TSS - Towards Sustainable Society

What is TSS?

Towards Sustainable Society (TSS) is a free, open knowledge site about what a sustainable society could look like as a whole. It uses the Doughnut as its compass: a good life for all, between a social foundation that nobody should fall below and an ecological ceiling that no generation may break through.

Most Doughnut tools focus on one place, sector or audience. TSS tries to describe the whole society, and how its parts depend on each other.

How it is built

TSS describes society as four connected systems, with people at the centre and the planetary boundaries around them:

• The Ecological System: nature’s cycles, resources, resilience and tipping points, and the human footprint.
• The Economic System: money and how it is created, production and consumption, work, ownership and basic security, and growth.
• The Democratic System: power, elections, participation, rights, public debate and long-term decision-making.
• The Social and Cultural System: a good life, living conditions, norms and values, trust, and tensions in society.

Each system has around eight pages. The last page of each system describes what that system looks like in a sustainable society. In total the site has about 50 interlinked pages, organised like a wiki.

The Society Map on the start page is a clickable overview of the whole structure. Three framework pages explain how the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the planetary boundaries and Doughnut Economics fit together. The SDGs and the planetary boundaries are used to fill the social foundation and the ecological ceiling with concrete content.

How it puts Doughnut Economics into practice

TSS uses the Doughnut to test every part of society with the same question: does this help meet everyone’s needs within the means of the planet? The economic pages go further than most introductions. They explain how money is created, what role banks play, and how basic security and a sustainable use of money could work inside the Doughnut.

The aim is to make the Doughnut feel realistic as a long-term direction for a whole society, not only as an idea.

Who it is for

TSS is written in plain language for anyone who has grown up with the idea that endless GDP growth is the way forward. You do not need a background in economics to read it. It is also useful for:

• teachers and study groups who want a structured overview
• local groups who want to see how their work connects to the whole
• politicians and civil servants who want a shared picture to work from

TSS does not take sides with any political party. It describes how society works and which paths there are, not which path is the right one.

Languages and licence

TSS was written in Swedish and is also available in English. Swedish examples are kept and marked in the English version. Visitors can use their browser’s translation for other languages. All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, the same licence as the tools on this platform.

• English: https://en.towardssustainablesociety.org
• Swedish: https://sv.towardssustainablesociety.org