doughnut economics does questionthe dominant economic growth paradigm [1,14]. How-ever, Brand et al. [49] see the absence of upper limits onthe social foundation as a particular limitation of thedoughnut, proposing that ‘societal boundaries’ areneeded to address injustice and slow the metabolism ofsocieties that overshoot ecological boundaries. Indownscaling efforts, determining such societal bound-aries would require powerful local leadership and in-tensive public engagement to foster their legitimacywhile also helping to identify the social and culturalresources that can support collective self-restraint [49].Such engagement may also help to counter the interestsof powerful actors who oppose socioeconomic limits orbenefit from greater inequality [69].

Translating the ambition behind the doughnut to localaction is inherently political given the demand for socialand economic shifts that imply a significant redistribu-tion of power and resources [23,65]. Critical social sci-ence research highlights the need for principles tounderpin such decision-making processes, ensuring thatgovernance for sustainable development is transparent,accountable, and responsive, particularly to those whoare marginalised [49].

Thisraises questions about the mechanisms to coordinate andmonitor change across scales, as well as the challenge ofmaintaining coherence over time while wider prioritiesand goals may shift. Given this, and the plethora of localgovernance institutions and arrangements that exist,successfully deploying the doughnut will require re-newed attention to coordination across multilevel gov-ernance regimes [5,53].

he concept of planetary boundariesprioritising scientific expertise and discussed primarily inacademic debates [14], and the doughnut commonlyappealing to policy-makers and practitioners at nationalor subnational scales, neither has the traction acrossspatial scales that has been achieved through the steerby the UN in the case of SDGs.

If the doughnut is to bea practical tool for governance it will need to involve newconversations incorporating political institutions, civilsociety organisations, and the wider public

downscaling poses the additional complexity ofunderstanding place-based dynamic systems to identifypathways that are safe and just over time [26,37]. Incomparison to national processes, where issues are ad-dressed by separate government departments and siloedpolicy agendas [22], local institutions may be better ableto generate integrative place-based policy and action[43,44]. However, institutional capacity and integrationmechanisms may be needed to support these kinds ofpolicies [45]. Applications of the doughnut present fur-ther challenges in this regard because of a need to in-tegrate and respond to changing scientific knowledgeregarding non-linear change, tipping points, interactionsand feedbacks [35], for which it may be difficult toidentify the implications for local contexts.

Downscaling the doughnut may require more attentionto connectivity across scales than has been demanded bypast approaches to local governance for sustainable de-velopment. The task of downscaling global models in-tensifies established challenges around goal setting,indicator selection, data availability and ongoing mon-itoring [18,22,23,26,39] because it requires goal setting tobe informed by an understanding of context-specificsocial and ecological trends and how they interact toinfluence both local and planetary outcomes. There areparticular complications in incorporating a burden-sharing approach that explores the extent to which localactivity contributes to global trends and problems.