For a long time, the end-goal of our economic systems has been narrowly focused on achieving ‘growth’. However, with rising socio-economic inequalities, 1 in 5 Europeans at risk of poverty or social exclusion and having globally crossed six out of nine planetary boundaries, it’s clear that our current system is not only ignoring the needs of people and planet, but also inflicting harm on our societies.
As Social Platform, we understand that to achieve our mission of sustainable, long-term social progress, we must have an economic system that works to enable this change. But what would this system look like?
A ‘Wellbeing Economy’ is an economy designed to serve people and the planet, not the other way around. It means that addressing everyday challenges and problems people face, such as living conditions, social protection and access to care and services are not secondary objectives but measurements of economic progress.
Existing international and European work on a wellbeing economy highlights 5 main objectives that broadly define a wellbeing economy:
- Purpose: the need to agree upon and work towards a common goal of an economy that ensures sustainable and inclusive wellbeing. Policy design and implementation must prioritise human and planetary wellbeing and business models must put social and environmental purpose at the heart of their work.
- Fairness: the need to ensure justice in all its dimensions at the heart of economic systems, through aspects like employment that delivers purpose and means for a decent livelihood, safe and healthy working conditions, and fair distribution of wealth.
- Dignity: the respect of fundamental human rights, the provision of resilient public services to ensure that everyone has enough to live in comfort, safety and happiness.
- Nature: a healthy relationship between people and planet as the foundation for physical and mental health, addressing the uneven impacts of climate change as well as climate change mitigation and achieving climate neutrality in a socially just way.
- Participation: transparent and democratic institutions enable structured meaningful participation of diverse stakeholders, including thriving and inclusive organised civil society and trade union movements, throughout decision-making processes and policy implementation.
Building on our work in the SPES project on sustainability transitions and the MERGE project on pathways to sustainable and inclusive wellbeing, Social Platform is taking this work further, aiming to define from a social perspective what is needed to achieve a wellbeing economy. As a first step, to start the learning process, we organised a Social Learning Platform on the topic. The objective of the event was to provide a learning opportunity for Social Platform members about ongoing work on a wellbeing economy at European level. As an external expert, we invited Alba Godefrey, from EuroHealthNet, who is engaged in the European Wellbeing Economy Coalition to present on the state of play of work on a wellbeing economy work in the EU and upcoming opportunities for EU-level civil society organisations to engage on the topic.
While there are some existing approaches to the wellbeing economy both at national level (Wellbeing economy governments) and initial commitments at EU level, obtained during the Finnish Council Presidency in 2019, several challenges to achieving a wellbeing economy remain. Lack of political will to change, short-term thinking as well as identification of the right metrics and indicators mean that wellbeing economy considerations have not been mainstreamed into EU decision-making.
Social Platform and other civil society organisations have an important role to play to support this work, to ensure that wellbeing economy ideas gain prominence on the EU agenda, help shape the narrative and serve as a link with communities at national and local level. As a next step, we will build on the knowledge gained on the wellbeing economy concept to start shaping our upcoming position on the topic.
