The question on how to achieve economic growth without destroying or depleting the natural capital stands stronger than ever as it is now a common admission that the erosion of natural capital will at some point put an end to welfare growth which will ultimately end GDP growth, meaning economic growth as a whole. Given the fact that economic growth corresponds to higher production rates in order to cover the needs of the population, it almost automatically equates to an uprising of pollution and depletion of natural resources. The various problems created by the growth paradigm has led to the development of other alternatives, namely the “a-growth” and “degrowth” paradigm. The interplay between economic growth and planetary boundaries is being heavily debated leading to questions such as whether is possible to reduce development to GDP or whether it should serve higher-level, instrumental social values (Adkisson, 2009) as well as whether downscaling the extent of economic activity could alleviate environmental pressures by utilizing a “steady-state economy” (Daly, 1991) where the “throughput” of material and energy does not exceed the planet’s capacity to regenerate these resources (Daly, 1991).

According to the “degrowth” paradigm consistency with biophysical boundaries is actually feasible if we manage to adequately downscale the economy. It has been said that degrowth is actually “a prosperous way down” (Odum and Odum, 2001). Van den Bergh and Kallis (2012) observe that material flows and CO2 emission reductions has so far occurred in countries that went through an economic decline, such as the ex-communist bloc in Europe, or to countries that relocated their consumer goods production to other countries (Peters et al. 2011). Additionally, Friedlingstain et al. (2010) point out that the recent economic crisis apart from recession and negative growth has also led to an absolute decline in CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, it is not viable for economies to repeatedly face negative growth in order to achieve positive outcomes in the alleviation of the environmental issues, which leads many to believe that an intentional, “socially sustainable economic degrowth” (Martinez-Alier, 2009) could possibly deliver the same positive results.

The aforementioned sustainable economic degrowth could possibly be achieved, according to degrowth proponents, through a “cap and share” (Douthwaite, 2011) system where global caps are introduced to declining resources, for instance CO2 emissions and oil. Additional measures would include a shift in the way the current economy works, meaning encompassing the concepts of work sharing -increasing employment by reducing working hours which in turn creates new jobs- (Jackson, 2009), and a remodeled social security system where the state is obliged to provide basic income as well as jobs, hence buffering the effects of recession and unemployment shall financial crises occur (Reventos 2007; Lawn 2009).             Although the concept of “prosperity without growth” (Jackson, 2009) has found many supporters, it has also been heavily criticized.

The first concern refers to regional distribution of per capita GDP. Jacob and Edenhofer (2014) observe that in a scenario where global income gets stabilized, the only ethically and politically correct decision would be to distribute it equally across countries. Even though a distribution like that would ensure a seven-fold per capita income increase for Sub-Saharan Africa it would also simultaneously result to an approximate 70 to 80 per cent cuts for the USA and the EU, cuts which would heavily impact not only the consumption rates, which appears to be the goal, but also the quality and level of healthcare, social security and education. Another criticism provided by Jacob and Edenhofer (2014) has to do with “economic efficiency”. In their example they present how a hypothetical reduction of CO2 emissions of 10 per cent resulted by the same amount of per capita GDP decrease, would reduce CO2 emissions by roughly 3.3 GtCO2 and global GDP by approximately US$7,000. Even though a decrease like that sounds promising, a scenario like the one described above would correspond to an approximate avoidance of US$2,100 per ton of CO2, “an order of magnitude above the most expensive technological mitigation options” (Jacob and Edenhofer, 2014).

Concerns such as the ones explained above have led many to consider that the problem actually lies on the fact that current discourse on the perplexity of economic growth and environmental concerns is heavily focused on positive economic growth as an end instead of a means to an end. What is being alternatively proposed has generally been termed as “a-growth” (Van den Bergh, 2011). Van den Bergh (2009) suggests that the GDP indicator is inefficient due to its incapability to capture social welfare. That is mainly because it focuses on costs instead of benefits of market related activities whilst at the same time it utterly excludes any activity that falls under the non-market category. Additionally, it seems to over extend the hypothesis that the higher the aggregation of individual incomes represented by GDP, the higher the societal happiness and welfare.

Empirically (Layard, 2005) this seems to fall far from the truth given the fact that individual welfare depends on a multitude of factors such as social status, effective adaption to physical and economic changes, stability and access to goods and services rather than the accumulation of them (Van den Bergh and Kallis, 2012). More specifically proponents of “a-growth” are not in favor of zero or negative growth. A-growth simply shifts the discourse’s focus from economic growth to social welfare thus making economic growth “desirable or undesirable only to the extent that it increases or decreases welfare, understood as the things that a given society values” (Jacob and Edenhofer, 2014).

Hence, the “a-growth” paradigm suggest that since per capita GDP is not a reliable indicator of social welfare or progress one should ignore it and instead focus on “sound environmental, social and economic policies independently of their effects on economic growth” (Van den Bergh and Kallis 2012). In turn ignoring the principles of the growth paradigm allows to cancel out the barriers imposed by it on the introduction of environmental policies. If one adopts a kind of agnosticism towards GDP, realizing environmental sustainability becomes much easier given that the dilemma of sacrificing growth or pursuing sustainability disappears all together.  Therefore, the first policy that would be implemented within an “a-growth” paradigm would be transitioning from fossil fuel to sources of renewable energy. A shift like that would naturally translate into the utilization of resources with a “lower energy concentration and productivity” which in turn would slow down the productivity as a whole, which is not a concern within the a-growth paradigm unlike the growth paradigm. Another important policy would be decreasing unemployment by sacrificing some productivity given that sacrificing growth is sometimes necessary in order to realize other goals, such as increasing employment (Jackson and Victor, 2011).

Proponents of the notion that GDP is somewhat of a problematic indicator due to the reasons explained above have argued that taking into account the multiple dimensions of social welfare requires a “dashboard” of welfare indicators. These indicators would in turn provide guidance for policy-making. As Jacob and Edenhofer (2014) observe, a practical realization of welfare diagnostics would be the establishment of “minimum thresholds” for capital stocks essential to welfare. These stocks would be linked to welfare as they would immediately affect access to education and health but also environmental preservation and protection. Public policy would then have to be in line with the minimum requirements indicated by the welfare diagnostics by ensuring “equitable access to sustainable development rather than formulas for emission reductions” (Stern, 2012) as well as the attainment of the rest material or non-material requirements.

A representative example of how welfare indicators could be implemented is the one designed by the Netherlands. In their model what is being proposed is a dashboard of welfare indicators under the names well-being “Here and Now”, well-being “Later”, well-being “Elsewhere” (Grin, Smits, Veraart and Lintsen, 2018). The indicators can be used to measure welfare in more than one dimensions, meaning that it takes under consideration the necessary capitals to “build up well-being”, intergenerational sustainability – ensuring abundance of per capita resources for the future generations- as well as “the transborder effects of sustainable development” meaning the impact countries can have in one another whilst creating their own well-being (Grin, Smits, Veraart and Lintsen, 2018).

Other alternative indicators to growth related to well-being are the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which assigns value to the life-sustaining functions of households, communities and the natural environment so that the destruction of these, and their replacement with commoditized substitutes, no longer appears as growth and gain (Talberth, 2008), the Gross National Happiness (GNH), the United Nations Human Development Index (UNHDI) that accounts for the effects of growth or the lack of it to people instead of economies as well as the Gross Sustainable Development Product (GSDP).

Another alternative to GDP that has been suggested that could constitute as a better measure for welfare is “net national product” (NNP). Unlike GDP, NNP “accounts for the accumulation or depletion of assets relevant for future consumption” (Jacob and Edenhofer, 2014) and therefore welfare. NNP is basically constructed around the notions of “genuine savings” and consumption. According to Hamilton and Clemens (1999) and Arrow et al. (2004) “genuine savings” could be calculated by a) pollution damages, b) investment in human capital, c) depreciation of the capital stock, and d) depletion of natural resources. If consumption and genuine savings are added, the sum creates the NNP indicator, where a country is getting poorer if the genuine savings are negative. Sustainable economic development would be achieved according to Hamilton (2014) if a country manages to maintain its levels of wealth and prevent them from decreasing. NNP has actually been recently embraced by the World Bank (2006, 2011) as well as by UNEP (2012). Even though NNP has brought forward the need to account for more than economic output it has also been criticized on conceptual and practical grounds, namely the incapability of market prices to approximate shadow prices when the economy is not on its optimal growth (Fleurbaey, 2009).

To sum up “sustainable development” seems to be a “wicked problem” given the fact that even though there is plentiful of theoretical concepts on how to achieve “growth” simultaneously with the preservation and protection of natural resources and the natural capital, in practice it is much more complicated as every possible solution seems to create other severe or less severe problems to a nation’s economy itself or other economies.