Towards post-growth policymaking: Barriers and enablers for sustainable wellbeing initiatives

Providing wellbeing for all while safeguarding planetary boundaries may require governments to pursue post-growth policies. Previous empirical studies of sustainable wellbeing initiatives investigating enablers of and barriers to post-growth policymaking are either based on a small number of empirical cases or lack an explicit analytical framework. To better understand how post-growth policymaking could be fostered, we investigate 29 initiatives across governance scales in Europe, New Zealand, and Canada. We apply a framework that distinguishes polity, politics, and policy to analyze the data. We find that the main enablers and barriers relate to the economic growth paradigm, the organization of government, attitudes towards policymaking, political strategies, and policy tools and outcomes. Engaging in positive framings of post-growth visions to change narratives and building broad-based alliances could act as drivers. However, initiatives face a tension between the need to connect to broad audiences and a risk of co-optation by depolitization.