Building a New Economic Order for Health in an Age of Rupture

A commentary published in the journal Globalization and Health argues that the world has moved beyond a period of economic transition into something more disruptive, and that governments are responding with policy tools that have already failed. The piece, written by Ronald Labonté and published on 20 July 2026 as an editorial in volume 22 of the open-access journal, takes as its starting point a remark by Canada’s Prime Minister at the January 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Mark Carney told the assembled global elite that “we are in a rupture, not a transition.” The commentary accepts that diagnosis but rejects the response that followed it, contending that the familiar playbook of tax cuts, new trade deals and public funding to attract private investment amounts to a neoliberal approach that is both increasingly unpopular and, in the author’s assessment, ineffective.

According to the editorial, Carney outlined what Canada was doing in response to global instability: cutting taxes, negotiating new trade agreements, and directing public money toward attracting private investment with the stated aim of growing Canada into a global energy powerhouse. Back home, with a new parliamentary majority, the commentary states that Carney rapidly cut development assistance, tied what remained of it to Canadian foreign investment interests, increased military spending, and rolled out legislation allowing his government to overrule almost every regulation that might hamper economic growth. Labonté argues that whether or not this was consciously intended, these policies began to emulate the very hegemon Carney had earlier urged middle-power countries to stand up against.

The editorial places Canada’s shift within a broader pattern. Many middle-power countries, it says, have to varying degrees begun adopting the same self-interested mercantilism that has been on what the author calls excessive American display over the past year, a period defined by the second presidency of Donald Trump. To illustrate the dynamic, the commentary cites a speech by emerita professor Jane Kelsey, who describes the approach as riding a wobbly bicycle as the international rules-based system falls apart, in the hope that pedalling hard enough will get us somewhere. The problem, Labonté writes, is where that pedalling is taking us.

The historical framing of the argument reaches back before the current geopolitical turmoil. The global economy, the editorial notes, faced two near collapses in recent memory: the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 covid pandemic. In both instances, the political response was to stoke the familiar engines of growth, ignoring that such growth relies upon increasing levels of material consumption. The consequences, as the author enumerates them, are climate chaos, unprecedented wealth disparities, and a planet rapidly traversing the last ecological thresholds capable of sustaining human life. This trajectory, Labonté contends, is why governments cannot simply “take on the world as it is,” despite what he characterizes as Carney’s Davos imprecations to do so.

Underlying this critique is a structural claim about how the world economy operates. The world “as it is,” the editorial argues, is structured by the logic of capitalism, the private accumulation of profit, and the externalization of social and environmental costs. To the extent that an emergent global political economy is filling the void left by failing neoliberalism, the author sees it resembling the great power politics of previous eras. He quotes Trump advisor Stephen Miller describing it as “a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Carney himself, the editorial notes, acknowledged as much in Davos, warning that this “world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.”

The commentary then extends the forecast into darker territory. Bleaker forecasters, it says, see the world heading toward one dominated by technology monopolies and monopsonies, in which unregulated artificial intelligence generates ever-more inequality within and between nations while taxing ecosystems for the vast amounts of energy and water needed for sprawling data centres. The editorial also observes that autocracies are on the rise and that fascism is making a comeback. These observations frame the stakes of the argument: without a deliberate change of economic direction, the default path leads toward concentrated power, ecological strain and diminishing democratic space.

Against this pessimistic backdrop, the editorial identifies what it calls an ironic, perhaps tragic, feature of the present era: a plethora of broadly similar alternative political economy models already exist. One example is the World Health Organization’s Council on an Economics of Health for All, which released a series of reports with recommendations intended to transform economic systems and co-create a policy design guide to deliver shared wellbeing. None of the Council’s recommendations, Labonté writes, would be foreign to public health activists who have long argued for the health-determining importance of progressive taxation, environmental justice, economic fairness, gender equity, collective human rights, food security, and properly financed governments dedicated to protecting civic spaces for public engagement in policy making. The 2026 World Health Assembly, the editorial adds, codified some of these ambitions in specific strategies that it urged member states to adopt.

The editorial surveys several of these alternative frameworks in detail. A year after the WHO Council released its final report, a Club of Rome collaboration published its Earth4All Survival Guide for Humanity, identifying five great turnarounds with seventeen specific policy directives intended to create a wellbeing economy. The Club of Rome is best known for its seminal 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, which modeled the social and environmental damage of continued unfettered economic growth, and the Earth4All Guide similarly modeled future scenarios. The editorial summarizes the modelled contrast starkly: if the recommended, evidence-informed policies are adopted, humanity could celebrate the year 2100 living healthier and more equal on a still vibrant planet; if only modest economic and environmental reforms compatible with the capitalism and growth paradigm are pursued, the next century is more likely to arrive amid societal collapse on a nearly unlivable planet. These are model-based scenarios, projections of possible futures rather than observations of present outcomes.

Signs of practical engagement exist, the editorial acknowledges, though it tempers its optimism. Some countries are cautiously engaging with at least the idea of wellbeing economies. There is a Wellbeing Economy Alliance with over 500 member organizations, and roughly a half dozen countries are organized as Wellbeing Economy Governments. While few wellbeing economy initiatives call out capitalism directly or adopt fiscally challenging policies, the editorial notes that their language of abundance, wellness and conviviality resonates with polling indicating that many of the world’s peoples want an economy organized around wellbeing rather than around growth and capital accumulation. At more local scales, 50 local and regional governments are attempting to ground their policies in Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics model, which is based on avoiding ecosystem overshoot and remedying social shortfalls in the determinants of health. Though grounded locally, the model calls for assessing how a city’s consumption affects people globally and how its resource use affects planetary boundaries. Meanwhile, economist Mariana Mazzucato, who chaired the WHO Council, is extending her earlier Mission Economy work in a project called The Common Good Economy, premised on participatory decision-making and strong democratic states actively shaping markets for socially desirable goals rather than simply fixing inevitable market failures.

The editorial closes with both scepticism and a call to action. Labonté notes reasons to doubt the idealism of many alternative models, citing the most recent one, the Global Justice Report released by the World Inequality Lab, co-directed by Thomas Piketty, known for his critical work on capitalism’s disequalizing outcomes. One of the report’s authors acknowledged it is “visionary and maybe utopian” but essential to show that other paths are possible. Eschewing the labels of degrowth or postgrowth economics, the report embraces sufficiency, meaning just enough for all to lead healthy lives, and habitability, meaning staying within ecosystem boundaries. It is unique, the editorial says, in simultaneously modeling four transition dimensions: redistribution at global scale; deep reform of the international financial and economic order; radical transformation of the energy system; and substantial shifts in consumption patterns. Its key elements include reduced working hours with a shift from industry and mining to education and health, forming a caring economy; a global justice fund comprised of wealth taxes and a global income tax with a 90 percent marginal rate; radically reduced material consumption; and primarily plant-based diets. What is missing from present political responses, Labonté argues, is a declaration of what type of world is actually needed. Without proclaiming the insights of these well-studied economic alternatives, the interests of the multibillionaire few will continue directing political choices in their favour, defaulting to what former Colombian president Gustavo Petro described as the “suicidal model of capitalism.” Deepening geopolitical crises, the editorial concludes, will likely bring pivotal moments of evolution, revolution or environmental necessity, and it will take the mobilization of progressive ecosocial justice movements, and considerable personal courage in speaking out against autocrats and oligarchs, to pivot politics toward sufficiency and habitability.

Subject of Research: An editorial arguing for alternative wellbeing economy models to replace neoliberal growth policies in order to protect health and ecological sustainability.

Article Title: From rupture to recourse: building a new economic order for health

Article References: Labonté, R. (2026). From rupture to recourse: building a new economic order for health. Globalization and Health, 22(1), Article 59. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-026-01231-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12992-026-01231-x

Keywords: global health, political economy, neoliberalism, wellbeing economy, doughnut economics, climate change, WHO Council on an Economics of Health for All, Earth4All, Global Justice Report, economic inequality, ecological thresholds, mercantilism