02/09/2026
Sufficiency has increasingly been discussed as a way towards socio-ecological sustainability in the face of the accelerating climate crisis. Sufficiency calls for a focus on needs and ‘enoughness’, implying there are absolute limits for society’s levels of consumption and production. We argue that these absolute limits render sufficiency inherently incompatible with capitalism and economic growth, which is essential for the system to function. Much of existing research on sufficiency focuses on innovative business practices enabling reductions in production and consumption, yet the underlying capitalist structures powered by continuous expansion are rarely considered. As a result, any sufficiency qualities on organisational level alone cannot spread sufficiency throughout the broader economy.
In a new article in Sustainable Futures, Ben Robra, Alícia Trepat Pont, and Alexandros Pazaitis explore the crucial question of how sufficiency practices can scale and spread horizontally across networks of like-minded organisations and beyond. They argue that for a sufficiency-aligned economy and society to emerge, organisations need to withstand the systemic tendencies, within which they need to operate, while actively seeking to prefigure alternatives that can potentially usher in a more sustainable societal configuration.
In this direction, they propose a confluence between commoning (as an organisational form) and sufficiency. Commoning organisations are directly opposed to capitalist forms of organising and thus presents a viable sphere for sufficiency. The article engages with organisational values to explore how a sufficiency aligned value system emerges within a network of commoning organisations in the Epirus region of northern Greece. Findings illustrate how the network’s organisations come together in deep relationality to create an alternative value system in contrast to dominant capitalist values. The organisations’ members co-create a shared worldview committed to an alternative economic system, explicitly oriented away from capitalist profit-driven logics and towards sustaining the work, relationships, and communities in which the network’s members are embedded.
Sufficiency values are incorporated into relational practices of commoning and thereby scale-wide and reproduce across the network’s organisations, expressing the fulfillment of societal needs within the local ecological boundaries. Beyond the network's boundaries, this capacity for scaling-wide may extend to other organisations and networks, carrying the potential for broader collective action to oppose and transcend capitalism and, ultimately, for the emergence of a sufficiency economy. This pattern represents a foundation to further explore how sufficiency can potentially scale horizontally without succumbing to capitalist co-optation.
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