Cities & Regions: Let's Get Started [4 languages]

A guide for local governments to engage with Doughnut Economics, including 12 case studies, available in four languages

Posted by the DEAL Team April, 13, 2023 87 likes

About this guide

Version 2.0 (November 2024)
📢 UPDATE: The guide now available in English, Spanish, French and Brazilian Portuguese

We welcome community translations in all languages, if you're interested to or have the opportunity to translate the tool or part of it - please do get in touch.

Download the full guide in the links below:
'to view on screen' - small file, contains links to tools and external resources; choose spread-view in your PDF viewer for the best experience.
'to print' - big file, is higher resolution, and does not have any clickable links.

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This guide is for anyone working within or alongside local or regional government who is inspired by the concepts and tools of Doughnut Economics and wants to better understand how to start putting them into practice in their own place. It collects real-world approaches and examples that can be applied and adapted worldwide and at many scales - whether for a city or town, a village or rural region, a county or state. It is intended as a starting point for those who are new to Doughnut Economics, as well as those who are already familiar and engaging with the concepts.

We published the first version of this guide in 2023, and one year later, we published an updated version which includes 12 in-depth case studies of the journey, experiences and learnings generously shared by pioneering civil servants and leaders from Amsterdam (Netherlands), Brussels (Belgium), Copenhagen (Denmark), Grenoble (France), Valence Romans (France), Ipoh (Malaysia), Cornwall (UK), Glasgow (Scotland), Tomelilla (Sweden), Bad Nauheim (Germany), Nanaimo (Canada) and Barcelona (Spain).

Drawing from the principles of Doughnut Economics, from DEAL’s tools and methodologies and from the experiences of cities and regions, this guide brings together our most current understanding of how Doughnut Economics is being put into practice by local and regional governments, along with examples from places already in action. It lays out nine pathways for engaging with Doughnut Economics - from learning and testing, to developing metrics and strategy, to using the Doughnut as a unifying framework for policy-making.

Each pathway sets out a series of potential actions, examples from local and regional governments around the world, as well as key available tools and resources. These pathways are not a step-by-step approach, but rather a catalogue of possibilities - a library of options - allowing each mayor, councillor, head of department and ambitious civil servant to identify the possibilities and opportunities in their own locality. Most places will be exploring more than one pathway at the same time, the most ambitious ones may aim to engage with all of them.

Nine pathways for getting started with Doughnut Economics in local government

You can see a video of DEAL's Cities and Regions Lead Leonora Grcheva introducing the work of local governments and introducing the nine pathways for getting started that this guide sets (to get the slides from this video, go here).

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Learning and evolving this guide

We have now published the second version of this guide (November 2024), updating the examples and tools throughout, and including twelve case studies. We’ve kept the “nine pathways” that offers ways to get started, but these are in no way a definite and prescriptive list. There may be more, less, or quite different ones in a few years time - we invite all cities and regions to join us on our learning journey to find and share entry points for local adaptation and transformative action.

We hope to include more case studies in the next version, and while currently the majority of the case studies are Europe-based, as we see the ideas and practice beginning to spread more and more in different regions of the world, we hope that this will be reflected in the next version of the guide.

If you work within or with a local government and your work hasn’t been accurately represented in the guide, or hasn’t been shown at all and you would like to see it there, please let us know in the survey below or by getting in touch. If you work in a local government and have already started or are considering working with Doughnut Economics, and would like to join online peer-to-peer discussions and learning opportunities with local government peers from around the world, do get in touch with the DEAL team, selecting "Cities & Regions" in our contact form, and Leonora, our Cities&Regions Lead will be in touch.

If you have any feedback, questions or suggestions about the guide, or if you would like to suggest case studies or tools that should be included in a next version of it - please fill in this 2-question survey. We have limited capacity and resources for proof-reading - so if you find errors in the publication, in any of the languages, including parts of translations that you think could be improved - please get in touch.