A wide range of literatures have identified the capitalist organisation of societies, and the capitalist growth imperative central to this organisation, as the root cause of the catastrophic climate and biodiversity crises. Highlighting the need to break with this imperative, a growing community of scholars conduct research revolving around the notion of ‘degrowth’. While the degrowth perspective is generally viewed as anti-and postcapitalist, there is no consensus on how precisely to conceptualise degrowth. In recent works we have proposed a conceptualisation according to which it is a process involving deep transformations on four interconnected planes of social being (eg, Buch-Hansen & Nesterova 2023). Here we draw on Bhaskar (2016) who proposes that social being exists and unfolds on four planes at once. These are (a) material transactions with nature,(b) social interactions between people,(c) social structure, and (d) the inner being of individuals. Degrowth transformations for example involve (a) that transactions with nature are improved via a selective and equitable reduction in matter and energy throughput,(b) that social interactions between people come to be characterised more by caring, empathy, solidarity and embracing diversity,(c) that social structures undergo significant changes, for instance involving redistribution of resources to massively reduce economic inequality and, finally,(d) that substantial growth takes place on the plane of peoples’ inner being.

In our forthcoming book (Buch-Hansen et al. 2024), we theorise what such transformations entail in–and how they can emanate from–the sites of civil society, the state and business. In the present contribution we add to this perspective by briefly contemplating what sort of economics could play a positive role for deep transformations to unfold. We start out from the currently dominant perspective in economics, neoclassical economics, arguing that it constitutes an economics of deep degradation inasmuch as it produces harm on each plane of being. We then outline a vision of an economics of deep transformations (EDT)–a philosophically informed and genuinely interdisciplinary and holistic economics that could support change on all four planes.