Letter 11 — To Professor Milena Büchs

Post-growth welfare and the politics of “enough”

Date: 23 October 2025
Recipient: Professor Milena Büchs, Professor of Sustainable Welfare — Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds

Context

As Week 2 of One Letter a Day approaches its close, the conversation turns to the structural roots of sustainability. Professor Milena Büchs has spent her career exploring how welfare, justice and ecological limits can coexist — how societies might prosper without depending on perpetual growth. Her research on post-growth welfare and sustainable wellbeing offers one of the clearest frameworks for understanding what “enough” could mean in policy and everyday life.

Letter

Dear Professor Büchs,

I am writing as part of One Letter a Day: a year-long public correspondence that aims to reopen grounded conversations about the climate emergency. Each day I write to someone whose work shapes how we think and act on this crisis, and publish both letters and replies to encourage wider dialogue. This week focuses on climate-engaged academics and leaders here in Leeds.

Your work on post-growth welfare and sustainable wellbeing highlights the strong link between social justice and ecological limits. It reminds us that the question is not simply how to reduce carbon emissions, but how to design lives and institutions that allow people to flourish within those limits — in a word, creating the blueprint for a world we would actually want to live in. At a time when almost every policy discussion still begins with the word growth, that insight feels both urgent and strangely absent from public life.

Much of today’s climate action at regional and national level orbits around green growth and technological fixes. From your perspective, what would it take for ideas like post-growth and sustainable welfare to be treated as serious civic and political questions again, and not dismissed as unrealistic whenever the word “growth” returns to dominate the conversation?

I ask because it seems clear that citizens themselves are not the obstacle. Many already understand that fairness, security and enoughness can coexist, provided we define clearly what enough means. The difficulty, I find, lies in identifying civic and political voices willing to give those ideas legitimacy — to speak openly about limits not as loss, but as renewal. Your work contributes to helping us imagine what that might look like.

With appreciation for your research and for the clarity it brings to a conversation too often trapped in old assumptions,

– Vivien Badaut
Founder, one-letter-a-day.uk
Headingley / Hyde Park resident

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Tomorrow’s letter continues Week 2 with Dr Louise Atkinson, exploring how participatory art and storytelling can help communities imagine sustainable futures and reconnect emotionally with place.