The Colorful Economy: A Conceptual Heuristic Framework for Integrating Economic Paradigms under Global Megatrends

Global megatrends such as climate change, resource depletion, demographic ageing and technological acceleration increasingly challenge conventional economic thinking. Existing economic paradigms, including the green, circular, blue, bio-based and silver economy, address specific aspects of these challenges, but are rarely analysed in an integrated way. Most existing frameworks remain focused on single domains rather than on interactions between paradigms. This paper introduces the concept of the Colorful Economy as a heuristic framework linking economic paradigms to interacting global megatrends. The analysis is based on a qualitative synthesis of 15 institutional reports and 22 peer-reviewed studies. The main contribution of the paper is the development of an integrative analytical framework that systematically maps economic paradigms onto global megatrends and makes explicit the interactions between them. This includes a structured mapping of paradigms to megatrends, the identification of key synergies and trade-offs with explicit evidence grading, and the formulation of the Multi-Color Interaction Framework (MCIF) as a tool for analysing policy coherence. The MCIF framework is a classificatory and interpretive heuristic, not intended for prediction. It provides a structured way to analyse how economic paradigms interact, complement or conflict within complex sustainability challenges. No single paradigm is sufficient to address the multi-dimensional pressures associated with global megatrends. The main contribution to sustainability science lies in a mid-level integrative framework that links economic paradigms with systemic transformation processes. It highlights the importance of considering interactions across paradigms and suggests that resilience is more likely to emerge from their combination than from reliance on any single approach.