The Chains of Green Reform: Why ‘Transformation’ Without Democracy Is Still a Masquerade
There are reports that reek of moral superiority even before you crack the cover. Transforming Economics for Sustainability is one of them. It breathes urgency, reason, planetary concern — but beneath the varnish of systems thinking and sustainability lies something Orwell would immediately recognize: a technocratic reconstruction of reality, draped in the rhetoric of progress. A catechism for those who believe spreadsheets can save the world.
The report claims to propose a radical transformation of economic thinking. But upon closer inspection, it offers not a revolution, but an enlightened restoration. The old house of economics isn’t being razed to the ground — it’s being retrofitted into an ecological convention center. The foundation remains untouched: institutions speak, citizens listen. This isn’t transformation; it’s academic greenwashing in a tuxedo.
Let us measure this work against the axes of the integrated prompt: does it prioritize classical democratic sovereignty (KDP), or is it primarily a product of technocratic managerialism (MTM)? On paper, it scores brilliantly — references to “power redistribution,” “justice,” and “well-being economies” abound like bees in an ecological orchard. But look more closely, and the sweet nectar starts to sour.
Who, exactly, is going to bring about this transformation? Not the citizen. Not the voter. Not even the rebellious youth or the striking cleaner. No — the report entrusts this systemic shift to “epistemic communities,” “scientific coalitions,” “decision-making frameworks,” and “indicator sets.” The revolution has become a workshop. Every human actor is replaced by a proxy: algorithms, models, experts. Transformation as process management.
What we witness here is a familiar technocratic reflex: to confuse power with knowledge, democracy with system efficiency. Politics becomes the optimization of consensus, legitimacy a checkbox, and conflict something to be moderated out of the spreadsheet. This is transformation by PowerPoint — sustainable, measurable, depoliticized.
The report speaks the language of transformation but whispers the grammar of control. It redefines political urgency as methodological nuance. Everything becomes a parameter, a transition pathway, a lever of governance. There is talk of “governance architectures,” “dynamic feedback loops,” and “context-sensitive economic narratives.” One half expects the word “citizen” to appear, only to find instead “stakeholder platforms.”
This is technocracy in gala attire. Its power lies not in brute force, but in language — the capacity to name without exposing. Where Orwell feared Newspeak, this report perfects Softspeak: a language designed not to lie, but to sedate. One does not say, for example, that inequality is the result of capitalist accumulation; one notes a “suboptimal distribution of value flows.” One does not demand redistribution; one proposes a “multi-scalar recalibration of socio-ecological provisioning systems.”
In this bureaucratic Esperanto, even revolution becomes hygienic. Rage becomes participation. Collapse becomes a managed transition. The market, stripped of its violence, is transformed into a “coordinating mechanism.” And the economy — that devouring beast — becomes a “system of provisioning,” as if it were an innocent logistics network.
Let us shift the lens: does this report, in line with the Daly-Gaia System Test (DGS), acknowledge planetary boundaries, thermodynamic limits, and ecological interdependence? Ostensibly, yes. Nature is present. Climate change, biodiversity, material flows — all the right keywords parade past. But the document is blind to the most fundamental ecological reality: that sustainability is not just a matter of systems, but of conflict over resources, time, and privilege.
What is completely absent from the analysis is power. Who gains from the current system? Who loses? Who pays the price for “economic productivity,” and who reaps the profits? What institutions enforce these distributions? Who resists, and how are they silenced? Not a word. The report exists in a frictionless world of good intentions, a policy space devoid of struggle.
To speak with Foucault: knowledge is never neutral. Every framework, every model, every index of “well-being” is already a product of power. Yet this report behaves as if knowledge floats above politics — as if we only need to design better “metrics” and “frameworks,” and the system will adjust accordingly. But the system resists. Not because it is poorly designed, but because it is design: the architecture of accumulation, maintained by force, ideology, and inertia.
The Holistic Transition Test (HBT) asks: is there room in this document for complexity, contradiction, and real citizen participation? Does it recognize that transitions are messy, unpredictable, often tragic? Again, the answer is no. What we get is a tightly scripted screenplay in which every actor plays their pre-approved role. The system must change — but it must do so without friction, without protest, without desire.
The report reduces social change to engineering: input, output, feedback. Resistance becomes “adaptive lag.” Political struggle is framed as a “design challenge.” The human being — longing, fearing, hoping — is stripped of drama and turned into a behavioral parameter. Every potential riot becomes a “participatory process.” Every revolution, a workshop.
What is missing is not information, but imagination. Not planning, but poetry. Not data, but danger. A transition that does not risk rupture is no transition at all. The authors seem afraid of chaos, yet every birth — of a world, an idea, a movement — begins in disorder. The citizen is not a cog in the machine of sustainability. She is its beating heart, its unpredictable motor. But here, she has been tranquilized with metrics.
Let us now apply the final axis: does the report resonate with the biological, sensory, and emotional reality of the human being? Does it recognize fatigue, community, mortality, ritual — the things that make us more than units of labor or consumers of well-being? Sadly, no. The document is conceptually rich but existentially barren. It speaks to the brain but not to the belly. It designs for the system but forgets the soul.
There is no dust in this report. No hunger. No tears. No bread. The human figure has been dissolved into the abstract plural: “communities,” “actors,” “stakeholders.” But the singular body — the woman washing blood from her hands, the child coughing in the smog, the farmer digging into depleted soil — is absent. What remains is a managerial anthropoid, a humanoid made of spreadsheets.
There is no music either. No mythology. No cultural memory. The economy is reduced to provisioning, but provisioning without ritual becomes logistics. Without stories, we do not live — we survive. Every sustainable future must be rooted in meaning. This report provides indicators, but no symbols. It offers governance, but no grief.
After the acronyms, after the diagrams, after the polished abstractions and institutional modesty — what remains? A sense of unease. Not because the authors are insincere — on the contrary, their intentions are commendable — but because the terrain on which they operate has already been sanitized. The most important questions were never posed.
Not: How do we redesign the system? But: Who dares to stop it?
Not: What is the optimal governance architecture? But: What must we give up, and who will scream when we do?
Not: What does a sustainable economy look like? But: What does it feel like to live in one — to lose, to change, to mourn, to rebuild?
The report offers transformation without politics, justice without struggle, hope without narrative. It is a beautiful mirage — coherent, ethical, informed — that risks becoming the most dangerous fiction of all: the idea that we can change everything without changing ourselves.
In that sense, the true revolution still waits. Not in frameworks or metrics. But in the heart of the citizen, the voice of the dissenting worker, the song of the forest, the crack in the concrete.
Let us be clear: the time for spreadsheets has passed. The time for storytelling, for refusal, for action — that time is now.
So, Hans, I just downloaded your dissertation, and read your Substack post more closely.
As feedback, much of what you say is just-so, and also well-understood (by those who choose think of these issues. While I did not have any "aha moments" traveling through your work, your particular articulation has value in itself. it does. It gets people thinking. THAT has real value. Of all who try, few get to what I think of as SAVVY. But. The more people we can start down this journey, the more likely we are to grown human savvy.
You've just begun your journey, I feel, and my purpose is to show you where I cam out, after starting from a place not dissimilar to yours. I intend this to be additive.
Think of your dissertation work as a marker on a path, where you do have choices.
As one example, you posit three levels:
+ Optimisation – tweaking what exists.
+ Reform – changing rules and institutions.
+ Transformation – rethinking our goals, values, and assumptions.
And on this basis you advocate for "radical" transformation.
You stop too soon.
In the context of my decades tussling with the idea of societal change, I've come to appreciate that we need to begin with a nuanced understanding of how change processes play out in the occurring world. (Let's stop this nonsense about "the natural world." There is no such thing. To follow Steward Pickett, humans can only be seen as PART of ecosystems, so the nature-human distinction is pure contrivance.)
We need to see that ontogeny and phylogeny (evolutionary processes at the level of individuals and the processes at the level of groups) MUST NOT be conflated. That way lies error.
I'd point you at the huge and rich literature that precedes the emergence of Adaptive Management in conservation projects as the ONLY way of approaching efforts in the occurring world. (The "occurring world" includes everything, but only that which is subject to evolutionary change.)
I hope that now the PhD is over - welcome to the world of reflective scholarship - you will consider all your fine points in the context of cognitive justice. Each of the points you make regarding the need to consider founding assumptions is correct. And yet, I assume you have been too busy to consider how political economists, structuralists, feminist economists make all these points and still consider the absolute requirement to include grounded and contextual knowledge.
I am not surprised but actually I had hoped under leadership of Rene Kemp and others that Maastricht University had improved its ability to be a site of Eurocolonization.
I gave up a UN scholarship and chose to self finance my PhD at SPRU rather than be subject to the narrow econometric turn being led by the academics at Maastricht.
Congratulations on the completion of your PhD. Your dissertation looks like a great addition in the field of Ecological Economics. As you say, many theories of the past are simply outdated today, to put it simply.
When I had my first course in ecological economics, it was the first time that I said: this makes sense. I wish there were entire undergraduate programs designed along the lines of ecological economics (my prediction is that, most likely, sooner or later there will be)
Nice to see quoting Daly in the beginning of your dissertation — I will definitely dig deeper into it.
The cover of your thesis looks super cool by the way!
The Chains of Green Reform: Why ‘Transformation’ Without Democracy Is Still a Masquerade
There are reports that reek of moral superiority even before you crack the cover. Transforming Economics for Sustainability is one of them. It breathes urgency, reason, planetary concern — but beneath the varnish of systems thinking and sustainability lies something Orwell would immediately recognize: a technocratic reconstruction of reality, draped in the rhetoric of progress. A catechism for those who believe spreadsheets can save the world.
The report claims to propose a radical transformation of economic thinking. But upon closer inspection, it offers not a revolution, but an enlightened restoration. The old house of economics isn’t being razed to the ground — it’s being retrofitted into an ecological convention center. The foundation remains untouched: institutions speak, citizens listen. This isn’t transformation; it’s academic greenwashing in a tuxedo.
Let us measure this work against the axes of the integrated prompt: does it prioritize classical democratic sovereignty (KDP), or is it primarily a product of technocratic managerialism (MTM)? On paper, it scores brilliantly — references to “power redistribution,” “justice,” and “well-being economies” abound like bees in an ecological orchard. But look more closely, and the sweet nectar starts to sour.
Who, exactly, is going to bring about this transformation? Not the citizen. Not the voter. Not even the rebellious youth or the striking cleaner. No — the report entrusts this systemic shift to “epistemic communities,” “scientific coalitions,” “decision-making frameworks,” and “indicator sets.” The revolution has become a workshop. Every human actor is replaced by a proxy: algorithms, models, experts. Transformation as process management.
What we witness here is a familiar technocratic reflex: to confuse power with knowledge, democracy with system efficiency. Politics becomes the optimization of consensus, legitimacy a checkbox, and conflict something to be moderated out of the spreadsheet. This is transformation by PowerPoint — sustainable, measurable, depoliticized.
The report speaks the language of transformation but whispers the grammar of control. It redefines political urgency as methodological nuance. Everything becomes a parameter, a transition pathway, a lever of governance. There is talk of “governance architectures,” “dynamic feedback loops,” and “context-sensitive economic narratives.” One half expects the word “citizen” to appear, only to find instead “stakeholder platforms.”
This is technocracy in gala attire. Its power lies not in brute force, but in language — the capacity to name without exposing. Where Orwell feared Newspeak, this report perfects Softspeak: a language designed not to lie, but to sedate. One does not say, for example, that inequality is the result of capitalist accumulation; one notes a “suboptimal distribution of value flows.” One does not demand redistribution; one proposes a “multi-scalar recalibration of socio-ecological provisioning systems.”
In this bureaucratic Esperanto, even revolution becomes hygienic. Rage becomes participation. Collapse becomes a managed transition. The market, stripped of its violence, is transformed into a “coordinating mechanism.” And the economy — that devouring beast — becomes a “system of provisioning,” as if it were an innocent logistics network.
Let us shift the lens: does this report, in line with the Daly-Gaia System Test (DGS), acknowledge planetary boundaries, thermodynamic limits, and ecological interdependence? Ostensibly, yes. Nature is present. Climate change, biodiversity, material flows — all the right keywords parade past. But the document is blind to the most fundamental ecological reality: that sustainability is not just a matter of systems, but of conflict over resources, time, and privilege.
What is completely absent from the analysis is power. Who gains from the current system? Who loses? Who pays the price for “economic productivity,” and who reaps the profits? What institutions enforce these distributions? Who resists, and how are they silenced? Not a word. The report exists in a frictionless world of good intentions, a policy space devoid of struggle.
To speak with Foucault: knowledge is never neutral. Every framework, every model, every index of “well-being” is already a product of power. Yet this report behaves as if knowledge floats above politics — as if we only need to design better “metrics” and “frameworks,” and the system will adjust accordingly. But the system resists. Not because it is poorly designed, but because it is design: the architecture of accumulation, maintained by force, ideology, and inertia.
The Holistic Transition Test (HBT) asks: is there room in this document for complexity, contradiction, and real citizen participation? Does it recognize that transitions are messy, unpredictable, often tragic? Again, the answer is no. What we get is a tightly scripted screenplay in which every actor plays their pre-approved role. The system must change — but it must do so without friction, without protest, without desire.
The report reduces social change to engineering: input, output, feedback. Resistance becomes “adaptive lag.” Political struggle is framed as a “design challenge.” The human being — longing, fearing, hoping — is stripped of drama and turned into a behavioral parameter. Every potential riot becomes a “participatory process.” Every revolution, a workshop.
What is missing is not information, but imagination. Not planning, but poetry. Not data, but danger. A transition that does not risk rupture is no transition at all. The authors seem afraid of chaos, yet every birth — of a world, an idea, a movement — begins in disorder. The citizen is not a cog in the machine of sustainability. She is its beating heart, its unpredictable motor. But here, she has been tranquilized with metrics.
Let us now apply the final axis: does the report resonate with the biological, sensory, and emotional reality of the human being? Does it recognize fatigue, community, mortality, ritual — the things that make us more than units of labor or consumers of well-being? Sadly, no. The document is conceptually rich but existentially barren. It speaks to the brain but not to the belly. It designs for the system but forgets the soul.
There is no dust in this report. No hunger. No tears. No bread. The human figure has been dissolved into the abstract plural: “communities,” “actors,” “stakeholders.” But the singular body — the woman washing blood from her hands, the child coughing in the smog, the farmer digging into depleted soil — is absent. What remains is a managerial anthropoid, a humanoid made of spreadsheets.
There is no music either. No mythology. No cultural memory. The economy is reduced to provisioning, but provisioning without ritual becomes logistics. Without stories, we do not live — we survive. Every sustainable future must be rooted in meaning. This report provides indicators, but no symbols. It offers governance, but no grief.
After the acronyms, after the diagrams, after the polished abstractions and institutional modesty — what remains? A sense of unease. Not because the authors are insincere — on the contrary, their intentions are commendable — but because the terrain on which they operate has already been sanitized. The most important questions were never posed.
Not: How do we redesign the system? But: Who dares to stop it?
Not: What is the optimal governance architecture? But: What must we give up, and who will scream when we do?
Not: What does a sustainable economy look like? But: What does it feel like to live in one — to lose, to change, to mourn, to rebuild?
The report offers transformation without politics, justice without struggle, hope without narrative. It is a beautiful mirage — coherent, ethical, informed — that risks becoming the most dangerous fiction of all: the idea that we can change everything without changing ourselves.
In that sense, the true revolution still waits. Not in frameworks or metrics. But in the heart of the citizen, the voice of the dissenting worker, the song of the forest, the crack in the concrete.
Let us be clear: the time for spreadsheets has passed. The time for storytelling, for refusal, for action — that time is now.
So, Hans, I just downloaded your dissertation, and read your Substack post more closely.
As feedback, much of what you say is just-so, and also well-understood (by those who choose think of these issues. While I did not have any "aha moments" traveling through your work, your particular articulation has value in itself. it does. It gets people thinking. THAT has real value. Of all who try, few get to what I think of as SAVVY. But. The more people we can start down this journey, the more likely we are to grown human savvy.
You've just begun your journey, I feel, and my purpose is to show you where I cam out, after starting from a place not dissimilar to yours. I intend this to be additive.
Think of your dissertation work as a marker on a path, where you do have choices.
As one example, you posit three levels:
+ Optimisation – tweaking what exists.
+ Reform – changing rules and institutions.
+ Transformation – rethinking our goals, values, and assumptions.
And on this basis you advocate for "radical" transformation.
You stop too soon.
In the context of my decades tussling with the idea of societal change, I've come to appreciate that we need to begin with a nuanced understanding of how change processes play out in the occurring world. (Let's stop this nonsense about "the natural world." There is no such thing. To follow Steward Pickett, humans can only be seen as PART of ecosystems, so the nature-human distinction is pure contrivance.)
We need to see that ontogeny and phylogeny (evolutionary processes at the level of individuals and the processes at the level of groups) MUST NOT be conflated. That way lies error.
I'd point you at the huge and rich literature that precedes the emergence of Adaptive Management in conservation projects as the ONLY way of approaching efforts in the occurring world. (The "occurring world" includes everything, but only that which is subject to evolutionary change.)
--
Ashwani
Vasishth vasishth@ramapo.edu
(323)206-1858 (Cell Phone).
calendly.com/vasishth/google-meet-30
Congrats on this achievement.
I hope that now the PhD is over - welcome to the world of reflective scholarship - you will consider all your fine points in the context of cognitive justice. Each of the points you make regarding the need to consider founding assumptions is correct. And yet, I assume you have been too busy to consider how political economists, structuralists, feminist economists make all these points and still consider the absolute requirement to include grounded and contextual knowledge.
I am not surprised but actually I had hoped under leadership of Rene Kemp and others that Maastricht University had improved its ability to be a site of Eurocolonization.
I gave up a UN scholarship and chose to self finance my PhD at SPRU rather than be subject to the narrow econometric turn being led by the academics at Maastricht.
Hi Hans,
Congratulations on the completion of your PhD. Your dissertation looks like a great addition in the field of Ecological Economics. As you say, many theories of the past are simply outdated today, to put it simply.
When I had my first course in ecological economics, it was the first time that I said: this makes sense. I wish there were entire undergraduate programs designed along the lines of ecological economics (my prediction is that, most likely, sooner or later there will be)
Nice to see quoting Daly in the beginning of your dissertation — I will definitely dig deeper into it.
The cover of your thesis looks super cool by the way!
Congrats again 🥂
congrats Hans, indeed, thanksfor sharing this!
First, congratulations on your emergence from what was clearly an intense process.
Look forward to engaging with your basic argument, once I get your punchlines.
Thinking in systems—as distinct from “systems thinking”—is slippery stuff, and always a worthwhile endeavor.