Putting Ecological Economics into Practice: Lessons from the Doughnut Model in Barcelona

A recent study named “Ecological economics into action: Lessons from the Barcelona City doughnut” written by our researchers Federico Demaria and Enric Tello, alongside Claudio Cattaneo (Masaryk University), Mariana Morena Hanbuty Lemos (Universitat Autònomaa de Barcelona), Viktor Humpert (Research and Degrowth International) and Marc Montlleo (Environment Department, Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona) analyses how Barcelona has brought ecological economics principles to life through the practical application of Doughnut Economics at the city level.

Why this matters
Cities are at the heart of the sustainability transition. They concentrate people, infrastructure, and political power, but also consume a disproportionate share of global resources and generate significant environmental impacts. If the world is to stay within planetary boundaries while ensuring decent lives for all, cities must learn to operate within social and ecological limits. Yet most urban planning tools today remain rooted in economic growth paradigms (i.e. following the well-known motto: ‘the city as a growth machine’). This creates a gap between sustainability rhetoric and real-world governance. Bridging this gap requires new frameworks, indicators, and participatory tools. One such approach is Donut Economics.

New research from Barcelona
In a recent study, which was published in the journal Ecological Economics, the researchers examine what happens when the Donut Economics framework is applied to a real city: Barcelona. The article offers a detailed account of how they co-developed a “City Portrait” for Barcelona by adapting the methodology created by the Donut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) led by Kate Raworth and Andrew Fanning.

How the City Donut was created
They assessed the city’s performance across four interlinked lenses: Local Social, Local Ecological, Global Social, and Global Ecological. These dimensions combine the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the planetary boundaries framework. Through participatory workshops and expert consultations involving over 50 stakeholders, they selected and refined more than 150 indicators to evaluate Barcelona’s performance. Their methodological innovation was the construction of a “re-rolled donut” diagram that visually synthesises these dimensions in a single image, enabling users to identify key trade-offs and policy tensions (See Image).

The findings are sobering. While Barcelona performs reasonably well in areas such as healthcare and education, the city exceeds ecological thresholds in domains like greenhouse gas emissions, material use, and nitrogen cycles. Access to green space and environmental justice also emerged as major local gaps. More importantly, the global lenses revealed how urban consumption in Barcelona depends on resource-intensive supply chains, generating impacts well beyond city limits.

Science-policy challenges and insights
Developing the City Donut was not just a technical task. It required balancing scientific rigour, data availability, and political feasibility. Some indicators were excluded due to lack of localised data or their politically sensitive nature. Still, the process helped create space for more reflective conversations about urban priorities. The Donut functioned as a boundary object: a shared framework that enabled dialogue across disciplines and municipality departments, and opened up new thinking around justice, distribution, and global responsibility.

A contribution to the post-growth urban agenda
This study contributes to the emerging agenda of post-growth urbanism and ecological economics in practice. Cities are increasingly seen as sites of both unsustainability and transformation. In this context, the Barcelona City Donut offers a grounded example of how urban planning can shift from GDP-focused models to more holistic approaches to wellbeing and sustainability. In their previous work on urbanizing degrowth, the authors argued for the need to reframe urban governance using post-growth principles. The City Donut builds on this by offering a practical tool to implement such a shift, anchoring it in participatory governance, multi-dimensional indicators, and global-local accountability.

Implications for the MAPS project
This case study contributes directly to the MAPS project by advancing its core objective of identifying and testing post-growth pathways to sustainability. In particular, it offers a concrete example of how local governments can use alternative indicators and participatory processes to assess ecological and social performance without relying on GDP growth. The methodological innovations developed in this article – such as the integration of global and local dimensions and the participatory selection of indicators – provide valuable insights for MAPS’s ongoing work on sustainable wellbeing metrics, multi-level governance, and transformative policy tools.

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