Let's Stop Asking How to Grow Fairly — and Ask Something Bigger

Ellie Breeze, Together Culture’s Community Director, suggests that the changemakers we need aren’t sitting on conference stages - they’re people like us.

Michael Kenny, Inaugural Head of Bennett School of Public Policy, Diane Coyle, Bennett Professor of Public Policy, and Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester in conversation at the Bennett School of Public Policy Annual Conference on 26 March 2026.

Unlimited growth cannot be good and it cannot be green. So why are public leaders still pretending that’s true - even when I suspect they know it’s not?

Last week at the Bennett School of Public Policy Annual Conference, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, spoke about the inequality that shadows economic growth. Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge, made the case for systems thinking in polarised times.

Important voices. Vital ideas. And still neither directly challenged unlimited GDP and a need to reshape our economic system entirely.

The people who will lead the urgent and transformational change we need aren't sitting on conference stages. The changemakers we need are people like you and me. People committed to building communities with the power to make decisions about how we live and work together to create and share prosperity in an inclusive and ecological way.

Nature doesn't do infinite growth. It does cycles: creation, exchange, decay, renewal. Every system that has ever sustained itself has known when to stop expanding and start transforming.

Our economy is built to perpetuate growth. And the politicians and policymakers who mean well are still too wedded to business as usual to confront that destructive truth and transform it.

So let's do it ourselves.

Let’s not ask "how do we grow more fairly?" but: what if growth itself needs to go? What does that economy look like?

A regenerative economy doesn't tinker at the edges. It reimagines the whole cycle into one that works with the limits of the earth and returns power to the people living within it.

This isn't theory. It's what the Together Culture community is building, starting where all real change begins: culture, or our beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviours and how we employ them to build the world we want to live in.

Ready to think differently and act together? I'm running a digital intro session on 9 April — join me. Book your place here.