first thing I did, to be completely honest, I put it in the bottom drawer of my desk because I thought, well, you know, that’s a doodle I like, but I, and I just left it there for months. But every time I had a conversation I say, oh, there’s a, people say there’s, there’s a thing in that. And I realized the power of pictures. So I just wanna bring it to that, that how do we escape from these paradigms that we’ve been raised in and that we can feel locked in? And one way is to re-visualize things.

So that was for me, the opening of coming back into economics and, and starting not with supply and demand, not with capital, not with any monetary metrics, ’cause they’re all invented. Incredibly powerful, but invented. I started with this donut diagram saying, if the goal of the economy, which I was never invited to talk about in my undergraduate degree, I’ve never talked about the goal. It was just assumed as growth. If we start with a goal, it’s to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Now we could debate, right? You could debate is, is that, is that a right expression of it? We could, we could go into big debate, but at least we’re talking about it. But if we did say, let’s take that as the goal. Then what kind of economics would you teach? What kind of economic mindset? How would we value things? How would we draw things? How would we contract things? How would we understand our relation? And that’s where, you know, all of our work connects actually. So I mean, the work you’ve been doing for years about the dark matter of the deep design of contract under things is it kind of blows my mind time and time again. And you feel it happening. Right? When Indy speaks, we, he really lifts off the layers, pulls up the floorboards of the systems that we’ve only ever walked in, and enables us to see extraordinary opportunities and different possible worlds beneath. I’m doing it through drawing the doughnut and trying to bring together all the economics I was never taught. Had to go and read feminist economics and ecological economics and complex economics and IT systems think it blew my mind and tried to bring them together to dance on the same page. And that’s what I did in my book, Donut Economics. But then the really exciting thing that happened when it came out in 2017 was people started coming up to me saying, oh, I love these ideas. I’m actually doing this. I’m teaching this in my classroom. I am putting this into practice ideas just like this already. We’re doing this in my community, I’m doing this in my company. Can I, can I do this in my town or my city? And that’s where it connects to what you do, James, because regenerative distributive futures, like whatever the words we use, whether we talk about donuts or not, that’s not the point. It’s about going towards futures that are actually in practice and being demonstrated. And, you know, you can go somewhere and see a community centre, or a school or a business or a, a city council’s goals and new ways of working. So we are trying to make this practice real. So I love that we’re sitting here, especially in this order. Uh, it all connects up and of course the learning goes all the way from what happened in the community centre, right back round to how do, how can indies work, learn from what, how contracts could be made differently. So it’s utterly interdependent. This theorizing drawing donuts in practice. It goes, it goes round. It’s a joy.

James: Thank you, Kate.

Kate: Pleasure.

James: I, I’m really curious about, um, the relationship between the household, the commons, the market, and the state that is so clearly in, in the work that you’ve done and also in the work that you are doing and also in the work that we are doing at Opus and with many other people here in, in Sheffield. And, and I think, you know, we’ve heard some, some challenging things today, which been about, you all really hit me in the gut and I really value that feeling actually. It tells me I’m living in a world, um, that needs something. Um, which I think is important and I an ask of all of us life. Um, and I also live in a place that I love deeply, Sheffield, south Yorkshire. If, if we can do it anywhere, we can do it here. And that’s what drives me, uh, every day to contribute towards that. But what I’m kind of angling a question towards very slowly, is how do these relationships between the household, the commons, the market and the state shift or need to adapt and, and how do you both think they need to shift and adapt in the context of a city or a region like South Yorkshire? Because I have this growing worry that when I look at the politics of the UK, when I look at the progress that we are making or lack of it internationally, I have a worry that the solve the fit – and I know we’re not dealing in those linear kind of object terms, but I worry that, that it’s not coming from there. I’m not seeing, uh, it’s not coming from the international, it’s not coming from the nation state. It’s as likely to be places that develop – the solutions are coming locally. And so I’m worried, I’m interested in what, what you both think that change of relationship between those layers of, of, of, uh, household commons market estate in place need to be or feel like, or what the signals might be that we might look for.

So I’ve just asked you a gigantic difficult question, so, okay. But these, these are gigantic wonderful figures, aren’t they?

Kate: So, so I’m hearing two related things. One is about the how do we provision for our needs and wants? And there’s a diagram I drew in Donut economics called the embedded Economy diagram, which has in the economy recognizing that economic, the economy is not just made up at the market and the state when you’re, when you’re a student in economics, that’s what you get taught about. There’s the market, we can come in with prices and companies and profit motive, and then there’s the state, you know, that can fix the problems that the fix if their externalities or market failure, you can bring the state in, but then there’s always that, well, the state might get it wrong, there might be state failure. So it was a kind of market state boxing match. And the 20th century economic debate was very much market state boxing match you, you know, let’s say fair free market capitalist. You state loving socialists, Jews and in that boxing match

James: How cards have changed.

Kate: And both, of course, both. Were for growth, both were for endless growth. So we’re just still in the same par. We just choose. But in that boxing match, we lose sight of two other fundamental ways that we provision for our needs and wants. We don’t talk about or we view, students are taught to think about the household, the space of unpaid caring work and feminist economics puts it centre stage, right? Unpaid, caring work. Where do we all start the day in our homes, caring for ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Care. Right? It, you can’t price it, you can’t pay for care. Love the time that we put into raising our kids and paying and caring for our parents as they age. That’s the household. It’s what makes life worth living. And it gets squeezed by the market when people are forced to do overtime or, or, or you know, the instability of employment. And it often gets undercut by the state. When state services are cut back, more pressure gets put on the household to pick up the pieces when austerity kicks in. So there’s the household, which is essential, but there’s also the commons. And as economic students, again, we only ever learn about the tragedy of the commons and how the commons will be exploited. And it actually, a brilliant woman called Ellen Ostrom, first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. She was a political scientist. She was never an economist. She was a political scientist anyway, but she went around the world and said, actually, there are some amazing comments, how people share irrigation water in the rice fields of Nepal. Uh, how fishermen share fishing grounds in New England. We learn to steward things together if we follow rules as a community. Every club in universities are kind of commons, and if people really misbehave, sometimes they get kicked out of the club. You’ve got to follow the rules, you’ve got to respect this resource. And that’s how we steward it together. So the household and the commons are really essential. And actually all of us weave our way through all of these four forms every day. I bet you probably bought something from the market today. You probably bought a ticket or a sandwich or so, so you probably can get or, or sold your labour, right? You went to work and you got wage. You’ve engaged in the market. Definitely benefiting the state. Here we are in university, you’ve been down the street, might have taken a train, got some public information. Definitely been in the household where you woke up this morning in your care and your relationships, and probably in the commons, probably part of a community choir or a neighbourhood or just how you treat your neighbours is a culture of common. So we weave our way seamlessly through them, and I think it’s really important to name them. Because only when we name them can we see them. It’s a bit like those entanglements. Only when we name it can we see it and we can start to rebalance. I think ever since Margaret Thatcher, we’ve had a country that swung very much towards the market, market, market, market, get the state out the way state’s hopeless. You know, bring in the market. And they’ve had that rhetoric in the US and the UK and it’s, it’s spread across the world. So many people say we live in a market society and we’ve got come to think of it so normal that market systems will dominate. Can we bring back the states or can we actually enable the commons? And I think that’s a lot your work is that what if the community actually, we don’t just rely on top down state provisioning, but what if the community can democratically and collectively engage in this work? So there are many different ways we can provision for our needs and wants. I have to say, I wouldn’t want to live in a society that that blocked out any one of those. I think they’re all really valuable. They have distinct traits. The market can be an incredibly valuable mechanism. Just, it needs to be kept in a place where it doesn’t run like wildfire and rip up other things. We value state, incredibly valuable provider of public services. Just, you know, free at the point of use. Massive. The NHS massive value here. Households, we all want to have to have families and care. The commons invaluable, but it’s about rebalancing between those. And that for me is a very big part of 21st century economics. And again, the practice, I, I really think 21st century economics is being practiced first and will be theorized later. And it’s work like yours and happening in cities and towns across this country and around the world. That demonstrating practice of a different kind, that actually we can bring back the commons, we can do this differently. It’s, that’s what inspires us to, to keep going forward with new theory because the practice shows it could be possible.

Indy:Thank you Kate. Yeah. I love polling Kate. Um, um. So I suppose I, I want to go at this question. Um, uh, I don’t think we have a market. I think we have the freedom of monopolies. Um, and I think it’s really important for us to take down some of the kind of political illusions that we’ve been living in. A market is a means of distribution, of information, a symmetrical information, and the provisioning of supply and demand to be able to actually, it’s a very efficient computational system. It’s one of the most efficient computational systems. We don’t have a market, literally, I, I begged to differ. I think we have the freedom for monopolies. That is what free markets are. Free markets are the ability to construct monopolies of power. And all of our markets have been largely coded for monopolies of power. And I want to say that because I, I think we have to be able to take down the legitimacy that is being operationalized in a way that I think is deeply problematic. 68% of our s and p 100, I believe, would be net loss making if it had the price in social environmental goods. So what legitimacy or what profit or what value.

At the same time, I increasingly worry about the tyranny of state. You look around the world, what I see is states with their concentration of power and thereby their concentration of risk that they’re holding in volatility are inherently turning into destructive mechanisms because they’re holding so much power and risk. So they’re trying to manage risk through control. And inherently, I think there is something, and I haven’t had time to think this through, but I think there’s something problematic in the nature of state that are almost certainly in moments like this become authoritarian directly or indirectly because of the concentration of power and risk. And I think we’re seeing this pretty much unanimously. And I think it’s a function of the nature of them, not because there’s bad people, it’s also just say that I think it’s a function of the design of state as we have it, that in volatility it will tend to it that way. And I think the challenge that we face is that there is no real civic, we are subjects of state, to use John Alexander’s language and we are, we are consumers in the market in monopolies and citizenship as an idea is both simultaneously massively important. Who here believes they are… Who here genuinely believes that the state is more important than them, is more sovereign than them put up your hand. Does any one person believes the state is more important than great? Two. And don’t mind state any state. The idea of the sovereign is the great, the sovereign is the state as opposed to us. I think we’re living in a world where sovereignty is exploding, where we perceive our own sovereignty. And we’re also perceived more radically sovereignties of rivers, sovereignties of, of forests. And I think there’s a challenge to both state and the theory of free monopolies right now. And I think our problem is how do we operationalize in that reality? And what I like about this conversation, and James, what you’re doing uh, in Sheffield is I think the space of operation is the municipal because I think it allows exactly, Kate, what you are saying, to come to bear a different type of economy, to come to bear, which is deep in relationality and can unlock value in forms that neither monopolies can unlock and neither state can unlock their command and control theory because you could operate a form of relationality that is much broader than what I, what I think either those can operationalize and I think the challenge for us is also to break ourselves from the shackles of being subjects and consumers and what does it really mean to be a citizen? What is the obligation we hold to be citizens? What is our obligation to not just have rights, but actually the obligation to be a full citizen in space and time? And I think there’s a demand there of a different type of economy, a citizen and civic economy that has to be constructed and enabled.

So like that’s all abstract, right? So imagine if Sheffield got together and said, we are going to donate 10 pounds a month to build a civic litigation fund, 10 pounds a month. Say if a thousand people did that, you’ve got 10,000 pounds a month to fight on behalf the citizens of Sheffield. You can litigate directors of councils. Universities that aren’t fulfilling their responsibilities, which they know, sure they should. And I’m not saying they’re bad people, but the correction, the real force of state is brought to the table through citizenship and it will help them be better because they want to be better. But you construct the politics of power in new ways. So I, I suppose I’m asking the question for myself is, I think we’re waiting for forces that are going to bring us home. And we need a new type of force to break, to break through this. And I think we need a new type of organizing to break through this. And again, I wanna say this really clearly. I don’t believe people are bad. I don’t, 99% of people are not bad. They’re good people, but they are trapped in the roles and the structures they play. A corporation is – the CEO of a corporation is trapped in a performance function. As is a leader of a council in many ways. And so this is not about good or bad people. In fact, there is no othering in this conversation. In my view, what we have to recognize is we need new structures to be able to unleash us in more radical ways. And that this, and there was something really for me, really beautiful. How do we, how do we build a sanctity of the household in that fourth space? Like how do we build the justice of the sanctity of a household, which isn’t just subject to the power of state and to the power of markets or monopolies? How do we rebuild that sanctity in some way? What does it mean to do that in a really profound way? What would they require us to do? And I think there’s something really important to be dealt with. Because I think we have to rebuild a new theory of power as much as just attacking the existing systems.

James: And a new theory of value alongside it, right? Because fundamentally, at the household level, one of our challenges is we’re not able to, to openly value it and allocate the resource required to.. .

Kate: Can I come please? The second half of your question –

James: … get you a guide because I’m looking for a guide.

Kate: Well, you said, yeah. You said, are we worried that we are not getting leadership from the international or the national level that it seems to, or are we worried that it seems to be local? So,

James: well, I think that’s a positive, but Yeah,

Kate: okay. Okay. Yes. Yeah. so, so just donate Economics came out in 2017 and like I said, people started saying, yeah, I’m doing this, which was really exciting.Um, and when mayors started saying, can I. Could I do this donut thing in my town? Now, Indy has just quite correctly said no one can. There’s no happy safe New Zealand. You know, there’s no single place or town. We are all entangled. But we can start and say, what would it mean to start to try to, to create those conditions here? A mayor started asking me and counsellors, and it’s actually one of the things that led me to set up Donut Economics Action Lab. I never had the ambition or vision of myself setting my own organization. I was a happy backroom researcher. Uh, but it was really clear that it was calling for this ’cause people wanted to do this. And, and I’d meet a counsellor here and a mayor that is like, oh, hang on. They need to connect. I need to create something that enables these people to connect. ’cause they’re gonna learn way more from each other than from me. ’cause they’re both in municipal work, right? I don’t know the answer. They know the answers. They can help each other. So we set up Donut Economic Action Lab and one of the first things that happened was the city of Amsterdam. Said we want to do a city portrait of Amsterdam using the donut, looking at Amsterdam through the donut, and we invite here, here’s what we invite cities to do. We came up with these questions like, how can this city, you can think of it as here, how can this city be a home to thriving people in an ecologically thriving place while respecting the wellbeing of all people entangled with the world and the health of the whole planet. So there’s two local visions, right? Locally thriving people and a locally thriving local environment. And do that in a way that actually respects rather undermines people in the world through global supply chains. People who are connected to us all through our trade policy, the places we make weapons and sell arms to worldwide and inflict bombs on other countries, right? We are entangled through that and are carbon emissions causing climate change. So we are entangled through all of these ways. That’s what we invite places to ask themselves. And Amsterdam said, we wanna do that. They’re one of the places like we wanna be first, right? And there’s always the one that we wanna be first. And actually to their credit, they place at the heart of their policy to be a circular city. They’re really driving to gonna be a hundred percent circular by 2050. Bit like Kennedy. We’re gonna fly the moon, dunno how we’re gonna get there. Dunno what materials to use. The point is to try and we’ll figure it out as we go. No one knows what it means to be a hundred percent circular city. Well, we’ll figure it out as we go. Let’s go for this. And they launched their city portrait through the lens of the donot in April, 2019 in the height of their COVID crisis. It was actually the highest month of infection rate in that city. So you might say, why would you know they’re in the middle of COVID? And they said, because we’re in this emergency and one day we’re gonna emerge from this, the city’s shut. And when we open this city up again, is it gonna go this way or is it gonna go that way? And they could see that a crisis is an opportunity to reorient. So they said, we’re gonna launch this in the middle of this. And once Amsterdam did it, six weeks later, Copenhagen voted with a massive majority, don’t wanna be left behind by Amsterdam now – voted. That’s we are gonna explore what it means for us to live in the donor. And then there was Brussels and then there was Barcelona. It literally went A, B, C. And I thought, are we gonna go through this alphabetically? Uh, but, but there’s now over 50 towns and cities and municipalities and districts and counties around the world, including here in the UK, Glasgow, that have adopted officially, the city council has said publicly. We are using the concept of the donor in some way in our vision and our strategy and our policies. And drum roll. There is a beautiful: Sheffield Donut, mostly baked today. As I, as I stepped into a lift in this building, somebody stepped into the lift with me and it was literally a real elevator pitch. The real thing. She said, I have a, a hot off the press, the Sheffield donut. This is made by Emma, Sean, and Ian. I think Emma and Sean are at least are here. Are you here? Yeah. There, they’re, so this is thanks to students from this university. So this isn’t the city council, but this is students from the university working with a member of the community who’s also a renegade economist. So this is a community led initiative that begin, I mean, in many, many places where it’s happened, it’s begun from the community starting going to the council and saying, come on, we wanna engage in this all these different ways.

But it, we get started and the reason why I, I’m not worried that we’re getting started at the municipal level is because cities and towns like you can come together, you can meet, you can connect. Uh, you can reimagine the politics locally. You can, you can actually get to talk to the counsellor. There’s something, and we, I think we as also people in the UK, we are more proud to say the town or the city that we’re from than that we’re English. I certainly am, right? Or that we are British. We are more proud of our locality. And so there’s something, a Pacific pride and a culture of where we are, um, here. This is how we do it here in Sheffield or in Leeds or in Brighton or Totness or wherever it is, that there’s something that we love about our place and the values that we have in this place. And can we take those values and pivot away from the degenerative and the, the, the world that’s left so many behind? Can we take those same values and come back with them towards a regenerative and a far more distributed future? So actually I think it’s gonna build like as so many movements do bubble up and what we’ve seen in Europe, mainland. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, Copenhagen. It’s popping up. All it’s popping. The European Commission starts going, hang on a minute, what’s going on here? Because some of their biggest, most famous cities are doing this thing. So the next level up starts to pay attention, and we are now finding that we are getting interest from national governments too. So it’s being demonstrated, piloted, experimented, proof of concept, proof of practice in localities. And I think this is one way that things start to bubble up. So I deeply believe in these local and even neighbourhood level initiatives in Birmingham. Amazing crew called Civic Square doing at the neighbourhood street to street, creating a local donut, right? So we can, we can do it at all these different levels.

James: Incredible. Yeah, incredible. Thank you. I think we are gonna open up for a, a few questions from everyone. Very keen. Um, so give us a few minutes. Some people running around with Mike. Joe here is gonna, um, administer the question.

Jo: I will do the q and a. Albert’s got a mic on the left hand side of the room and I will do this room. So we’ll try and do a spread.Put your hands up. Uh, there’s a very straight hand up there with a man in the white hoodie, so I’m okay. Straight to you.

Guest: Thank you so much for a fantastic, um, exploration. I really wanted to ask a question about currencies, not in the sense of dollars and Dracma and Pesos, more in the sense of the many currencies that Kate you were speaking to. I’ve had lots of exposure to the gift economy in various different versions. How can we give visibility and make tangible and make operational the many currencies? How can that come into play? How, I’d just love to hear your thoughts on how we don’t reduce everything to the metric of capital. How we can actually engage with all these different currencies that are at play in society already and work with them.

Kate: Ooh, you wanna go on that Indy?

Indy: So I think there’s multiple layers to that question. Um, so a tree planted by communities is 90% likely to survive a tree planted through a contractor. By a local authority is a 50% chance of survival. And that difference is a function of care. So, and I’m going to say we know care has value. The question, I think, and I, and I think there’s multi, I think the question we all need to hold together, and I don’t know what the answer is. We have tried local currencies, time banks, gift economies. We’ve tried all, like, this is not, not a tried event. So the question I’m holding more seriously is what is the innovation required to actually systemically make that, um, a completely different story. And the experiments I’m seeing that some of them we’re part of, but not all of them, like bioregional drawing rights. So do you limit the currency formation, fiat currency formation to the limits, what a bioregional capacity is? So I think we’re gonna have to think quite radically about new forms of currencies. I think. So some really interesting work going on around how do you print claims? So if you’re gonna rejuvenate the River Don here, could you print future claims of the, of value that would be like stable coins, effectively on the future value of rejuvenating that river and use those printings to actually allow for allocation of rejuvenation of that river. So it’s like a future you’re claiming, claiming out a future value to the thing. So I think your, your conversation is absolutely right. I also think there’s certain economies of gifts that we’ve fundamentally destroyed. And I think people like David, um, uh, David Graber sort of talked about this much more elegantly than I will be able to do. But I think there are certain things that we need to intentionally move out of the financial economy, the loss of Sunday and allowing Sunday trading destroyed the gift and care economy of society. ’cause it turned everything into a consumer space. So the question for me is how do we rebuild other forms of spaces for economies, both in space and time, in more fundamental ways? I think there is, um, I think it’s a great question. I just, I’m struggling to default back into the old answers, so I think we need answers on this. And I think these answers are going to be really interesting. So all the work, like we’re seeing resource backed currencies being talked about in, in the African content, uh, context, which is you look at mining resources and you print currencies or notes on the basis of the mining resources into future claims and allow that to actually create liquidity institute as opposed to have to borrow capital from the US or US or, or, or somewhere else. So I think there’s new forms of innovations that are going to open up. I finally, I would say, I think we need a class of bio-regional banks across the whole of the UK because you cannot put finance into, you cannot price our goods by financing nature on our goods. Go back to my point about food. The cost of food would become too expensive. We’re going to have to rejuvenate our nature-based infrastructure of the UK by the Central bank or the Treasury in the UK, effectively giving negative interest rate allocations to rejuvenate our base biodiversity. So we’re going to need these bio-regional banks to rebuild our base, primary, primary biological infrastructures of life. And so I think there’s loads of really interesting work in there. And the final point I just want to add was stuff like if you own, if you have a timber house, right? You build a timber house, um, you own a timber chair, you also own the responsibility to sequester 500 years worth of carbon. Just down on the right, you also own the responsibility sequester and hold 500 years worth of carbon. So when someone turns around and buys a chipboard table, you think, huh, how the hell is that going to be done? So I think there’s something also happening more fundamentally in our stewardship of our material economies that has, it’s not its currency, but in terms of how we own obligations of stewardship, not just the rights of use. So if I own this liability of 500 years worth of carbon, I have to think about what that means. And I have a completely different governance of our material economy. So the trade is no longer about use and abuse, which is the rights of property. It’s about the actual stewardship and responsibility. So I think there are new, I hate using the word economies with Kate here, but economies that are layering together in stewardship and in other forms that are hybridizing in lovely ways, and I think they’re going to change the currencies on the table. So I think it’s a great question. I’m giving you a broad spectrum answer because I don’t think yet we know the answer. In my humble view. I think this is a moment where we’re going to have to explore these dimensions and they’re going to open up those opportunities. Certainly, that’s what I’m seeing.

Joe: Take some more questions.

Jo: Another question, these maybe from this side of the room. Oh, Al’s gone on this up already.

Guest: Thank you. Thank you very much. Um, my name’s Peter Gilbert. I’m a counsellor here in Sheffield. Yeah, I’m not alone actually. You’ve got several counsellors here in the audience tonight and I just wanted to say, um, to the creators of the Sheffield Donut, if there was any way I was able to help you to bring that to Sheffield City Council, I’d be very happy to.

Kate: And if I could add then, and if you would then get in touch with Donut Economics Action Lab, my fantastic colleague Leonora would be delighted to have a conversation with you and she could say, ah, hearing your context, I would love to put you in touch with this city. And that’s it. Because you could learn from them because they’re at that sim or here’s what they’ve already done. There’s a guide actually we’ve published called. Cities and regions, let’s get started. Uh, and it’s just got packed full of examples from towns and cities around the world of the many different ways they’re getting started. And for us, it’s a really important part of the way the work happens. We don’t say, right, you’ve gotta do this first, and that like, we don’t know. I’m not a counsellor. I’ve never worked in a city council. How would I know how to do that? We are learning from how others are starting. They’re starting in lots of different ways. So there’s many different entry points and we just love sharing it back. So for us, coming back to currencies and flows as an organization DEAL is fully funded by foundations. We are extremely lucky that we’ve got that foundation funding. It means that every, and we only do the work because of that, because it means that everything we do, we can put in the commons. So we don’t have any market relations with people. So we put all the learning in the commons. We make all of our tools and concepts free in the commons, what we ask for is reciprocity. We just say to anyone, you’re welcome to use these tools. All we ask is that you share back any innovations or your learning ’cause that’s what’s valuable. So that comes back to this currency point, right? That it’s that learning how and how can we design a website, how can we design the words we use our interaction with people so that it does flow, because it takes time to document what you did and to share what worked and what didn’t work. So again, we are trying to find that currency of information. ’cause that’s the really valuable thing. We’ve managed to take money off the table, but we need to make that information flow because that’s going to get the real value back to places that want to learn from each other. So that’d be amazing.  And, and we’d love to show you what they’re doing in Glasgow and what they’ve been doing in Cornwall, what’s happening in Leeds. So yes.. This, this is gonna happen. Excellent.

Joe: Lovely. Um, I’m just gonna bring, uh, one question in from, uh, the live stream, uh, as well, which we’ve had, uh, my colleagues just WhatsApp me, which is around, can you talk a little bit about the efforts in Sheffield to usher in transitions, like the ones that you’ve been talking about in the panel and how people can get involved directly, uh, in projects on the ground?

Kate: (to James) think that might be you.

James: Uh, yeah, sure. Um, I mean, well firstly, I would, I would say there are so many people and groups, um, in Shefield that are doing really amazing work for each other and for the world that we live in. And, um, so I, I can share a little bit about the work that Opus is involved in with, with colleagues at DM and Sheffield and she social enterprise network, many, many partner organizations across the city. One of those projects is the Sheffield City Goals, which some of you may have come across, which is these wide boundary goals that envisage a, uh, a 10 year journey for the, for the city in, into transition. And what drew us to that work originally was the tender from the city partnership board in 2022, uh, referenced donut economics. We thought, well, this must be worth doing. And there’s some really interesting work coming out of that at the moment around how do we think about neighbourhood decision making? How do we think about how, um, money and value should flow in the city in a way that helps us, uh, answer complicated questions like, um, why is a dead tree worth more than a live tree? And alongside that, were some really interesting stuff around next generation. So how are we thinking about long-term decision making in the city? How are we thinking about intergenerational learning, which is absolutely critical for maintaining the fabric of this place that we all live in together. And then the final thing on just in that bit is some metrics that com compound metrics that basically bring these ideas together and help us measure that over time. The other thing I’d name just briefly is the River Don Project. Uh, the River Don Project, um, is basically trying to answer this question of, um, well, it’s kind of around the commons really. Right? It’s, so, it’s kind of trying to answer this question of like, how would you steward, uh, a waterway, a water health? We know that our water systems are in serious decline. We know that, and we know that the quality of the management of those systems is not always, I’m trying to be diplomatic in our, in our best interests. And we know that there are new ways that we can think about how do we sense into the systems that we are a part of and how do we think about distributed governance and stewardship of those commons that we are all parts of. So there’s a few bits of work that, um, yeah, we’re a bit involved in, in Sheffield on that. That’s helpful.

Joe: Thank you. Just a heads up, Kate, you’ve got about 20 minutes before one of my colleagues will take you to the train station. So maybe we’ll try and direct some of the other questions more directly to Kate.

Kate: Is that a question from a woman?

Joe: Yes, exactly.

Guest: Thank you. Love being picked for something for my gender. Um, Kate you are an absolute inspiration love. Thank you so much. Um, I work for a company called Social Value Portal and actually every single person in my company got given a copy of your book. So, um, it is a pleasure to be here today and we’ve quantified social value, which is to kind of respond to, to some of the things that we’re hoping to do within the donut.

So, um, I wanted to ask you, I completely agreed with your point about what happened with the financial crisis, um, and why we couldn’t use that as an opportunity to rethink economics. And I just wonder why we’re now not using COVID as an opportunity to rethink again, because we’ve just had that massive crisis and I feel like we’ve, we’ve slowed on, on using that. So somehow we’re back in a, an era of Trump and tariffs that are just at that what the fuck point. So how do we bring back that, that level of, um, the tipping point and realizing that we really have to respond now, um, and create some action. Thank you.

Kate: Yeah, it’s a great question. How do we, how do we seize the opportunity of crisis? And when we were in the midst of COVID, so many people were saying, yeah, yeah. It’s so clear that governments can do things they ne you would’ve thought was impossible. Take people off the streets and put them in in care and, and I can’t even remember the word. What was the word for they, everybody’s wages. That word we’d never heard of before. And then we were all talking about it’s, there’s this new thing. It just policies that you’d never heard of were suddenly like, yep, absolutely mainstream. So why can’t that… Right? So we were all in it. The the world, there is no going back to normal. And they’re suddenly like, well, it’s not normal, but it’s, it’s not the different, it’s, we didn’t come out the different door. We hoping we would. So there’s a really big question around crises, and when we harness them and change, like Amsterdam had this real intention to become a far more circular city. And uh, and every time I go there, I see that shift, right? So for, they, they, for example, have said, no, uh, fossil fuel vehicles, cars, or boats in the city by 2030. And you go there and it’s more and more changing. So they are set on it. So what’s happened there that they’ve really seized crisis, but also seized a, a vision and opportunity. And then in other places we just float back, not towards the new future, but actually into, oh my God, it’s, why is it getting worse? It’s getting worse, but we’re still entrenched in the old, I don’t know the answer on that, but I just, I’m fascinated by places that do seize change. And I’m going to give an example of one Melbourne in Australia. So they had terrible wildfires in 2009, but again in 2019 and again in 2022. And people there said to me, we just, you know, it’s supposed to be kind of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And then it just burning and COVID and I think the combination of wildfires and COVID, something happened in Melbourne. They just said there has to be another way. And they came together in a massive ecosystem of very, very different organizations across the city and created this organization called Regen Melbourne. And they used the donor again as a starting point. It’s a visual and they created the donor. You can go on their website, they’ve done it beautifully and they’ve come up with really positive visions of what they do want. So they have this positive vision of. What if the Yara River, which runs through the centre of the city, what if this was swimmable? It is a beautiful, you know, and if that becomes swimmable, lots and lots of things will have happened and changed in relation to make that possible. Uh, they’ve got a vision about, uh, transforming their food systems, their neighbourhoods. So they’ve used the crises they’ve been through to pivot towards a different vision. But as we know, what often happens with often climate crises, uh, floods, we think, oh, this, you know, this. Some people used to say, you know, only America suffered the kind of floods the rest of the world. Well, they did, but sometimes they, people buckle down and then they go, we’re gonna bite back against nature. Right? And it turns into this us against nature. We are gonna harden against nature. We’re gonna redouble a gun. And, and so what metaphors or what, what relations do we think we hold in those moments of crisis and how we can flip out of it? And I’m. I’m actually really inter I’m gonna, I’m gonna ask both Indy and James to say something about a crisis. Has there been a crisis here in Sheffield that you, you can think of how it’s been responded to? Has it been seized or We’ve been drawn back and something from Indie on a, uh, the metaphors of crisis, how we could come through. Why don’t you go first, James?

James: Sure. Yeah. Uh, sorry, I lost the idea of metaphors of crisis. No, just, just yeah. Like for Soul

Kate: Indy will deal with that. No problem. Don’t you worry about him. Yeah.

James: Yeah. Um, I guess what all comes to mind actually is, is, is not just a, a crisis, but also kind of a leverage point that I’m seeing, and particularly in the sort of rights of nature and the river work that we’re doing. So, you know, many of you here will be aware of the. The flood risk, uh, here in South Yorkshire. And that being a continuing risk and the risk of intensity is increasing. And of course there was a really serious flood, um, a few years ago. Um, but what I’m mindful of, uh, which is a kind of point of interest really, uh, is that legislation has now been passed that means that Yorkshire Water will have to put sensors in, uh, its entire waterways. I think this is a really good thing. I think this is gonna give us insight as members of, of citizenry of South Yorkshire. It’s gonna give us insight into what is the water quality like here. What is the flood risk that Yorkshire Water and other partners are making? And I think that is something that we just really need to be kind of mindful of. And watching 2026, they have to start putting sensors in the river so that we can find out what the pollutants are in it. And I just want to kind of throw that out into the room sheet, just so more people are aware of that and, uh, can campaign for, for that data to be transparent.

Indy: So I, I want to be fast on this. So I think the key conversation from a problematic sense, I’m sensing is around security. We are seeing the language move from net zero to security. The key challenges is a bounded idea of security, a separatist idea of security, or is an entangled idea, security that is the wall. Metaphor, what is, how do we frame security? Hmm. I think security will define, I think we’ll see huge amounts of innovation around security, economics. What is our theory of economics with regards to security when we know markets are capital, markets are entirely designed for the efficiency of capital, not the resilience of supply. So they do not care if we don’t have food in the, in a, in the mainstream of a crisis. That’s not their problem, but we know it destabilizes everything. So I think security for me is number one. I think unfortunately that is what, where, where the intellectual, we want to have a voice. That is what we have to influence. It is going to most of our money, government money is moving towards security as a framework I. Second, I think it’s really worth recognizing where change historically occurred. So the River Danube was a location of a war in the 19th century, early 19th century. And international waters as an idea was born on the River Danube because suddenly nine countries have to say, we’ve got to reimagine how we share this trade route and look after it. So I think the future of our governance is going to be born in places like where we have to manage glaciers and river systems because our hydrological systems are so fragile. So Alps, we lose by 2070. We lose the glaciers and the Alps. We are going to have to rejuvenate and manage these glacier systems and hydrological systems that operate at sub continental level. And we’re going to have to build new institutions, not just to conserve them, but to regenerate them. So I think we’re going to see new forms of planetary governance emerging around these glacier systems. I think we’re going to see planetary governance emerging around, uh, like I said, the ice shelf in the Antarctic, because if we don’t, we all die. So I think the language I’ve been using is this pre-emptive peace strikes. Where are we going to pre-emptively strike for peace? Because you know, if we lose the Himalaya glaciers or the Himalaya glaciers go into a place of conflict between three nuclear powers, the level of war we will set unleash will be so devastating that I think we have to acknowledge and operationalize into a new form of pre-emptive piece. And that will require new institutions. So as lot as well as what other frames. I think look for the geographies that where these futures are going to be born. It’s no coincidence for me that we’re doing land which owns itself in places like Canada where the crown and indigenous land rights are being, having to be reimagined. So the where is really important. So no coincidence, we’re looking at, um, a conservation land between South Africa and Zimbabwe of how do you conserve a piece of territory and a park and regenerate it between two nation states because actually that creates a new form of transnational generative capacity. So I think the where is really important as well as the what of the frames, and that’s what I’m starting to see.

Joe: We have another question, uh, on this side of the room, and this will be the last one for Kate before my colleague will need to take her to the train station.

Guest: It’s very, uh, enjoyable to hear this wonderful broad sweep of ideas and, and visions. Um, I’ve been giving out a leaflet here called A Tale of Two Cities, and I feel slightly as though I’m living in a parallel universe to, uh, what’s been talked about here. The fact is that our region and our city is probably one of the biggest arms producers in the country. And, um, I would like the councillors and anybody from the mayoral authority here to talk about what they, um, see the trajectory for our economy is when hundreds of millions of public money are being bought into expanding our arms economy. And that’s why I feel I’m slightly living in a parallel universe. Uh, as an architect. I’ve been, um, fighting for years and years. John will know about this. To get our mayor authority and our local authorities to take up retrofitting, um, you know, it is something that everybody says makes absolute sense. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s something that’s needed for our economy. So sustainability for the cost of living scam that’s been pulled on us. Um, but the mayoral authority is, has been up to do nothing. My question is what do our, um, democratic representatives have to say about the fact that they’re boosting our arms economy funded by public money and actually doing very little about boosting sustainability of our economy?

Kate: I am happy to, to give a couple of reflections. So I hope it doesn’t feel like a parallel reality. Because I think both of the things you just said, actually, we really well into the frames we’ve been bringing. So if I come back to, um. The framework of can a place live in the donut? If I say again those questions, what does it mean? Can this city be a home to thriving people in a locally ecologically thriving place while respecting the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet? So the fact that in the UK, across the UK, in Sheffield and in many other places, we have major companies that are producing parts for military planes that are bombing other countries. That’s really entangled. Like we are really entangled, our industries and our jobs are really entangled with violence imposed on other countries. So how do we bring that? And if, if there were a city portrait, like in in Amsterdam, it came out that Amsterdam is the biggest port importing cocoa from West Africa, which has modern day slavery. And when we first put that in the city portrait, the councillor said, I, I’m sorry. And so you have that, take that out. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not us. We don’t recognize that at all. And we had to say to them. Hang on. You’ve already recognized your carbon emissions. Like we’re really used to talking about that. We’re entangled this way too. And to her credit, the, the Vice Mayor for sustainability pivoted 180 degrees and then she started talking about it and she said, this is connected to our circular economy as well. ’cause we can’t live well here in Amsterdam if the way that we live well here is undermining the rights and wellbeing of people in the rest of the world. That’s why we have to look at the locality and how we’re entangled to the rest of the world. So it would exactly come out and, and be part of the questions of – How, how are we going to transform who we are in relation to others and our impacts on others? And on the point you just made about retrofitting, I’ve had a real privilege working with, um, and I’m going to say this, sitting next to an architect, this is Flip It Round with, with amazing group of people called Architects Declare, you may know them in response to climate crisis. And you know, there’s been teachers declare and doctors declare, architects declare. And they have put together a brilliant set of pleas to the government. They call them the building blocks, just to, to align the regulation and the incentives in this country to make it make sense. And they told me this fact that I didn’t believe for a long time, and I had to go to that. Like, is this really true? If you want, if there’s a building that you know, like, well what are we going to do with this building that’s not being used? If you want to knock it down and build a new one, you pay no VAT if you want to retrofit it. You’ll pay 20% VAT. It’s insane. So that to me is like the most obvious insanity. And actually it comes right back to, to something that one of the challenges we’re seeing is localities trying to transform, right? We want to retrofit our buildings, want to check, but they are sitting under regulation and incentives and tax and policies that are made at national level. And of course nations are sitting in the international, right? So we’re all affected and shaped and limited and imposed upon by the levels of above what, what, um, and blows me away and keeps me at work is yet, and still people show up and say, yeah, we’re going to begin anyway, even though we’re not even in control of half of the policies or the budgets or the influences or the global financial markets that actually buffet us around. We are just going to get started. So I see that again and again. So thank you for bringing both of those issues. They, they would both definitely need to be coming out in the space of a, of a city’s donor and like, this is the conversation, let’s have it.

Joe: Um, Kate, I just want to say a massive thank you, uh, for joining us at Sheffield on behalf of the festival debate. Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for Kate Raworth (clapping).

So we we’re gonna keep going till nine just for James, uh, and Indy, that’s all right with both of you. So, uh, we can still take more questions, please, on the side room. Maybe another question, uh, from when we go up to this one…

Indy: Can I just build a little bit on the question that was asked earlier? And I’ll be slightly controversial, um, on multiple levels. Yeah, sorry. Um, what I find deeply elegant about how Kate communicates is she doesn’t put things into conflict. I appreciate that because actually the complexity of the world that we’re operating in opens up these conversations in very complex and rich ways. So we actually don’t have the carbon budget to retrofit Sheffield’s housing. We don’t actually have the carbon budget, the total carbon budget of the UK to, to build new homes. Right is about 14,000 a year, not 350,000. And if we were to take that total 14,000 and rebuild retrofit homes across the UK, we’d have no new build capacity. The violence of us retrofitting all the UK means we throw up a volcano of carbon, which means many people around the world will be hurt. Those are real numbers. You can look them up, the numbers. The reason why I say this stuff is there is violence in lots of our work, which is visible and invisible, and I think there’s something really important about how we bring ourselves together and move the economies of violence direct and indirect into economies of deep peace. But it requires us not to create the other. Whenever I’ve created the other, I’ve destroyed the capacity to bring people on. And I deeply love this about how Kate negotiates with the world because I think it allows us all to bring our worries to the table and allows for a negotiation recognizing invisible and non-visible violences, and for us to come to our recognitions and deliver the journeys. And I think there’s a hard question for all of us in how we do this transition. My worry is we are stuck in the politics of othering. Whether the politics of othering is rooted in, and I’m going to be controversial, race, identity, whatever. And it doesn’t work for us because it creates our own enemies. And the fact is, we’re non divisible. We are indivisibly linked. Now our fates are shared. And I do want to put that on the table. And I think it’s difficult to say that. But I do think it’s really important ’cause I think we need a different type of politics and a different type of negotiation to be able to boom these conversations without creating, turning people into our enemies and the others.

And I say that ’cause I’ve just seen it in so many of the landscapes I operate in, that people create the other. And I think there’s something for me to be taught to myself. But how do we not do that? How do we invite conversations into beyond the othering? Because there is no other in an entangled planet and I think it’s something we should I, that’s my deep admiration and I’ve seen Kate do this multiple times. When she does this, she brings lots of different voices together and allows us to actually evolve ourselves and change our own journeys in a com in a compassionate way, which I think is really important in this moment when fear is existing everywhere. And I just put that on the table humbly, and I apologize. I’m not trying to be, I just, I see it in a different way now and I don’t think our politics of activism works in the way it used to work, because we create the others that are become our enemies and there is no other in this crisis right now.

Joe: Thank you very much. We’ve got a question here.

Guest: Thank you. I’m a member of, uh, Schools Climate Education South Yorkshire, and one of our aims is to look at ways of bringing donut economics into the school system, secondary school system in particular. If anybody else here is interested in that, please find somebody from SCESY. Andm ake yourselves known to them. Um, there’s one next door to me. Uh,

Indy: my question, I, you Kate’s Circus, have you seen Kate do her donut circus?

Guest: I, yes, I know. Yeah. And, uh, I, my question though is about, um, that, you know, the new kid on the block at the moment is, is artificial intelligence. Do you see artificial intelligence as offering us any opportunities or is it entirely risks? And how do you have thoughts about how you can embed care within AI?

Indy: You’re kind to stretch. Okay. Okay. I, um, um, multiple levels. Who here has chat? GTP zero three model. Anyone have run those zero three model few people effectively, we’re running PhDs in our pocket right now, almost PhD level intelligences in our pocket. I think the question for me, at a metaphysical level and a larger level is our, our technologies are constructed in the same way we treat ourselves. We construct our technologies through a theory of control and instruction, not care and humility. We’ve constructed our technologies to be in the same way that we imagined each other as bad robots, our employment contracts, our roles. We fill people into roles. We don’t invite people into contributions like that. I mean, it was a profound moment to me when I came roles this as contributions. The role is I’ve understood what the value I need to create and would you mind filling it? The contribution is, I have a goal. We have a goal. How would you contribute to making this goal? It’s completely different. All of our machine technologies are rooted in 19th century institutional design, which is actually all about control extraction and actually creating the slaves of them as much as the slaves of ourselves. So I think there’s a really deep philosophical question for me that large language models and learning artificial intelligence are all opening up is what is our governance of these realities? I also think they are potentially a source of great emancipation. What does it free? How does it free us up to be radically human? What intelligence does it open up in those massive ways? And I think we have to start to talk about what is a new human machine economy. So the work, I like work we’re doing around what is the relationship of a new human machine pairing, which isn’t rooted in machines instructing us and enslaving us and driving us to action. But what is a new form of pairing? I think if we are not doing that work or what is human machine pairing, I think we’re in trouble, frankly. I also think human machine economies are going to change everything around us. So if you look at Terra preta, which is, for example, the Amazon is is referred to as Terra Preta in the inner a sort of western worldview. We have the wild and the farmed cultivated. Terra Preta is the idea of an open garden of value open garden. The Amazon was an open garden. It was a cultivated open garden. Technologies give us the pathway for precision technologies, precision farming, that allow us to have new forms of ecosystems that we can actually work with and cultivate with technological capabilities, precision farming capabilities. So I think we have to look at technology and human relationships in really radical ways. We have to look at how could technology be an emancipation tool. I think words that have evoked me are what are, what is a tender machine? Think of the words, right? Tender machine. What is a machine operating with? Careful with carefulness. What is a machine that’s operating not knowing? Right? So wisdom as the best example, case studies of wisdom I’ve heard are wisdom is the ability to know that you don’t know. Right? We designed machines on the presumption of all knowingness. What is a tender machine that actually knows that it does not know? How does it operate? How does it engage in tenderness in the world? And I know I’m using evocative examples, but if there’s art technologists in the room and people working at the intersection of art and technology, this is the moment to invent fundamentally different relationships of humans and machines. This is the moment to do extraordinary things that aren’t just the tools of weaponization, but actually the tools of everyday emancipation. So I think you hit on a really important point, and I think parallel with that is what does it mean to be radically human? Every, every great revolution, and I use the great in that way, is fundamentally a revolution of what it means to be human. And I think we’re right at the cusp of what does it mean to be human? Because if you look at any of the science, all of our cultural work is bullshit. The reality is, um, whether it’s actually I’m a multitude of organisms, less than 40% of me is human, DNA, I’m symbiotically a function of non-human DNA that builds my consciousness. My consciousness, if you go to some really brilliant people, will say your consciousness may be a kind of a quantum function. Epigenetically, I’m linked in time. I’m a spectrum. My personality is a spectrum of personalities. We live in the illusion of the individual, which is no longer real. Science has proved it’s no longer real, but we are living in the old illusions. So the emancipation and the re-imagination of human is the other symbiotic project. With the emancipation and the expansion of what we think of those machines, we have a terrible relationship with machines. Because we have othered them to become vehicles of tyranny, fear, and other things. You go to Japan, their relationship with machines is not rooted in fear and othering. I think there’s something to be done. And the same goes with our ecological systems. There’s a radical option here, which I think is really, really inviting us not how to fear, but into a new pace of emancipation.

James: Now I see why you grinned and laughed before answering that question. Yeah.

Joe: Thank you Indy. Um, we’ve probably got time for maybe one more question along, uh, your side of the run album. Um, maybe down here at the bottom, I think.

Guest: So I’ve been trying to think about how to phrase this for the entire time. There’s a lot of talk about care and reintegrating care into society, into the social values that we hold as a society. Um, and I think that that’s quite a contentious topic in a lot of ways. Because society’s different and their values and their outlook. And I, I work in the care sector, I work as an independent advocate here in in Sheffield, and I see kind of the specialization of labour and families and the roles that families play in caring for, for their loved ones as being outsourced to a lot of private enterprise professionals like myself, keeps me employed. Social services, the probation service, uh, carers, the NHS, nurses, doctors, district nurses, you name it. There’s a whole enterprise funded on the professionalization of care and families no longer looking after one’s own. How do you foresee returning to a model of kinship or supplementing that through entanglement?

Indy: Really important question. Um, so one I’d really, and I I, I just wanna fully acknowledge other brilliant people. There’s a person called Forrest Landry, which I think he’s, he’s a brilliant American philosopher and I think we should look to him. Why? And there’s the other brilliant people as well, like, um, uh, Elizabeth Sawer and there’s a few others, but why I think he is really interesting. He makes this differentiation of we are living in a world of power over, and power over is how we’ve constructed the world. Our theory of dominion, our theory of control, our, our leverage of machines. It’s all about power over. And there’s a beautiful book by, uh, Sophie Strand, uh, called the Flowering Wand. I don’t know if many of you, she’s an incredible thinker, very young, an extraordinary thinker. She talks about how from a, like a Western perspective, that we were living a partnership societies before we became relational societies, before we became societies of the sword. So why the flowering wand is because the wand was a, was a, and she’s talking, she’s doing a critique of masculinity, masculinity in west. She took it, we went from the, the wand as the role of the mage and the druid to the sword as a means of control and suppression. And she beautifully does that. I cannot do it justice to what she’s written. But why this is important is that in complexity as the world re-entangles and as our lives in entangle, I think we’re living in a paradigmatic moment where control is a theory of organizing is no longer efficient, which is why care cannot be delivered through the theory of service. Care. Care cannot be delivered through financial incentives because care is not a financial incentive. And we’ve tried to create an economy, a financial economy around care as a means of incentivizing rather than creating the frameworks of abundance for positionality, for people to care. And I think this is really important for me. So I think this distinction that you make, this is why I want to go to the macro idea of care because I think in complexity the only way to operate is to be in relationship of the unknown harm that you do and the, and the care that you bring to the table. But this manifests in our underlying theory of how we’ve created an economy rooted in, in incentives, instruction, control. And that has to be unwound to an economy rooted in learning, in tenderness and in being in different ways. And that is a different type of economy. And it’s not a moral debate for me. It’s just in complexity. That is the only way to operate. And this manifestly changes organizations. Organizations should not have a CEO. They should have a chief learning officer. I’m serious. In complexity. There is no one brain that can, that can understand the complexity of a large organization, even a small organization. So we live with the illusion of control. When we know most boards, most CEOs cannot process the complexity of the risk they’re handling. It’s impossible. It’s not their failings. So imagine a, an organism rooted in a theory of learning. Rooted in coherence, emerging from learning action and accountability coming from learning care being a function of being in relationship with the world. So I think what you’re asking for me is both a practical question of can our professional economy root care?

And I would argue that we are reaching to the end of that cycle and we’re gonna have to reimagine. But I think it’s also a deeper question. Can you incentivize and create all the economic para failure? And there’s a macro question of, as a society, have we moved away from the idea of power over as a means of operating complexity to being in care, as being a more fundamental question of a new economy and a way of being in complexity. So just to stack those three.

Joe: And I think that pretty much brings, uh, this evening’s event to a close. Could you please join me in thanking one more time. James, Indy and Kate. Our volunteers for tonight’s event, Sheffield Hall University for generously hosting tonight’s event as well, and all of you for coming.

Manda: So there we go. That’s it for this bonus. Enormous thanks to James, to Johnny, to the whole team at the Festival of Debate. First of all, for making it happen and then for letting us bring this recording to the Accidental God’s community. I hope this inspires you as deeply as it does me. Please do follow up Indy’s Substack, the work of the Donut Economic Action Lab and everything that James and Opus are doing in Sheffield, nothing in here is easy. As Indy says at one point, we are in the middle of the structural war that we have been waging against ourselves each other and the living web of life for at least 2000 years, if not longer. But we are alive at the time when we can make a difference, when every single conversation that we have has the potential to open minds and hearts to a different way of being. So I hope this conversation has helped to open yours and that you can go out into the world and help to do the same for other people.

And if you know of anybody else who would be open to the conversation that is held here, then please do send them this link. And that’s it. From us and from the Festival of Debate. We’ll be back next week with another conversation at the usual time. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot to Alan Lowles, the very tight studios for the production to Lou Mayor for the video and the transcript to Faith Tilray for the website and for all of the work behind the scenes and for picking out the slack when I couldn’t.

And as ever, a huge thanks to you for your attention and your time, and for caring enough to listen. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we value every single moment that you give us. So that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you, and goodbye.

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