Team Kallis:still in its design and development phase,one early result with potential impact is the development of a diagnostic framework to analyse growth dependencies at the municipal level.The team is collaborating with the city of Girona to test the model and advise decision makers on post growth policies.As part of this collaboration,a toolkit is being developed for studying,identifying and strategizing(on how to break from)growth dependencies,which could be used by other 'post-growth cities' around Europe.A core component consists of participation and engagement processes where activists,citizens and policy makers are helped through facilitated focus groups to make their own sense of growth dependencies and identify leverage points through which change beyond growth dependence could be catalyzed.Team Hickel:still in a development phase with researchers’ first set of papers under review or forthcoming,with breakthroughs achieved or soon to be published.One,a paper in Nature Communications titled “Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy” advances the state of the art by assessing South-North flows of embodied labour according to sectors,skill levels and wages,establishing that unequal exchange occurs even when correcting for sector and skill level;two,a paper forthcoming in Global Food Security provides the first-ever assessment of value-capture dynamics in the global agri-food system;three,a paper forthcoming in Nature Climate Change,a collaboration between Hickel and Steinberger,provides the first comprehensive framework for post-growth climate mitigation scenario modelling.Team Steinberger:the results of the PhDs of Tamberg and Nag,with 2–3 submitted papers each,provide groundbreaking insights into the causal framework and measurement of determinants of well-being(Tamberg) and unequal exchange labour dynamics(Nag),significantly changing understanding of their fields and representing major conceptual and empirical advances with academic and policy implications.Tamberg’s work clarifies interlinkages of personal,social and economic determinants of well-being and demonstrates the crucial role of prioritising need satisfaction over economic growth.Nag’s work demonstrates international dependence patterns of labour footprints and the potential of South-South development should the global North drain on global South productive capacity be lifted.On economic democracy,the team developed the first discussion focusing on provisioning systems in Sustainability:Science,Practice and Policy.Finally,PhD Nag led a REAL project-wide effort contributing to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty’s “Roadmap to eradicating poverty without growth,”with concise summaries of policies and research,to be published as a standalone report in autumn 2025,going beyond state of the art in comprehensiveness and dividing policies into those applicable by high-income vs low and middle income countries.
