Description (en)
WWWforEurope Working Paper No. 40, 77 pages
The research project WWWforEurope undertakes to lie the theoretical and empirical foundations for the embarkment on a new socio-ecological growth path in Europe. The new path underlines the need to guarantee Welfare as a broad universal principle for its population, assuring economic and social prosperity. The new path stresses the value of achieving – what we call – Wealth, a value in which material and immaterial resources are combined with the goal to enrich people‘s lives and to preserve natural resources, nature and bio-diversity. Both cannot be achieved without Work: Europe needs to enable its population to achieve their life satisfaction at the highest level possible and Work is one of the most – if not, the most – fundamental precondition for this. In short, the overarching question the WWWforEurope project attempts to answer is what kind of new European growth and development strategy is necessary and feasible, enabling a socio-ecological transition to high levels of employment, well-being of its citizens, social inclusion, resilience of ecological systems and a significant contribution to the global common goods like climate stability. Thus the project’s central goals are to identify the forces and challenges necessitating deliberations on a new growth path, to define socio-ecological transition, key actors and main obstacles, and to find out how the process of a socio-ecological transition can be initiated, monitored, and accelerated on an institutional level (EU, national and regional level). A central prerequisite to successfully accomplish these central goals is to establish a common understanding of the central questions raised by this undertaking and to create awareness for the project’s systemic and interdisciplinary approach. To this behalf, this paper presents fundamental concepts, terms and definitions relevant for socio-ecological transition. Thus it should provide some kind of lexicon, which serves as starting point and background for the work on the central questions guiding the WWWforEurope project. Wherever possible, the paper should facilitate the agreement on common definitions. It is not the aim of the paper to elaborate tradeoffs in depth and to offer solutions and answers already. It rather strives to motivate all research groups involved in the WWWforEurope project to use and discuss the existing concepts, may they be consistent or just offer a variety of thought. It also attempts at drawing attention to the existence of trade-offs and open questions relevant for the various research areas. Moreover, the paper wants to inspire the search for best (or the identification of not working) practices, and it wants to increase the awareness for existing barriers to change. While the paper is not able to elaborate in depth distributional and gender aspects as crucial cross-cutting issues, it aims at directing attention at them and at inspiring research undertaken in the WWWforEurope project to consider these cross-cutting issues. Finally, the paper does not focus too much on policy issues. It is the aim of the overall project to identify (potential) interlinkages, trade-offs and synergies and to discuss policy options and instruments in details to support a more dynamic, inclusive and ecological growth and development path for Europe.
Keywords (en)
Behavioural economics, beyond GDP, biophysical constraints, ecological innovation, economic growth path, gender, innovation, social innovation, socio-ecological transition, sustainable growth, synergies, wealth