Festival de las Economias del Bienestar

Exploring Doughnut Economics at the 2026 Wellbeing Economy Festival (Bogotá)

On 24 October 2026, the Colombian Network of Wellbeing Economies (Red Colombiana de Economías de Bienestar, RCEB) held its first Wellbeing Economy Festival at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. It was our way of joining Global Donut Days 2026. Across several fronts, we set out to answer one question: how do the ideas of Doughnut Economics speak to Colombian reality?

Why the Doughnut?

The RCEB was created to bring together organisations, communities and people who want to change how Colombia understands progress. We want to measure it by how much collective wellbeing it generates, and to look for economic models that make a better future possible. The Doughnut fits this vision of justice and wellbeing perfectly. It describes a social foundation that no one should fall below and an ecological ceiling we should not overshoot.

In a country that still depends on extractive models and carries deep social wounds, that idea can feel distant, even utopian. That is why we wanted to take it beyond academia, as DEAL’s “Communities and Art” stream proposes. We did it along three paths: art, projects that already practise alternative forms of progress, and a conversation between finance and education.

Art

We launched the art open call “Local Action, Global Connection” and invited artists, collectives and citizens to translate the Doughnut into a sensory language. In three weeks we received 31 works: music, theatre, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, printmaking, podcasts and installations. They came from Bogotá, the Sabana, Meta, Putumayo, the Caribbean coast and the Coffee Region.

The two winning works look at rural territory from the two sides of the Doughnut.

“Sumapaz en Cajas: Cartographies of Water and Mountain”, by Pilar Vargas, is a participatory installation made with soil pigments from the páramo, the high-Andean ecosystem. Visitors make their own prints using inks made from contaminated soil from the territory. The exercise reveals how this precious páramo, which sustains ecological chains essential to life, already carries the wounds of overextraction in its memory.

“ConSumo Cuidado” (a play on “consumption” and “I care”), by Natalia Agudelo (IBI Tekoa), is a series of pieces made from discarded objects and inspired by the natural wealth of the Cundinamarca–Boyacá highlands. The work critiques the consumerism that pushes us outside the Doughnut and proposes a shift towards Buen Vivir (Good Living) and more frugal ways of life. Through her work, the artist shares how her own life changed when she returned to the countryside and to conscious consumption. Some of her choices could seem “radical”, such as building her home with ecobricks.

Second path: projects already living inside the Doughnut

In parallel, we opened a call for organisations, collectives, businesses and communities running wellbeing economy initiatives, and received 69 applications. Without setting out to, we ended up with a map of experiences across Colombia, from La Guajira and the Sierra Nevada to Chocó, Cauca and the Amazon. The most common themes were the circular economy (45 projects), the social and solidarity economy (34), ecological restoration (30) and the care economy (27). In other words, economies that aim to be regenerative and distributive by design.

The two winning projects show this well:

Miss Celánea (Cali) is a conscious fashion movement. It has run 9 editions of its Second-Hand and New Economies Market and 11 Hilé gatherings, spaces for listening and creating around fashion, identity and climate justice. It works on the ceiling (less new clothing, more circularity) and on the foundation (community, popular and feminist economies) at the same time.
Pensar Verde (Editora 3 Ltda.) connects biodiversity, design and local economies in Bogotá, Chocó, Cesar and Huila. It has 7 fair trade agreements with producers and developed a fair-price calculator that includes costs the market usually hides, such as how dependent a producer is on a single product. It is a concrete bet on distributing value more fairly.

Choosing the winners was not the job of a single team. Seventeen member organisations evaluated the applications. Each one was read twice, using a shared rubric of impact, creativity and relevance. This was our way of practising the distributed governance the Doughnut calls for.

Third path: money and education

In the afternoon, we brought the Doughnut into two conversations.

The first, on regenerative investment, was moderated by ReFi Collective with Bioethos, NESsT Colombia and WWF. The underlying question was how to direct capital towards wellbeing without repeating extractive logics, and what tensions arise between the idea of limits and the idea of impact.

The second, on education for wellbeing economies, brought together Shambala, Páramo Savers, CSA Colombia and Universidad del Rosario. We discussed how to teach an economics that does not treat growth as its only horizon.

Alongside the panels, Acción Pública ran an activation. This organisation studies inequality and climate change, and is developing Melting Planet, a game built on collaboration and communication. Playing it opened up conversations about how liberal economic thinking puts competition first, and with it inequality. The alternative is cooperation, which feels less familiar because we are rarely taught to think in terms of shared resources and common benefits.

What did we learn?

First, that new models are already taking shape. Many of their creators have never heard of the Doughnut or of heterodox economics, yet they recognise the need to change what we call “progress”. Their models respect ecological limits and narrow the gaps of economic and social inequality in the country. We received 100 applications and 254 people registered for the festival. More than a third of them wrote to us from outside Bogotá, from 19 departments and 3 other countries.

Second, that the projects exist, but sustaining them is hard. Only 8 of the 69 projects describe themselves as financially self-sustaining. Living inside the Doughnut still comes at a cost, and this is where the Network has a role to play in accompanying them and connecting them with funders.

Thank you to DEAL for inviting us to Global Donut Days, to the 17 evaluating organisations, to the artists, to every project that applied, to the speakers, and to Universidad de los Andes for opening its doors to us.