article · Nature Sustainability
Transforming economic systems is increasingly seen as necessary to address overlapping global crises. Although unconventional economic approaches aiming for human and planetary well-being offer transformative potential, their mainstream adoption is obstructed by intellectual lock-ins, vested interests, and a lack of unified discursive power to influence policy. A qualitative content analysis of 238 scientific and practical sources examined 38 alternative economic approaches to provide conceptual coherence. Across these approaches, ten core ecological, social, political economy, and holistic principles emerged. These encompass themes such as social-ecological embeddedness, limits to growth, regenerative design, equity, cooperation, and decolonisation. Reviewing the opportunities and barriers to using these ideas provides a consolidated basis for developing conceptual models, practical methodologies, and policy solutions, while highlighting the need to validate these principles further within global South contexts.
Current economic models struggle to resolve systemic environmental and social problems. By clarifying and combining the core ideas of dozens of alternative economic schools, this work provides a shared language and structured framework. This helps researchers, policymakers, and civic institutions build coordinated, coherent strategies aimed at long-term ecological and societal resilience.
This work represents early-stage conceptual research focused on macroeconomic principles rather than commercial products. It offers a framework that could inform future policy development, sustainability methodologies, and advisory tools for public sector bodies, international organisations, and development practitioners. The abstract does not indicate a direct commercial application pathway or technology readiness level.
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Abstract Transformation of economic systems is widely regarded as essential for tackling interacting global crises. Unconventional economic approaches seeking holistic human and planetary well-being have transformative potential, but mainstreaming them is hampered by vested interests and intellectual lock-ins. They are also diffuse and struggle to develop sufficient discursive power to gain more widespread traction in policy. To bring coherence, we undertake a qualitative content analysis of 238 document sources from science and practice. We identify ten ecological, social, political economy and holistic principles cutting across 38 economic approaches. They include: (1) social–ecological embeddedness and holistic well-being; (2) interdisciplinarity and complexity thinking; (3) limits to growth; (4) limited substitutability of natural capital; (5) regenerative design; (6) holistic perspectives of people and values; (7) equity, equality and justice; (8) relationality and social enfranchisement; (9) participation, deliberation and cooperation and (10) post-capitalism and decolonization. We also consider opportunities and barriers to applying these principles in the context of global crises. Our results can help consolidate transformative economic approaches and support future efforts to synthesize conceptual models, methodologies and policy solutions and to validate the identified principles more explicitly within global south contexts.
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DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01562-4
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