Presentation short abstract

Combining Degrowth’s call for planned downscaling, the Foundational Economy’s emphasis on essential sectors, and Democratic Planning’s governance tools offers a framework for ecological democratic planning that can support fair socio-ecological transformations within planetary boundaries.

Presentation long abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic made the “essential economy” visible, as governments prioritized sectors that sustain everyday life—healthcare, food systems, utilities, social care and transport—while shutting down non-essentials. This exposed both the indispensability of foundational provisioning systems and their fragility after decades of neoliberal austerity (Foundational Economy Collective, 2020; Russell et al., 2022). At the same time, the climate crisis underscores the need to reorganize economic activity within planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023). This chapter brings together three strands of scholarship—Degrowth, the Foundational Economy (FE) and Democratic/Ecological Planning—to outline an integrated framework for socio-ecological transformation focused on essential provisioning.

Degrowth calls for a democratically planned downscaling of harmful, high-throughput sectors to open “metabolic space” for socially and environmentally beneficial activities (D’Alisa, 2014; Hickel, 2021). FE scholarship identifies the essential sectors that sustain everyday life, and its recent “FE 2.0” turn incorporates ecological limits into their governance (Calafati et al., 2021; Bärnthaler et al., 2021). Democratic and Ecological Planning contribute institutional architectures, participatory mechanisms and socio-metabolic tools for coordinating provisioning systems across scales (Beaucaire et al., 2023; Durand et al., 2024).

By mapping synergies across these literatures, the chapter suggests that planning for the essential economy can be approached through a conceptual bridge linking degrowth’s socio-ecological aims, FE’s identification of essential sectors and ecological planning’s governance tools. This convergence offers a lens for examining how essential provisioning might be organized within ecological limits and highlights avenues for future research grounded in ecological accounting and democratic deliberation.