Doughnut Economics aims to rethink our economies to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. You can find out more by visiting About Doughnut Economics.

Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) is putting 21st century economic thinking into practice in order to create regenerative and distributive economies where people and planet thrive in balance. You can find out more by visiting About DEAL.

We are a dynamic team dedicated to turning the ideas of Doughnut Economics into action. Meet each member of the DEAL Team and find more out about our current projects.

Please see our Code of Conduct for a full description of what it means to be a member of the DEAL community, including what you can expect of us and what we ask of you in return. Only individuals can currently join the platform, not organisations.

Before creating a new local group, coalition or network, we recommend you consider the following three things:

1. connecting with other members of the DEAL Community who are in your location, and learning more about what’s already happening where you live. Find members near you

2. whether there are any existing like-minded networks that are already in a position to mobilise around these ideas such as Transition Network, WEAll Hubs and Extinction Rebellion.

3. whether you are able to dedicate the time and energy required to both create and sustain an effective and dynamic new network.

 

If, after considering these things, you would still like to create a new local group, we’d love to hear from you! We’ll then arrange a call to discuss the name of your group, along with the criteria for creating new groups, coalitions and networks.

 

Considerations for the name of your group:

 

 

 

 

Considerations for the principles of a group in practice:

 

 

 

We hope these boundaries help to unleash our collective creativity, much like the boundaries of the Doughnut itself. And in the spirit of learning and improving together, we may need to adjust these rules in the future. Updates will follow in our newsletters. If you already have suggestions that you think can help, please do not hesitate to contact us.

In designing and launching DEAL we have embraced openness by making the core concepts of Doughnut Economics available to changemakers for using and adapting in their own work in many areas, including education, town and cities, community organising, business, and government. 

At the same time, it is essential to balance that openness with ensuring integrity in how the concepts of Doughnut Economics are put into practice. This is especially critical in the field of business, defined here as all profit-making organisations, from social enterprise to multinational corporations - where the concept is most at risk of getting greenwashed or co-opted. If that were to happen, Doughnut Economics would be devalued and discredited for all changemakers, thus undermining its transformative potential.     

For this reason, we are carefully designing our strategic approach to engaging with business and we will soon publish DEAL’s Business Policy describing the conditions under which businesses can engage with the Doughnut.  We will also be recruiting a Business & Enterprise Lead in the coming months to lead and further develop this work. 

Until we are ready to publish DEAL’s Business Policy and engage with the interest that it creates, here is DEAL’s holding position regarding business (all profit-making organisations) engaging with the Doughnut and Doughnut Economics:     

         We will be developing new versions of this tool over the coming year, and adding further workshop guidelines.       

We realise these conditions may cause some frustration in the business-related community, especially amongst those companies that are pioneers in transforming business, but we hope it is clear that we have created them in order to safeguard the integrity of how the Doughnut is applied in the context of business, and to ensure that it can achieve its long-term potential as a tool for transformative action. 

Yes. Please see our Licensing Rules for full details.

We have published a detailed methodological guide, called Creating City Portraits, which describes the methods that were chosen to create 'Thriving City Portraits' in several cities, including Amsterdam, and it also identifies useful resources and alternative approaches that we came across in this process of downscaling the Doughnut to places.

The Doughnut diagram has been translated in over a dozen languages which you can find and download here.

 

Currently, most other content is only available in English, but translating the site, as well as content such as tools and stories, into other languages is a priority for us.

 

We are currently investigating the best way of supporting multiple languages on the site, as well as a process to best facilitate community contributions to translating the content.

 

If you are interested in helping translate content, or you have already done so and wish to share your work with the community, please do get in touch via the DEAL Contact Form and select the 'Translations' category.

 

In the meantime, many modern Internet browsers have translation features built in, or added via extensions, that can automatically machine translate the content of our web pages. For examples see Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

For uploading tools and stories, please see 'About Stories' and 'About Tools' for more details.

To add an event that's relevant to the DEAL community, head over to the Events and click 'Add an event', which includes posting guidelines.

If you have a question or want advice about a specific tool on our community platform we encourage you to post a comment on the tool itself where either the DEAL Team or our community can respond and everyone can learn from the responses.

Yes. DEAL takes your privacy very seriously. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information.

Yes! Please Contact Us and choose 'Platform' from the category selection and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Please Contact Us and choose 'Events' from the category selection to send us a message about any Doughnut-related events.

Yes! Here is a list of academic articles and reports that we update periodically. This list is not exhaustive, and please do let us know if you would like us to add additional sources by sending a message via the contact page and choose 'Research & Data Analysis' from the category options.

Not quite yet, but it will be. In the spirit of open design and creating commons resources, we do plan to release the source code for the DEAL website and Community Platform as soon as possible. We’ll share further news here, on social media and in our newsletter.

Not at present, however we think that a certification programme could have huge benefits for everyone: it would create confidence for consultants, for the recipients of their work and for DEAL. It would also protect the integrity of the concept and ensure that Doughnut Economics is used in a transformational way. We are currently exploring this idea and we will follow up with updates in the coming months. 

Kate and the rest of the DEAL Team's time is very full supporting the work of the global DEAL Community and so we are sorry to say that we don’t have the capacity to review or provide endorsements for books, nor are we currently able to write articles for journals and other publications.