The Melbourne Doughnut: From Conceptual Compass to Measurement System for Systemic Change
Alison Whitten launches the City Portrait for Greater Melbourne in November 2023
After a successful launch in November 2023, what’s next for the Melbourne Doughnut? Regen Melbourne Research Lead Alison Whitten and CEO Kaj Lofgren explain how our Doughnut will help sustain our regeneration efforts in the years to come.
The Doughnut: more than a sugar hit
When Kate Raworth introduced the Doughnut as a way of reframing the purpose and goal of economics, it was in many ways an overnight success.
This wasn’t because it offered a sugar hit, a quick fix to the global social and ecological challenges we face with increasing urgency. It was because the Doughnut brought together a succinct and powerful picture of the relational nature of these challenges. Moreover, what backed up the image in Doughnut Economics was a clear articulation of why and how our current systems have perpetuated these challenges, leaving us with unmet social needs and dangerously excessive impacts on the planet.
Kate herself likes to recite the quote, “all models are wrong, but some are useful” when speaking about the Doughnut (attributed to statistician George Box). We tend to agree. We also love a good framework. Navigating complexity is hard, and models like the Doughnut help to make it easier to digest.
So, what is it that we love about the Doughnut?
First, it is the best representation we’ve seen of the integration of social and ecological parts of our global system. By applying the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as the inside of the Doughnut (Social Foundation) and the Planetary Boundaries on the outside (Ecological Ceiling), it captures holistically the elements of our human and natural systems.
Second, the design of the Doughnut highlights the tensions that exist between elements of the system. This is not a ‘do less bad’ or ‘do more better’ kind of framework. Rather, it makes clear that any decision we make about one part of the system has an impact on another part – positive or negative. It makes the trade-offs and negative externalities generated through our current ways of working obvious, but also suggests the opportunity for new and exciting abundances to emerge as we find ways for people and planet to thrive together.
Third, the Doughnut is scalable. While it was designed at a global scale, it is a tool that can be applied to a city, a precinct, or even a street - as long as the relationship between that place and its broader context is kept in mind.
Fourth, doughnuts spark joy, and this one is no exception. We need to take social and environmental challenges seriously, but we don’t need to take ourselves too seriously in the process. The Doughnut invites playfulness, creativity and fun as it unpacks the big, messy challenges of our time.
Shaping the Melbourne Doughnut
Whether or not we could have named them at the time, these are the reasons that the Doughnut appealed to us – and to many other Melburnians – as we sat in lockdown in 2020, wondering what the city’s future could hold. Localising the Doughnut to a Melbourne context not only helped us to grapple with the compounding social and ecological challenges we were experiencing, but also helped us to look ahead to a future that could feel different.
The Melbourne Doughnut emerged from a series of community workshops and expert roundtables, bringing hundreds of Melburnians together (virtually) to reflect on the possibility of a more regenerative future for the city. As part of the Towards a Regenerative Melbourne report documenting this process, it was launched by Kate Raworth at Melbourne Knowledge Week in 2021, and has been integral to Regen Melbourne’s identity since.
Data and the Doughnut: Creating a City Portrait for Greater Melbourne
Part of the inspiration for localising the Doughnut came from Amsterdam, which released a ‘City Portrait’ in mid-2020. This was the first example of both downscaling the Doughnut and applying localised data to it. Amsterdam’s City Portrait assessed the city’s performance in relation to the Doughnut’s holistic social and ecological measures, examining the city both on its own and in relation to its global impacts. Not long afterwards, other cities followed suit, giving rise to a methodology tool for creating City Portraits and a growing number of global examples.
At the time of Regen Melbourne’s formation, we committed to developing a City Portrait for Greater Melbourne, adding data to the qualitative work that had shaped the Melbourne Doughnut. We began in late 2022, kicking off with a deep dive on the Social Foundation with experts on each dimension.
We set out for the City Portrait to be developed in a way that demonstrated rigour, relevance and legitimacy. This felt like a tall order when we started the process, but what eventuated over the course of a year was an incredible collaborative effort that included substantial contributions from dozens of partners. The City Portrait platform outlines our methodology in detail; we’ve used the word ‘epic’ to describe the experience, which still feels fitting as we reflect on (and recover from) it! Most significantly, we partnered with Dr Michael Dunbar to apply an interactive and design-thinking approach to the work.
The result, the City Portrait platform, launched in November 2023 to a crowd of more than 300 people. Mirroring the initial Melbourne Doughnut launch, Kate Raworth joined us to celebrate the occasion – this time also marking the start of the first Global Doughnut Day.
Our to-do list for the Portrait isn’t complete. We are working this year to add new content, primarily including new ‘lenses’ to represent Local-Ecological (health of the environment here in Greater Melbourne) and Global-Social (the global impacts of our consumption habits in Greater Melbourne) perspectives, as well as historical time series data. The platform will continue to evolve to respond to various use-cases, but the core of it is there, and what it tells us about Melbourne as a place for people and the environment to thrive is clear.
Bringing measurement into practice for systems change
We love that the Doughnut is fun, and the City Portrait as developed and launched last year has proved to be an engaging way to introduce the framework and its critical concepts to a broader audience. But that isn’t enough. We need this tool to support work on the ground, to facilitate systems change towards a more viable future than our current trajectory might suggest.
The City Portrait platform highlights a number of insights and recommendations for action based on what the data tells us. These speak to the pathways that we see as necessary to move us towards the safe and just space for Greater Melbourne. They are both broad and ambitious – necessarily so, as the nature and scale of change diverge considerably from our current reality. They suggest the kinds of things, like genuine integrated planning and shifts in investment paradigms, that get many nods around the room when recited, but too often land in the ‘too hard’ basket when fully unpacked.
We can be confident in these recommendations, or at least the data and narrative underpinning them. In the middle of last year, the Australian Government Treasury released its Measuring What Matters framework (coincidence that our work carries the same name? Maybe, maybe not…). The ‘friendly critics’ of this work give it credit for making a start by introducing an alternative to standard economic measures, but are still waiting to see how it will impact decision-making in practice. We would add to this that the framework itself is very simplistic, going back to the reasons we love the Doughnut, and that this work would benefit from applying a more participatory approach. Nonetheless, it is aligned in its language and – we believe – intent in realigning social, environmental and economic goals at-scale to prioritise wellbeing.
“We love that the Doughnut is fun, and the City Portrait as developed and launched last year has proved to be an engaging way to introduce the framework. But that isn’t enough. We need this tool to support work on the ground.”
How, then, can we best demonstrate the role of the Melbourne Doughnut, and the City Portrait based on it, in practice? For us, this now forms the core of the measurement system for our work. This is a small but significant posture shift that forms part of our updated strategy in 2024. Where the Melbourne Doughnut initially served as a directional compass, the City Portrait now illustrates and quantitatively measures the long-term outcomes we seek for our city. Applying this lens now allows us to work backwards, looking at the ways in which our projects serve as pathways towards systemic impact.
We know that measuring systems change is complex. The entire premise of systems change means that multiple actions by multiple actors across multiple sectors are necessary to see us inch closer to the safe and just space that the City Portrait describes for Greater Melbourne. Showing attribution of Regen Melbourne’s portfolio alone is unrealistic, but surfacing signals from our work – measurable or otherwise – that demonstrate whether we’re affecting change in the parts of the system where we work IS realistic, and is a necessary part of our work.
We have embarked on this work by mapping our projects to the Melbourne Doughnut, identifying which dimensions relate most closely to each project’s scope and purpose. Some patterns have already emerged: Regen Streets covers most dimensions because it is effectively about downscaling a regenerative frame to the street level; Participatory Melbourne covers non-physical dimensions most heavily; and the Swimmable Birrarung includes a neat balance of social and ecological elements.
Where to from here?
A priority for the coming months is to develop Regen Melbourne’s impact assessment and communication approach, building on the mapping of our work to the Melbourne Doughnut. Not only will this strengthen our storytelling about the shifts we’re seeing through our work, but it will demonstrate how the Doughnut and the City Portrait generated from it can apply to others’ priorities.
If you’d like to talk to us about the Doughnut or learn more about our work, please email alson@regen.melbourne
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