The ringmaster

There are not many economists who have done courses on clowning and improvisation in order to communicate their theories more widely. But for Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, both became necessary after she hit on the idea of doing festival talks in the format of a circus. 

The Doughnut Circus – performed for the first time at the 2025 Resurgence Summer Camp – came about due to the location of a talk she gave earlier in the year at the Wilderness Festival. 

When she saw that her talk was to be located in a circus tent, she decided to make it much more playful and jokey than she had before. 

Empowers

“It just worked. People were laughing and I was riffing off them - I didn't know I could do this!” she recalls. "It was a really lovely experience of stepping into something because the space called for it.”

She immediately signed up for the courses in clowning and improvisation, planning to build on the idea for a talk at the Greenbelt festival. A chance finding of a red top hat in a vintage shop sealed the idea. 

At the circus, Raworth portrays the battle between two characters, Nature and Finance, which she believes is ‘almost the foundational tension of the world’.

She picks volunteers from the audience and provides them with costumes and props. Raworth tells the audience that “This is not a circ-me, or a circ-you, it’s a circ-us. And it takes all of us to make a circus”.

“I’ve learned that if you give people a hat and if you give them an object and you call them up on stage, it empowers them, it’s like giving them a mask so they can play another character,” she says.

Concentric

Not knowing in advance who the performers will be is ‘unnerving’, she admits, but she has learnt that, given a room of at least 50 people, there is always someone who can juggle, or do an acrobatic trick.

“I don't need to hire in any professional circus performers – it just celebrating the skills of everyday people, which are massive - it’s a really powerful metaphor to show us that all the skills we need are already here in the room,” she says. 

Raworth’s Doughnut model is now 13 years old. It was inspired by the Planetary Boundaries, a diagram drawn up by a group of researchers in Stockholm to identify the planet’s life-support systems from biodiversity to freshwater reserves, and the limits within which they need to remain to avoid irreversible damage. 

This built on Raworth’s experiences on a development fellowship in Zanzibar, working on the UN’s annual Human Development Report and in a research role at Oxfam. She saw that economies need to be designed to meet the needs of all people without destabilising environmental life-support systems. 

The ‘doughnut’ is the visual interpretation of this: it consists of two concentric rings - a social foundation and an ecological ceiling - with the space in between depicting the boundaries in which humanity can thrive. 

Localities

In early October, the doughnut was updated for 2025, following the first major stocktake of progress since 2017. Raworth worked with Andrew Fanning, research and data analysis lead at the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), an organisation that helps practitioners and communities translate theory into action, to transform the doughnut from a snapshot in a single year to a trends monitor.

They have also disaggregated the global doughnut into country clusters, revealing the extent to which wealthy countries drive most of the overshoot through the pursuit of endless GDP growth, while poorer countries bear the brunt of deprivation.

The work has been peer-reviewed and published in the scientific journal Nature, which will give clout to practitioners and communities looking to use the doughnut, Raworth says. 

“We’re thrilled - it gives very valuable credibility to all the practitioners who are using the doughnut around the world,” she says.

There are a growing number of these, with more than 50 local governments around the world that have incorporated doughnut economics into their vision for their localities, ranging from Grenoble in France, Cornwall and Glasgow in the UK, and Ipoh in Malaysia.  

Retrofitting

But governments are still wedded to the traditional idea of growth, not least in the UK where prime minister Keir Starmer has targeted securing the highest sustained growth in the G7, while chancellor Rachel Reeves’ focus on economic growth through infrastructure development has led to proposals to reduce environmental protections to boost housebuilding and airport expansion. 

“I’m really deeply frustrated and disappointed that our current government isn't taking up the opportunity to put out a vision of a thriving future for the UK, but rather falling back on very outdated growth-centric political narratives that I don't think win hearts and minds at all, leaving other political parties to do so in a far more alarming way,” she says. 

Promises of endless economic growth are not what motivates people, she says. “People want respect, they want belonging, they want good jobs and for the kids to go to good schools,” she says.

As an example of how the UK economy could be made more ‘doughnutty’ in the upcoming budget, Raworth points to the housing debate. “She could look at more effective use of existing housing stock to make it more affordable, rather than having a renter economy where housing is used as a speculative asset by the wealthy, rather than a human right for all,” she says.

The 20 per cent value added tax (VAT) rate levied on retrofitting or restoring existing building stock should be cut to level the costs compared to building new homes from scratch, on which no VAT is due, she says.

Outrageous

Protecting biodiversity when housebuilding should also be prioritised, for example, by requiring ‘swift bricks’ to be installed in all new homes, she adds.

“I’m going from very big to very specific and small,” she notes. “But essentially I'm saying that when we create housing, we retrofit first, and build in space for nature. All of these things would be more doughnutty.”

Raworth is a self-styled ‘renegade economist’, a reference to her rebellion against the mainstream neoclassical economics she was taught when studying economics at Oxford University.

Raworth has returned to the university as a senior teaching fellow in its Environmental Change Institute, and is also a professor of practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. 

But she has been ‘gobsmacked’ to find that most universities are still teaching the same traditional economics that has been the mainstream thinking for decades, which Raworth finds ‘extraordinary’ and ‘outrageous’. 

Mindset

“These are young people who today, seeing the challenges in the world, decide to dedicate their minds, their student fees, and their years of training to become economists because they want to use the tools of public policy to help transform the world, just as I did way back in the 1990s.

“And yet, given all that we know about climate and ecological breakdown, given all that we know about the failings of neoclassical economics, that is still the mindset that they’re being taught!” she fumes.

“We’re not equipping the leaders of 2050 with the concepts and mindset that they urgently need if they’re to have half a chance of transforming this century,” she adds. 

Many students around the world have recognised the outdated content of their courses, and have set up a network called Rethinking Economics demanding changes so they are taught an economic mindset more fitting to the times, she says. There has also been a rise in masters degrees in ecological economics, she notes. 

Changemakers

Raworth has also curated a series of materials for university professors to help lecturers introduce her concepts to their existing courses, or develop a new course. These have also been picked up by academics in other subjects such as development studies, architecture, political studies and civil engineering, she says.  

Despite resistance to ideas to replace GDP suggested by various scholars and analysts since the 1970s, Raworth is certain that a more sustainable economic model will ‘one day’ take over from today’s growth-centric model. The only question is when.

“Will our societies only embrace an economic model centred on human rights and planetary integrity once we have made it devastatingly clear to ourselves why sidelining these in economics was a deep mistake in the first place? 

“Along with many changemakers, I’m committed to making that shift sooner rather than later, through every route to change we can find,” she says.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and the chief reporter for The Ecologist. Find her on Bluesky @catearly.bsky.social.