From September to November 2025, the PGB research team had the pleasure of welcoming Lotte Levelt, a PhD candidate from Nyenrode Business University, as a visiting researcher at the IIIEE. During her stay, Lotte engaged closely with our project group, sharing insights from her research on degrowth, strong sustainability, and post‑growth organisations. Her visit contributed to stimulating discussions on alternatives to dominant growth‑oriented business models and how firms can reorient themselves toward ecological and social well‑being.
Lotte is a full-time PhD candidate at Nyenrode’s Center for Entrepreneurship, Governance and Stewardship, where she investigates what degrowth-oriented business models might look like and how we might redefine value in a post-growth society. Before beginning her PhD, Lotte studied Governance, Economics and Development at Leiden University and completed a Research MSc in International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has also worked across Dutch government ministries, international NGOs, and as a university lecturer in sustainability and social sciences.
During her time at the IIIEE, Lotte presented her recent work, including an integrative review of degrowth, sufficiency, and regeneration as approaches to strong sustainability (Levelt et al, 2025). She showed that while the three concepts share common foundations, degrowth and sufficiency clearly articulate limits and critiques of capitalism, whereas regeneration is more varied and less unified. Her analysis identified three major tensions: the use of research perspectives misaligned with strong sustainability (leading to a risk of conceptual flexibility), differing importance placed on profit and ownership, and the gap between ideal‑type concepts and real‑world strategic contexts. She concluded that although the concepts overlap, their divergent practical applications prevent full integration, and she proposed a future research agenda to address these tensions.
Throughout her visit, Lotte’s clarity, critical reflections, and willingness to open complex theoretical debates enriched our project discussions. Her work offers valuable conceptual grounding for ongoing efforts to understand what post-growth businesses might require and what organizational transformations could look like in practice.
We thank Lotte for her inspiring contributions during her stay at the IIIEE and look forward to possible future collaborations as her doctoral research evolves!
