Professor Oksana Mont has been awarded a six-month fellowship from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) to conduct research at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo. The project, titled Thriving without growth: Japanese pathways for sustainable business, examines how companies and institutions operate in a context of prolonged low or no economic growth.
Japan’s long experience of near-steady-state economic conditions offers a unique opportunity to study how businesses sustain innovation, employment, and social stability without relying on continuous economic expansion. During her stay, Professor Mont will investigate how Japanese companies adapt to steady-state conditions and what lessons these experiences hold for Europe’s transition towards post-growth futures.
The fellowship builds directly on the Wallenberg Scholar programme Post-Growth Business (2025–2030) at Lund University, which develops frameworks for how companies can operate within planetary boundaries while ensuring human well-being. In Japan, the research will combine literature review, qualitative fieldwork, and stakeholder workshops with companies, municipalities, and policy organisations. The project will also use Mobile Research Labs, an intensive, collaborative, field-based methodology developed in prior European research projects.
The stay will strengthen collaboration between Lund University and leading Japanese scholars, including colleagues at the University of Tokyo and other research institutions. It will provide comparative insights into how businesses can thrive without quantitative growth and help advance a Japan–Sweden research network on post-growth and wellbeing economies.
Following the fellowship, the findings will feed into a symposium at Lund University and the development of a Massive Open Online Course on post-growth business, aimed at a broad international audience
