Beyond Circular Economy

Towards a Democratic Economic Planning Framework for a Post-Growth Society (with Mario Pansera)

In the last decade, the circular economy (CE) has emerged as a dominant framework for reconciling economic activity with environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, an increasing number of scholars are questioning the concept arguing that it reproduces the same capitalist logics – growth, competition, market valuation, colonialism – that are very the sources of ecological degradation and social inequality. Drawing on this recent critique, in this paper we argue that the CE, as currently conceived, is insufficient for addressing the climate crisis and must be re-situated within a broader post-growth political economy. To this aim, we present a framework for democratic economic planning based on sufficiency, ecological limits, plural valuation, and participatory institutions. We analyse the political, institutional, and ideological challenges to its implementation, while identifying emerging opportunities amid global ecological and economic crises. This paper argues that new and innovative forms of democratic planning are not only feasible but essential for achieving sustainability and justice in a post-growth world. Participatory planning fed by social imagination, we contend, must be reclaimed as a tool for emancipation and ecological stewardship: planning is freedom!

1. Circular Economy: a technological fix to capitalist crises?

Over the past decade, the circular economy (CE) has emerged as a dominant paradigm in sustainability discourse. Promoted by institutions such as the European Union, multinational corporations, and prominent consultancy firms, the CE promises to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation by creating closed-loop systems, optimising resource use, and minimising waste. Celebrated for its apparent pragmatism, political neutrality, and free-market compatibility, the CE has been positioned as a win-win solution – reconciling the need to protect the environment with the imperative of economic growth. Yet, this seductive vision is not without its critics. A growing body of work interrogates the political and economic assumptions underpinning CE (Hossain et al., 2024). Genovese and Pansera (2021) argue that the imaginary of CE, as currently framed by European institutions and implemented by the corporate world, is firmly based on a neoliberal techno-managerial ideology. Far from challenging the logic of capital accumulation and the imperative of perpetual economic growth, imaginaries of circularity reinforce the idea that technology can solve all social and environmental problems. The politics of a long due ecological transition – i.e. who wins, who loses, by which mechanism of power – is reduced to the engineering of circular closed-loops, rebranding of old fashion waste management policies and new empty indicators of circularity. In this sense the concept of CE can be seen as the umpteenth buzzword that replaces those fallen into disgrace of sustainable development or green growth. The original idea of CE is said to lack scientific precision (Giampietro & Funtowicz, 2020), to fall short on social dimensions (Pansera et al., 2024) and to be more a symptom of our systemic crisis rather than a solution to it (Lowe and Genovese 2022). The works of Lowe and Genovese (2022) and Llorente Gonzalez et al. (2025), call for a return to political economy, where questions of power, production – who produces, what to produce and why – and ownership take centre stage. In this view, the transition toward sustainability is not just a matter of technical and behavioural changes, but above all a deep political transformation. It implies rethinking how economic priorities are set, how resources are allocated – not via price signals or profit incentives, but through democratic deliberation and public purpose. The current versions of CE, pursued by national and supra-national institutions, and popularised by most academics and practitioners, strikingly fail to address these fundamental issues. We think that a more radical proposition is needed; one that conceptualise our present social and environmental challenges in terms of a democratic restructuring of the economy, grounded in new forms of collective planning, non-market valuation, and a break from the ideology of endless economic growth.

This paper builds on recent critical contributions (such as Genovese et. al., 2024) to develop a framework for democratic economic planning in a post-growth context. Drawing from historical models (e.g., Soviet central planning, Yugoslav autogestion, Chile’s Cybersyn), contemporary experiments (e.g., transition towns, commons governance, ecological budgeting), and the theoretical insights of ecological economics and Marxist political economy, the paper argues that economic planning – far from being an outdated relic – is essential for any meaningful transition beyond circular capitalism. We begin by critically examining the failures of circular growth, then explore how a value-based critique opens space for new forms of production and coordination. We then reconstruct a framework for democratic economic planning, highlighting both its historical precedents and its modern potential. Finally, we consider the obstacles such a framework might face, and why – in a world of accelerating climate breakdown and deepening inequality – it is more urgent than ever.

2. The Illusion of Circular Growth

The CE is frequently framed as a pragmatic and optimistic strategy for reconciling economic development with ecological sustainability. By emphasising resource efficiency, design for reuse, and industrial symbiosis, CE narratives promise a decoupling of environmental impacts from GDP growth – a vision that has gained remarkable traction among policymakers, corporations, and international institutions. The European Commission’s 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan, for example, integrates CE principles into its Green Deal agenda, proposing it as the cornerstone of Europe’s ecological transition. Yet this consensus has encountered a growing body of critical scholarship, which questions the ideological underpinnings and material viability of the CE model. Genovese and Pansera (2021) argue that CE is best understood not as a break from neoliberal capitalism, but as one of its most recent and sophisticated adaptations. Rather than challenging the growth imperative, CE reconfigures it through new vocabularies – circularity, innovation, systems thinking – while maintaining the centrality of competitive markets, private property, and commodification.

One of the key issues which can highlight the fallibility of mainstream attitudes towards a CE is offered by Zink and Geyer (2017) work on the issue of rebound effect. Gains in efficiency and material circularity often lead to increased consumption, either through cost savings being reinvested into production or through consumers using “green” products more liberally, according to a modern version of the Jevons’ paradox. Thus, despite technological improvements, total resource throughput may remain constant or even increase. This echoes a long-standing problem in ecological modernisation: improvements at the micro or meso level do not necessarily translate into system-level sustainability. Genovese et al. (2024) take this argument further. In their analysis, rebound effects are not merely side effects to be managed – they are structurally embedded and even desirable within a capitalist logic. Rather than aiming to reduce or displace primary production and extraction, most circular business models are designed to complement them, expanding consumption through new value propositions (e.g., “eco-luxury,” green branding, rental platforms). These models do not aim to contract the economy in line with ecological limits; they seek to “grow the pie” by tapping into new market niches and increasing turnover through enhanced circular flows. In this context, the rebound is not a failure of implementation but a feature of the system: it reflects the fact that circularity is being pursued within an economy whose primary objective remains expansion, capital accumulation and profit, not sufficiency or sustainability. This directly undermines the CE’s potential to reduce environmental impacts in absolute terms. Genovese et al.’s (2024) critique exposes the incompatibility between market-driven circularity and the goals of ecological stabilisation, emphasising that any serious strategy must go beyond efficiency and address the growth imperative itself. Moreover, as exemplified by the work of the JUST2CE project (see Passaro et al., 2024), CE frameworks tend to externalize social and geopolitical questions; much of the burden of circular practices – such as recycling, remanufacturing, and hard-to-treat waste processing – could be shifted to Global South economies, where labour is cheaper and environmental regulations weaker. This asymmetry reproduces colonial patterns of resource extraction and waste displacement, undermining the supposed universality and equity of CE principles. In this light, the CE can be seen as a new form of “green extractivism” – one that masks its exploitative core through the language of circularity.

Genovese and Pansera (2020), Pansera et al. (2021) and Lowe and Genovese (2022) also critique the depoliticising tendency of mainstream CE discourse. Rather than fostering a public debate about how we should live, produce, and consume, the CE tends to frame sustainability as a managerial challenge, solvable through innovation, metrics, and lifecycle assessments. As also posited by Llorente Gonzalez et al. (2025), this managerialism bypasses democratic deliberation and forecloses more radical imaginaries of socio-ecological transformation which could drive the pursuit of more ambitious circular futures, which are deemed as unplausible both in academic and policy-making circles.

An additional concern is the reduction of value to market terms. The CE frequently emphasizes, through its R-imperatives, “value retention” or “value recovery,” but what counts as value is typically limited to what can be monetised – materials, products, productivity. This narrows the horizon of sustainability to that which can be profitable or cost-effective, excluding dimensions such as social equity, care work, cultural relevance, and ecological integrity that resist commodification. Lowe and Genovese (2022) explicitly challenge these assumptions, advocating for a plurality of value frameworks that recognize non-market goods, enjoyment of life and collective well-being as central to sustainability.

Finally, even the more ambitious and systemic interpretations of the CE suffer from a critical blind spot: the absence of macro-level coordination and planning. While CE initiatives often seek to promote industrial symbiosis, shared platforms, or closed-loop eco-design, these interventions tend to be retroactive, confined to end-of-pipe solutions that aim to optimize or retrofit existing production systems rather than reconfigure them altogether. Implementation remains overwhelmingly atomised, led by individual firms or sectors acting independently, without ex-ante democratic coordination, collective foresight, or alignment with broader ecological goals (Calzolari et al., 2025). Even where collaboration exists – such as in industrial clusters or shared infrastructure – it is rarely embedded in public planning mechanisms or governed by principles of equity and sufficiency (Valentine, 2024). This institutional fragmentation undermines the transformative potential of CE and reveals the lack of an integrative framework capable of steering socio-economic metabolism at scale. Circularity without planning remains an incomplete and depoliticised exercise – trapped within firm-level strategies and market incentives, and unable to address the systemic crises of resource overuse, global inequality, and ecological overshoot (Genovese et al., 2024; Calzolari et al., 2025); as claimed by Fragio and Carpintero (2024), over the past decade, academic and political discourse has focused on achieving a circular economy that closes material cycles and converts waste into resources that can be used again in the productive system without major economic changes, promoting expectations that cannot be realized. Without democratic planning that operates across territories, sectors, and scales, the CE risks becoming yet another managerial rationalisation of unsustainable business-as-usual, rather than a vehicle for meaningful socio-ecological transition.

These critiques converge on a central insight: CE, as currently operationalised, is not a transitional pathway to post-capitalism, but rather a stabilising mechanism within capitalism. It seeks to preserve the system by softening its externalities, not to transform the structural conditions – private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, competition, capital accumulation and growth – which generate unsustainability in the first place.

2.1 Circular Economy as passive revolution?

The CE and the succession of recurrent buzzwords sustainable development, green growth, green business etc, in their dominant institutional form, exemplifies what Antonio Gramsci termed a “passive revolution” – a top-down transformation that seeks to absorb and neutralize the radical energy of demands for systemic change. In Gramscian terms, a passive revolution occurs when ruling classes preempt the possibility of revolutionary rupture by co-opting emerging ideas, selectively integrating them into existing frameworks, and presenting reform as transformation. Examples of this can be found in the recent policy-making initiatives of the European Union, which tried to implement CE principles within the continental production system, without questioning its fundamental objectives. Genovese and Pansera (2020) draw implicitly on this concept in his critique of CE, arguing that circularity functions as a hegemonic project: it appropriates the language of sustainability, systems change, and regeneration, while leaving untouched the core structures of capitalist accumulation. CE initiatives, especially at the corporate and policy level, often tout innovation, efficiency, and “green growth” as solutions – but these are largely technocratic adjustments, not challenges to the underlying power relations or logic of production. In doing so, CE neutralizes deeper critiques of capitalism, substituting managerial solutions for political contestation (Martinez-Alier, 2022).

This Gramscian reading highlights how the CE performs a discursive containment function – a strategy by which dominant institutions absorb emerging critiques in order to preserve the status quo. By presenting environmental reform as fully compatible with market logics, technological innovation, and private enterprise, the CE effectively pre-empts and marginalizes more transformative alternatives. In doing so, it reframes ecological crisis not as a symptom of systemic dysfunction, but as a technical challenge to be managed through better design, efficiency, and corporate responsibility. This containment operates on multiple levels. First, it limits the horizon of political imagination, narrowing the space of acceptable solutions to those that align with growth and capital accumulation. Proposals grounded in degrowth, eco-socialism, or commons-based planning are rendered unnecessary or “unrealistic” within this framework, despite offering more coherent responses to the root causes of ecological degradation (Savini, 2025). Second, it relocates agency away from collective democratic processes and toward expert-led, technocratic domains – such as product designers, supply chain managers, and innovation consultants – thereby depoliticising what are inherently conflicts over value, power, and purpose (Pansera et al., 2021). Third, the CE serves to re-legitimate capitalism at a moment of deep structural crisis. As rising ecological awareness threatens the legitimacy of the neoliberal order, circularity becomes a means of absorbing dissent, rebranding corporate practices, and reinforcing the idea that capitalism can reform itself indefinitely (Giampietro & Funtowicz, 2020). In this way, the CE acts not as a rupture with business-as-usual but as a soft stabilizer – a way of renewing consent and forestalling deeper structural change.

2.2 Supply chains – externalising impact for capitalism continuity

In mainstream CE discourse a central role is played by supply chains, which have been recognised as building blocks for the transition towards a CE (Genovese et al., 2017). Supply chains are framed as technical systems to be optimised – through digitalisation, traceability, or lifecycle analysis – while remaining within a growth-driven paradigm. Calzolari et al. (2025) challenge this instrumental view, arguing that global supply chains, coordinated by large Multi-National Enterprises, are not neutral logistical networks but deeply political structures that enable ecological degradation, labour exploitation, and socio-economic inequality. They are the logistical architecture of global capitalism, extending just-in-time production and resource extraction into increasingly fragile planetary systems. Even when these complex systems implement CE practices, they are often of a tokenistic nature. As such, any serious transition to a sustainable economy must confront the question of how supply chains are governed, for whom they are designed, and what ends they serve.

In the dominant CE paradigm, supply chains are seen as sites to increase efficiency, enforce traceability, reduce and recycle waste, repurpose by-products and reduce carbon emissions. But in reality, this apolitical depiction hides the fact that supply chains are the materialization of the endless search of capital for cheap labour, deregulated access to resources, and just-in-time control of commodity flows. They operate by externalising emissions, waste and labour exploitation around the globe taking advantage of institutional voids, loose environmental and labour regulation and geopolitical instability. At the same time, vast and highly complex global supply chains separate production and consumption preventing consumers (and firms) to realise the full social and ecological costs of goods and services. No matter how circular these planetary networks can become, as long as they will be embedded in a global economic system that craves for endless growth they are doomed to reshuffle social unrest and environmental destruction around the globe.

We think that this destructive paradigm can be only opposed by a post-growth imaginary that implies a democratically planned reduction of unsuitable production to levels that are compatible with the reproduction of local ecosystems (Kallis et al., 2025). Such post-growth transformation not only requires imaging new forms of organizing production but also innovative networks of supply and logistical and coordinative structures that link them. Post-growth supply chains should emerge – not as slimmed-down versions of the current models – but as deliberately reconfigured infrastructures of solidarity, oriented toward sufficiency, justice, and resilience. This means shortening supply chains, increasing local and regional provisioning, and embedding logistics in participatory governance structures. Supply chains would no longer serve the interests of cost efficiency and capital circulation, but instead function as mechanisms of democratic coordination among post-growth enterprises. This shift is not without contradictions. In the current economic system, even post-growth-oriented firms are compelled to operate within markets dominated by growth imperatives. They are compelled to source components, materials, and services from partners who may not share ecological or social commitments. This creates tensions: the principles guiding the post-growth firm – sufficiency, equity, low throughput – may clash with the practices of their upstream or downstream suppliers. Infrastructural entanglement with the capitalist economy can limit the autonomy of post-growth enterprises, at least in the short term (Pansera & Fressoli, 2021).

2.3 Reclaiming CE for a post-growth transformation

Mainstream conceptualisations of CE can be seen as a form of eco-modernism (Llorente Gonzalez et al., 2025), a top-down strategy in which superficial innovation masks continuity. In this light, the CE is not an emancipatory project but a strategic containment device, designed to manage ecological crisis without challenging the social relations that produce it. Breaking this cycle requires not only exposing the limits of circular reformism, but also constructing alternative political-economic imaginaries – rooted in democratic planning, sufficiency, and ecological justice. Our task is not to reject the language of circularity altogether, but to reclaim it from its passive-revolutionary form – to radicalize its content, democratize its governance, and embed it within a broader vision of post-capitalist transformation. If CE is to be more than a greenwashing tool, it must be placed within a broader critique of capitalism and a vision of democratic, post-growth transformation. Our work thus serves not merely to reject CE, but to redirect its energy: toward systems of collective ownership, planned sufficiency, ecological ethics, and participatory governance. The next sections will explore what such a redirection could look like, beginning with a rethinking of value and production.

3. Value, Production, and Labour – Rethinking Economic Fundamentals

A fundamental step to start imagining a post-growth democratically planned circularity is to engage with the concept of value and valuing. What do we value, and why? Is a key question in a critical new reformulation of circularity (Lowe and Genovese 2022). Business-as-usual CE is generally founded in neoclassic economic logic, which assumes that value is best measured through exchange in markets. Circular practices are thus validated insofar as they increase productivity, reduce costs, or extend the life of commodities in ways that remain profitable. But such assumptions severely limit the kind of transformation needed for a just and sustainable economy. Lowe and Genovese (2022) argue that CE discourse lacks a coherent or critical understanding of value. They show how mainstream approaches borrow from neoclassical economics, where value is derived from subjective preferences and market exchange. This leads to a commodification of sustainability: things are worth preserving not because they are socially or ecologically meaningful, but because they have monetary utility. Circularity becomes just another input into a profit-maximising system.Genovese and Lowe (2022) contend that a sustainable and democratic economy cannot rest on this logic. Instead, they suggest a pluralistic approach to value – one that integrates ethical, social, ecological, and use-based dimensions. Here, the focus shifts from exchange value (what can be sold) to use value (what satisfies real needs) and intrinsic value (what has worth regardless of market logic). This reframing opens the door to alternative economic models in which care, cooperation, ecological stewardship, and collective well-being are central. To make this conceptual shift, we can draw on rich traditions from Marxist political economy and ecological economics, both of which offer deeper critiques of capitalist production and the organisation of labour. From a Marxian perspective, capitalism is not simply a system of exchange, but a mode of production that transforms human labour and nature into commodities for the sake of surplus value. The CE, in this context, does not escape this dynamic; it merely reorganizes inputs and outputs without questioning who owns the means of production, who controls decisions, and what is being produced, for whom, and why. Rather than fixating on waste reduction or design efficiencies, a post-capitalist economy should start from a different premise: that economic activity should be organised around the fulfilment of human and ecological needs, not profit. This means radically rethinking production itself. Not all production is desirable, nor is all consumption meaningful. A democratically planned economy would ask: what goods and services are socially necessary? How can they be produced with minimal environmental impact? Who decides, and under what criteria?

The answers to these questions depend on reclaiming labour as a site of democratic agency. In the current system, workers have little control over what is produced or how; decisions are made by managers, shareholders, and market signals. A sustainable transformation requires that workers and communities collectively participate in shaping economic priorities. This points toward labour-managed firms, cooperative planning, and participatory governance structures, where labour is no longer subordinated to capital but becomes a vehicle for ecological and social flourishing.

Here, we can also find resonance with the ecological economists’ call for a “steady-state economy”, where production is limited by biophysical boundaries, which can be interpreted as binding constraints, and oriented toward sufficiency rather than accumulation. Such an economy would de-emphasize GDP growth and instead focus on metrics like social equity, health, leisure time, biodiversity, and resource resilience. The value of an economic activity would not be determined by market profitability, but by its contribution to the common good. Importantly, this also means de-centring work as the core of human life. In a post-growth society, automation, digital tools, and collective planning could reduce the time needed for socially necessary labour, freeing individuals for education, care, and political participation. Our approach is not about preserving jobs for their own sake, but about redefining what counts as meaningful activity within a socially just and ecologically safe society.

In sum, the transition away from circular capitalism requires not just new technologies or design paradigms, but a revaluation of value itself. We must move beyond the fetishism of efficiency and instead ask: what is worth producing? For whom? And under whose control? In the next section, we turn to the question of how such decisions might be coordinated, through democratic economic planning, rooted in both historical precedent and contemporary innovation.

4. Democratic Planning – Historical Lessons and Contemporary Relevance

In response to the ecological and social failures of market-based circularity, Genovese et al. (2024) call for a renewed focus on economic planning – not in its authoritarian or technocratic forms, but as a democratic, participatory process of coordinating production, distribution, and consumption in line with collective goals. Planning, in this sense, is not the opposite of freedom, but its precondition. Planning is freedom, as it enables societies to deliberate over what kind of economy they want, and to structure it accordingly. As Adaman and Devine (2022) work makes clear, if sustainability is to be real, it must be planned – and it must be planned democratically. While planning has often been caricatured – particularly in neoliberal discourse – as inefficient, bureaucratic, or even totalitarian, history provides a more nuanced set of lessons. Far from being monolithic, past planning models offer diverse and instructive insights into what works, what does not, and how planning might be reimagined for a post-growth world.

4.1 The Soviet Model: Scale Without Participation

Perhaps the most iconic example of economic planning is the Soviet Union’s command economy. Central planning allowed for rapid industrialisation, infrastructure development, and basic provisioning (e.g., universal healthcare, education, housing). However, the Soviet model was marred by its top-down structure, lack of democratic input, and environmental disregard (Tremblay-Pepin, 2022). The economy was managed through central ministries and five-year plans, with production targets set by bureaucrats rather than shaped through participatory processes. We do not advocate for a return to Soviet-style planning. However, we must be clear that the failures of the Soviet model are not inherent to planning per se, but rather to its centralised execution. It conflated planning with state control, and in doing so, stifled innovation, feedback, and public engagement. As a result, the Soviet experience is less a model to emulate than a cautionary tale about the dangers of planning without wider societal involvement.

4.2 Yugoslav Self-Management: A Participatory Alternative

A more compelling example is the Yugoslav model of workers’ self-management. Beginning in the 1950s, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia introduced a system in which enterprises were run by elected workers’ councils, which determined investment, production goals, and internal operations (Santo, 2024). This system represented an attempt to decentralize economic decision-making, while retaining planning as a framework for coordination. The Yugoslav experience shows that planning and participation can coexist. Although the system faced limitations – such as regional inequalities and market pressures creeping back in – it demonstrated the potential for democratic economic structures. The need for worker agency, cooperative ownership, and decentralised governance aligns closely with the philosophy of self-management, at the heart of the Yugoslav system.

4.3 Cybersyn: Planning Through Technology and Feedback

One of the most forward-thinking planning experiments occurred in Chile under Salvador Allende, through the Cybersyn project (1971–1973). Developed with the help of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, Cybersyn aimed to use early networked computing and real-time data to manage Chile’s nationalised industries (Espejo, 2014). It featured a system of telex machines in factories, a real-time operations room, and a focus on recursive feedback loops – all geared toward responsive, participatory economic coordination. Although short-lived (terminated by the 1973 coup), Cybersyn remains a source of inspiration. It suggests that planning need not be rigid or hierarchical; instead, it can be adaptive, distributed, and technologically sophisticated. Socialists often refers to Cybersyn as a model of how information technology – when used democratically – can support horizontal planning structures and rapid social learning (Espejo, 2022).

4.4 Historical socialist planning and environmental issues

While historical planning frameworks demonstrated important capacities for economic coordination and social provisioning, their approaches to ecological issues were often limited or contradictory. In the Soviet Union, central planning enabled rapid industrialisation and mass access to basic services, but it was overwhelmingly guided by productivist imperatives, with little regard for environmental limits. Nature was treated primarily as an input to be extracted and processed, leading to severe pollution, ecological degradation, and catastrophic outcomes such as the Aral Sea collapse. The planning apparatus lacked both the ecological awareness and the participatory mechanisms needed to prevent or respond to such outcomes. However, despite its environmental failures, the Soviet model also contained certain technical features that could be revalorised in contemporary democratic planning frameworks. Notably, Soviet planners relied on physical accounting systems, including material flow analysis and mass balances (Montias, 1959) , in order to plan production, along with a detailed description of input-output relations characterising supply networks. These non-monetary accounting methods allowed for a degree of resource tracking and systemic coordination that today’s market economies – governed by price signals and financial metrics – often lack. In a post-growth context, where ecological integrity and resource sufficiency must replace GDP as guiding metrics, such tools could form the basis for biophysically grounded planning oriented toward ecological limits.

In contrast, the Yugoslav self-management model, while more decentralised and participatory, struggled to embed ecological concerns into its federated enterprise structures. Environmental protection was often subordinated to inter-republic competitiveness and enterprise-level profitability. The lack of binding ecological coordination mechanisms limited its capacity to act on planetary concerns. The Cybersyn project in Chile, although cut short, marked a conceptual advance in this regard. Drawing on cybernetic theory, it envisioned planning as a real-time, adaptive system, using recursive feedback and system homeostasis to manage complexity. Had it developed further, it could have integrated environmental data into decision-making, laying the groundwork for ecologically dynamic governance. Taken together, these experiences underscore a key lesson: democratic planning must be ecologically literate and materially grounded. It must move beyond both the extractivist errors of centralised industrialism and the ecological vagueness of market mechanisms, incorporating non-monetary valuation, physical accounting, and participatory governance to align production with planetary boundaries and collective need.

4.5 Planning in the Present: From Municipalism to Commons

Beyond historical models, planning is very much alive today – though often at smaller scales and outside the state. Contemporary movements such as Participatory Budgeting, Transition Towns, and municipalist platforms (e.g. Barcelona en Comú) all involve communities making collective decisions about resource allocation, infrastructure, and development priorities. Similarly, experiments in commons governance – like community energy projects, food cooperatives, and digital knowledge commons – represent efforts to coordinate production and access without markets or hierarchy. These models offer a bottom-up alternative to both neoliberal individualism and state-centric bureaucracy. We see such practices as essential building blocks for a larger democratic planning framework, one that can scale through federated structures and technological coordination without losing local autonomy.

4.6 Contemporary capitalist planning

It is important to recognise that planning is not absent in capitalist economies. On the contrary, it is alive and highly sophisticated, but it is conducted by private actors to serve capital accumulation, not collective well-being. Corporations such as Amazon and Walmart engage in forms of planning that rival, and in some cases surpass, the logistical complexity of state institutions (Phillips and Rozworski, 2019). These firms deploy advanced operational research methods, including machine learning, network optimisation, inventory control algorithms, and real-time data analytics, in order to coordinate global supply chains spanning hundreds of countries and millions of workers. Their capacity to forecast demand, route goods, and reconfigure production in response to disruptions demonstrates that large-scale economic coordination is entirely feasible. However, under capitalism, it is mobilised for efficiency, profit, and competitive advantage, not democratic or ecological aims. The irony is that capitalism plans, but only for capital. These mega-firms exhibit a form of privatised central planning on a planetary scale (Genovese et al., 2024), commanding resources and supply chains, influencing labour markets, and shaping consumer behaviour in ways that mimic the functions of nation-states. Yet unlike public planning, corporate planning is opaque, undemocratic, and driven by metrics such as profitability, throughput times, cost minimisation, and market dominance.

This reveals that the question is not whether planning is possible or not. Technical advances in contemporary supply chain management demonstrate the full feasibility of planning. These experiences also show that, importantly, the computational limitations that constrained earlier socialist economic planning efforts – such as those encountered in the Soviet Union or even in Chile’s Cybersyn project – are far less binding today. The advent of distributed computing, open-source modelling tools, digital platforms, and real-time data systems makes it technically feasible to manage and coordinate complex socio-economic systems in ways that are adaptive, transparent, and participatory. This enhanced computational capacity, when coupled with democratic institutions and ecological priorities, could enable a new generation of planning mechanisms—ones capable of navigating complexity without replicating the bureaucratic rigidities or ecological blind spots of past attempts. The real question is: who plans, for whom, and toward what ends. A democratic planning framework would reclaim these capacities for public use, redeploying tools of coordination and optimisation toward goals of sufficiency, equity, and ecological regeneration.

5. A Framework for Democratic Planning in the Post-Growth Transition

If the CE cannot meaningfully address ecological collapse or social injustice within the logic of free-markets and growth, then an alternative framework must be developed – one that replaces commodified sustainability with democratic decision-making, and profit-driven production with collective sufficiency. This section outlines a potential planning framework grounded in recent eco-socialist critiques, enriched by ecological economics, historical experiences, and contemporary grassroots innovations. Our vision of planning is thus neither nostalgic nor utopian. It draws pragmatically from past experiences while addressing the needs of the present: climate breakdown, social fragmentation, economic precarity. It is planning not for domination, but for emancipation – a means of collectively shaping a just, sustainable future.

5.1 Core Principles of Democratic Planning

The transition to a post-growth society demands planning not as top-down control but as deliberative coordination, oriented toward meeting real needs within ecological limits. This involves a radical transformation of institutions, values, and economic mechanisms – starting with the core principles that guide planning itself (Barlow et al., 2022). These can be summarised as follows.

– Sufficiency Over Growth: A democratic planning should shifts from efficiency toward sufficiency. It asks: what do people truly need to live flourishing lives, and how can these needs be met without exhausting the Earth’s systems? It is clear that sustainability is incompatible with an economy that endlessly expands; planning must therefore constrain total production to remain within planetary boundaries.

– Ecological Integrity: Planning must be ecologically literate, integrating biophysical indicators into every aspect of decision-making. This includes carbon budgets, biodiversity targets, land use thresholds, and material throughput ceilings. Inspired by ecological economists like Herman Daly, our framework insists on binding environmental constraints – not just as externalities to be priced, but as limits to be collectively respected.

– Participatory Democracy: At the heart of our framework is the conviction that those affected by economic decisions must participate in them. Planning must be democratic in form and substance: deliberative assemblies, worker councils, citizen panels should replace boardrooms and private equity as sites of economic governance. This reclaims planning from technocracy and recentres it on popular sovereignty. Digital tools, platforms, and networks can support real-time feedback, citizen engagement, and distributed coordination – if governed democratically. Decisions should be taken at the most local level possible, with coordination mechanisms at higher levels only when necessary.

– Plural Valuation: A post-growth planning framework must break with the reductionist logic of monetary value. Building upon the seminal work of Martinez-Alier et al. (1998), Genovese and Lowe (2022) argue for plural value systems that recognize the importance of use-value, ecological health, cultural meaning, and care work. Planning institutions must develop alternative metrics of progress and well-being, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), the Happy Planet Index (HPI), also encouraging the development and adoption of tailored community indicators reflecting local priorities.

5.2 Institutional Architecture

A democratic planning framework requires nested structures—coordinated across scales but grounded in local autonomy. These can be summarised as follows:

– Local Planning Assemblies : At the base are territorial units (municipalities, neighbourhoods, rural districts) where residents deliberate on key questions of provisioning: food, housing, transport, energy, care. These assemblies should be composed of randomly selected and elected citizens, facilitated by public institutions, and supported by participatory tools (e.g., citizen juries, open forums, digital platforms).

– Sectoral Councils and Worker Cooperatives: In the productive sphere, worker-managed cooperatives replace profit-maximising firms. Coordinated by sectoral councils, these bodies determine production volumes, resource allocations, and technological needs based on social utility rather than market demand. These entities recall the self-management councils of Yugoslavia or the economic committees envisioned in Chile’s Cybersyn project, but updated with modern tools for coordination.

– Planning Federations: Above the local and sectoral level, regional and national planning federations synthesize proposals and mediate conflicts between sectors and territories. These bodies aggregate knowledge, monitor ecological indicators, and ensure coherence across scales – similar to what Soviet Gosplan attempted, but decentralised, participatory, and ecologically bounded. A compelling example of what we conceptualise as a planning federation can be found in the CE-centric quintuple-helix model proposed by Arsova et al. (2021). Although initially designed within the CE paradigm, the model embodies key characteristics of a democratic planning institution: stakeholder deliberation, territorial grounding, ecological centrality, and institutional hybridity.

– Trade Unions: A fully realised democratic planning framework must include the active participation of trade unions as central institutional actors in the governance of production, distribution, and labour policy. Rather than being marginalised or reduced to consultative roles – as is often the case in neoliberal models – unions should be integrated into sectoral councils, planning federations, and workplace-level governance. Drawing from traditions of labour self-management, we envision unions not just as defenders of wages or working conditions, but as co-governors of economic strategy, helping to shape what is produced, how it is produced, and for whom. Within worker-managed cooperatives and democratic supply chains, unions would ensure that labour rights, occupational health, and social reproduction are embedded in production planning, not treated as externalities. At the macro level, union federations could contribute to national and regional planning assemblies, offering strategic input on employment transitions, reskilling for ecological sectors, and the phasing out of unsustainable industries. In this vision, unions act as both vehicles of economic democracy and bridges between workplace knowledge and collective planning, reinforcing the legitimacy and accountability of the system. Moreover, their transnational networks position them as key players in articulating just transition policies that link post-growth goals with social protection, particularly in carbon-intensive or precarious sectors. Without trade unions as core agents of deliberation and coordination, democratic planning risks losing its anchoring in class power, labour justice, and transformative capacity.

– Digital Infrastructure: Democratic planning in the 21st century must leverage technological tools not to surveil, but to empower. Inspired by the legacy of Cybersyn, our framework would include open-source digital platforms for real-time data sharing, participatory modeling, and feedback systems that connect local decisions with broader ecological and social outcomes.

5.3 Coordinating Post-Growth Provisioning

The key function of democratic planning is to match societal needs with available resources in a way that respects both social justice and ecological limits. The priorities of a democratically planned post-growth economic system should be the following ones:

– Setting Social and Ecological Targets: Through deliberative processes and scientific expertise, societies would define basic needs (e.g. nutritious food, adequate housing, clean energy, mobility, education, healthcare) and set maximum levels of resource use (e.g. material footprint per capita). These targets anchor the planning process and guide prioritisation.

– Allocating Labour and Resources: Instead of market signals, participatory budgeting and needs assessments inform how labour and materials are distributed across sectors. Labour is no longer commodified, but coordinated through solidarity-based systems that ensure social contribution and fair distribution of tasks.

– Decommodifying Key Sectors: Essential sectors – such as health, energy, housing, water, and public transport – are removed from market dynamics and organised as commons or public services. Their management is guided by social mandates, not profitability. This is already partially visible in successful municipal remunicipalisation efforts (e.g. water services in Paris, energy in Barcelona), which the degrowth movement identifies as microcosms of a possible transition.

– Limiting Unnecessary Production: A democratic planning system would actively reduce or eliminate production of luxury goods, obsolescent technologies, or fossil-based commodities that serve no public need. This marks a break with consumerism and redirects labour and resources toward socially useful and ecologically regenerative work.

– Post-growth commodity chains: Alternative federated supply networks, governed democratically, should be set up which pool resources, information, and capabilities across post-growth firms and territories. These could be supported by public institutions, planning federations, or digital cooperatives that provide shared platforms for procurement, distribution, and materials management – ensuring that coordination happens according to social need and ecological criteria, rather than market price. Ultimately, the transition toward post-growth supply chains is not merely a technical redesign; it is a political and institutional struggle to reclaim coordination from the logic of capital. It requires not only new practices within firms, but also new systems of inter-firm cooperation, collective ownership of infrastructure, and planning beyond the firm – guided by values of reciprocity, transparency, and ecological stewardship. Logistics becomes not a hidden engine of extraction, but a visible infrastructure of care. Moving toward post-growth supply chains means more than reducing emissions or improving efficiency. It requires a re-territorialisation of production, prioritising local and regional provisioning systems that reduce dependency on long, vulnerable, and extractive networks. Supply chains must be redesigned not to serve capital mobility and cost reduction, but to meet social needs within ecological limits. This entails shortening production circuits, democratising logistical governance, and integrating supply chain decisions into broader frameworks of democratic planning and sufficiency-based economics. Rather than chasing perpetual optimisation, post-growth supply chains would focus on resilience, equity, transparency, and the ethical distribution of resources – reclaiming logistics as a public good aligned with socio-ecological transformation.

5.5 A Culture of Planning

Finally, planning is not just technical – it is cultural and political. One of the main challenges is shifting public consciousness away from individualistic, competitive, growth-oriented paradigms and toward a collective ethic of care, sufficiency, and stewardship. Education, media, and institutions must support a new social imaginary – one in which planning is seen not as restriction, but as collective empowerment. The goal is not to blueprint society from above, but to democratize economic coordination so that people can shape their own futures, together.

6. Obstacles and Opportunities

While the case for democratic economic planning is gaining intellectual momentum, its implementation faces significant obstacles – political, institutional, and ideological. We are aware that the transition to a post-growth, democratically planned economy is not merely a technical matter but a deeply contested political project. Any serious engagement with planning must therefore confront both the forces of resistance and the windows of opportunity that define our current historical moment. In the following section, we will examine the major obstacles to this transition – including political resistance, institutional inertia, and ideological capture – and explore why the current moment presents a unique opportunity for democratic planning to re-enter public imagination.

6.1 Obstacles: The Persistence of Capitalist Institutions

The most immediate barrier is the entrenchment of capitalist institutions: private property, profit-driven firms, global supply chains, and state policies structured that support growth. These institutions are not passive; they are actively defended by powerful interests – corporations, financial actors, technocratic elites – who benefit from the status quo. Planning challenges the very foundations of their control: over resources, labour, production, and investment. Moreover, mainstream political discourse is still deeply embedded in the language of markets and competitiveness. Even progressive parties often promote CE initiatives as “business opportunities,” reinforcing the idea that environmental and social goals must remain subservient to economic growth. This makes it difficult to articulate planning as an emancipatory rather than regressive idea. The bureaucratic inertia of existing states also presents a challenge. Most public institutions have been shaped by decades of neoliberal reforms, outsourcing, and performance management metrics aligned with market efficiency. Reorienting these structures toward participatory planning will require not just policy change, but institutional transformation and capacity-building. Finally, ideological resistance to planning runs deep. After decades of anti-communist propaganda, “planning” is often equated with inefficiency, authoritarianism, or technocratic overreach. Overcoming this legacy means building a new narrative, one that redefines planning as democratic, bottom-up, and oriented toward well-being rather than control.

6.2 Opportunities: Crisis as a Catalyst for Transition

Despite these obstacles, we argue that crisis opens space for systemic rethinking and imagination. The intersecting emergencies of our time – climate breakdown, energy instability, pandemic disruption, geopolitical tension and rising inequality – have exposed the failures of the market to ensure resilience, justice, or ecological balance. In this context, planning is returning at the centre of political imagination – not only in radical academic circles but also among policymakers exploring mission-oriented innovation, Green New Deals, and just transition frameworks. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, saw governments worldwide suspend market logics to mobilize resources, regulate supply chains, and provide income support. Though temporary, these actions proved that planning is possible – even under capitalism – when political will aligns with social urgency.

At the grassroots level, experiments in commons governance, community provisioning, cooperative economies, and digital solidarity platforms continue to grow. These initiatives prefigure the architecture of a democratically planned society, showing that such systems are not only imaginable but already partially in motion. Perhaps most importantly, younger generations – facing ecological collapse and economic precarity – are increasingly disillusioned with market logics and open to alternative visions. Movements like Fridays for Future, Degrowth, and democratic socialism are shifting the Overton window toward ideas once considered fringe.

We recognise that the transition to a democratically planned, post-growth economy cannot occur in a political vacuum – it must unfold within and against the capitalist system, navigating its contradictions while preparing the ground for systemic transformation. To this end, a strategy of dual power should be devised: supporting and scaling up post-growth-aligned actors – such as cooperative enterprises, socially oriented supply networks, and radical trade unions – while simultaneously building institutional alternatives capable of contesting capitalist hegemony. This involves fostering imagination and prefigurative institutions: real-world experiments like energy commons, food sovereignty initiatives, worker-managed firms, and municipalist platforms that do not wait for systemic change but enact planning principles in the present, modelling sufficiency, solidarity, and collective self-governance. These institutions serve both as proofs of concept and as embryonic nodes of a future economy, capable of being linked through federated planning infrastructures. Crucially, we emphasise the need for sustained political mobilisation. The transition cannot rely on technocratic design or incremental reform; it must be driven by organised labour, climate justice movements, degrowth advocates, and social struggles that articulate and demand systemic reconfiguration. These movements must not only resist the ecological and social violence of capitalist production but actively shape the contours of the post-capitalist future. In this perspective, planning is not just a set of tools or processes – it is a political project, rooted in agonistic conflict, strategy, and collective action. In sum, while the road to democratic planning is fraught with obstacles, it is also charged with possibilities. Planning is not a relic of the past—it is an essential tool for shaping a liveable future.

7. Conclusion – Planning is Emancipation; Planning is Freedom

In this paper, we have argued that the business-as-usual model of the CE – despite its appeal and widespread support—remains fundamentally constrained by its alignment with capitalist growth, market valuation, and technocratic governance. We have shown that real sustainability requires a deeper, systemic transformation: one that reclaims the economy as a site of collective imagination and deliberation, not private accumulation. At the heart of this transformation lies the imperative of democratic economic planning. Far from being a relic of 20th-century socialism or a utopian fantasy, planning – when rooted in democratic participation, ecological rationality, and plural conceptions of value – offers a vital alternative to the failed promises of green capitalism. It allows societies to decide, through shared processes, what should be produced, for whom, and within what environmental limits. It replaces the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of collective reason.

We have examined historical precedents – from the centralised planning of the Soviet Union to the decentralised models of Yugoslavia and the cybernetic experimentation of Chile’s Cybersyn – as well as contemporary grassroots practices such as commons governance and municipalism. Each contributes lessons for building a planning architecture that is both participatory and adaptive, capable of responding to local needs while coordinating action at larger scales.

The framework proposed here – based on an eco-socialist orientation – integrates ecological economics, labour democracy, digital infrastructure, and sufficiency-based provisioning. It is not a blueprint, but a compass: it points toward a future in which economies serve people and the planet, not profits. Realising such a vision will not be easy. It will require confronting entrenched power, reshaping institutions, and building a culture of solidarity and deliberation. Yet the urgency of the climate crisis, the disillusionment with market solutions, and the creative energy of social movements make this a moment of possibility.

Democratic planning is not just a technical tool. It is a political project of emancipation – a means of reclaiming collective agency in the face of ecological and social breakdown. If we are serious about sustainability, then we must also be serious about transformation. And that transformation must be planned – together, democratically, and with care.

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