Dear friends,
I hope you are enjoying the new year. I’m writing to share a selection of highlights from research we published in 2025, on capitalism, imperialism, post-growth and ecosocialist futures. All this work is open access, and free PDFs are available via the link at the end.
1) Post-growth: the science of well-being within planetary boundaries.
Joining together with Kate Raworth, Julia Steinberger, Giorgos Kallis and other leading scholars in the field, we present this exciting review of key questions and recent breakthroughs in post-growth research. The Lancet Planetary Health.
2) How popular is ecosocialist transformation?
We assessed public backing for ecosocialist transformation in the UK and US, and found it enjoys strong majority support in both countries: 72% in the US and 82% in the UK. We also tested how support is affected by different labels, like “degrowth”, “ecosocialism”, and “well-being economy”. It’s in The Lancet Planetary Health, and I wrote a brief summary on Substack here.
3) Who benefits from growth in consumption of global resources?
In this study we found that capitalist growth in the world economy misallocates resources toward countries that already have more than enough, dramatically exacerbating ecological pressures, while 50% of countries suffer from too little resource use to meet basic needs. A fairer allocation of resources in the world-system can enable good lives for all within planetary boundaries. The Lancet Planetary Health.
4) A progressive framework for green industrial policy.
Existing green industrial policy approaches are limited by capitalist logic and incapable of delivering an ecological civilization. We developed a new progressive framework for green industrial policy that can enable us to (a) scale down ecologically harmful industries; (b) organise production more directly around human needs and public benefit; (c) work toward global justice. New Political Economy.
5) Unequal exchange in the global agri-food system.
We found that global agricultural production is increasingly performed in the global South, but global food-system incomes are increasingly captured by post-farm activities in the global North. This dynamic suggests that Northern firms are appropriating value from Southern land and workers. Global Food Security.
6) Plundering Africa.
In this brief study we show that as the imperial powers imposed structural adjustment programmes on African countries, Africans were forced to consume less while their surplus resources were transferred out to the capitalist world economy effectively for free. Review of African Political Economy.
7) Ecomodernism, green growth and the imperial arrangement.
In this piece we describe how ecomodernist visions and “green growth” scenarios rely on fundamentally imperialist assumptions in order to maintain capital accumulation and needlessly high resource use in the global North, while reconciling this with ecological objectives. To overcome this contradiction requires ecosocialist pathways. Journal of Labour and Society.
8) On debt repudiation in the global South.
Debt crises continue to mount across the developing world. But asking for debt “forgiveness” is a dead end. The only way to overcome the imperialism of the debt system is to undertake collective debt repudiation, as part of a broader strategy to increase economic sovereignty. British Medical Journal.
9) Post-growth industrial policy for Europe.
Here we show that Europe’s new industrial policy is inadequate to address the social and ecological crises that Europe faces. We argue that these contradictions can be solved by integrating ecosocialist and post-growth insights, to align production with social well-being and planetary boundaries. Globalizations.
10) Why is the West warmongering against China?
Turning to short-form writing, here we argue that Western aggression toward China is due to the fact that China’s development (specifically, technological innovation and the rise in wages) is pinching Western profits and undermining the imperial arrangement on which Western capital accumulation depends. AJE.
11) Climate socialism.
Here we argue that the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, because the capitalist law of value prevents us from scaling down damaging industries and increasing investment in green transition. This inertia can be overcome through socialist policy, which can enable us to achieve rapid decarbonisation. Tribune.
12) The staggering death toll of Western sanctions.
The US and EU use sanctions as an instrument of imperial power, to strangle and even destroy global South governments that seek to chart a path toward meaningful sovereignty. We report on recent research finding that Western unilateral sanctions have caused a staggering 38 million excess deaths since 1970. AJE.
13) New data on global poverty.
Has extreme poverty really plunged since the 1980s? New data on the basic needs poverty line (BNPL) allows us to measure poverty more accurately. This evidence shows global extreme poverty increased dramatically during the period of neoliberal reform in the 1990s. Across the whole period from 1980 to 2011 (the final year of this data), the poverty rate declined by only 6 percentage points, while the number of people living in extreme poverty increased from 1.01 billion to 1.20 billion. The Conversation.
14) On ecological imperialism.
One of the most damaging myths about the global ecological crisis is that humans as such are responsible for it. In reality, the crisis is being driven mostly by the states and corporations of the imperial core, primarily to the benefit of their elites. This piece provides a brief summary of recent data on atmospheric colonisation and resource appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange. Tricontinental.
15) Degrowth politics and strategy.
Finally, there is a debate occurring within the degrowth community about politics and strategy. Here I argue that socialism, and socialist political movements, are essential to removing the capitalist class from power over investment and production, in order to achieve the transformations that degrowth advocates call for. Degrowth.info.
As always, thanks to all my brilliant colleagues who contributed to or led this research, and thanks to all of you who have shared the journey with us!
Free PDFs of all our research are available here.
Best wishes for 2026,
Jason