If you want your place to practice doughnut economics, you can now apply "the four lenses" to any situation

Doughnut economics keeps marching on as an education for towns, cities and countries - so they can live in a healthy zone between the basics of human wellbeing, and the biospheric/climatic limits of the planet.

Here’s their latest excellent educational tool - Doughnut Unrolled: Introducing the four lenses. The image at the top of the blog boils them down to four questions, set across a local-global axis, and a social-ecological axis.

  • Local-ecological: how can this place be as generous as the wildlife next door?

  • Global-ecological: how can this place respect the health of the whole planet?

  • Global-social: how can this place respect the well-being of all people?

  • Local-social: how can all the people of this place thrive?

They get there by an attractive move - “unrolling” the doughnut, to open up these lenses (see graphic below):

These lenses fit into Doughnut Unrolled: “a set of five tools that work together to apply the ideas of Doughnut Economics to your place:

  1. Introducing the four lenses - an introduction to the four lenses and the set of tools you can use to help your place bring humanity into the Doughnut.

  2. Community Portrait of Place - a selection of participatory workshop approaches you can use to explore the four lenses for your place.

  3. Data Portrait of Place - a handbook of approaches for collecting targets and indicators for each of the four lenses for your place.

  4. Exploring a topic - a selection of approaches to explore a specific topic through the four lenses, whether a sector, strategy, policy, project, initiative, object or idea.

  5. Dimensions of the four lenses - an overview of each of the dimensions of the four lenses on life.

    Together they help you create a 'Doughnut Portrait' of your place - a holistic picture with diverse inputs and perspectives - that can act as a starting point for transformative action.

More here. We recommend diving in on the “Dimensions of the Four Lenses” presentation first - a rich and rigourous canvas, showing the kinds of realities, cultures and experiences that have to be factored into a successful doughnut model.