home
frankly speaking podcast

#97 Matt Orsagh: Is There a Case for Degrowth?

Are we inevitably heading towards a post-growth world? Listen to Matt Orsagh, co-founder of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance and former Senior Director of Capital Markets at the CFA Institute

Is infinite economic growth compatible with life on a planet with finite resources?

In final episode of Frankly Speaking this year, Richard Howitt was joined by Matt Orsagh, co-founder of the Arketa Institute for Post-Growth Finance and former Senior Director of Capital Markets at the CFA Institute, to confront one of the most controversial questions in sustainability today: is it time to move beyond growth itself?

Together they discussed whether conventional sustainability thinking is no longer enough as well as the Arketa Institute’s latest paper By Disaster or Design. You’ll also hear about:

  • Why climate action based on green growth and energy efficiency may actually increase total resource use
  • How Jevons Paradox undermines many well-intentioned sustainability strategies
  • What the planetary boundaries framework reveals about how close we are to ecological breakdown
  • Why decoupling growth from emissions is, in Matt’s view, a mathematical impossibility
  • Matt’s belief that prosperity must be redefined beyond GDP and wealth accumulation
  • What a post-growth, locally-rooted financial system could look like in practice
  • Matt’s perspective on the crucial role of imagination in designing a viable future

Listen in and follow us on LinkedIn and Youtube!

You may also like these episodes

33:53

#90 Nareeluc Pairchaiyapoom: Why the Global South Wants Mandatory Due Diligence

What are the reasons behind Thailand’s moves to introduce mandatory supply chain due diligence legislation? Listen to Nareeluc Pairchaiyapoom, Director of the International Human Rights Division at Thailand’s Ministry of Justice.

33:28

#89 Brian Hill: Should We Measure the Sustainability of Products Instead of Firms?

Is product-level reporting rather than firm-level reporting better for the competitiveness of European industry? Listen to Brian Hill, Academic Director of the Inclusive Economy Center in Sustainability and Organisations Institute at HEC Paris, and Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS.  

31:25

#88 Lorena Bisignano & Louis Establet: Lessons from the First Wave of CSRD Disclosures

What’s the verdict on how well first-wave companies have been reporting according to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive? Listen to Frank Bold’s own Lorena Bisignano and Louis Establet