The letter talks a lot about ‘sustainable and inclusive wellbeing’, and manages to frame many of the EU’s own fundamental principles, goals and initiatives from this perspective. Of particular interest is the part about the EU’s own ‘Competitiveness Compass’ steering document and overarching framework, and how it then goes on to talk about how this approach does not fully integrate social and ecological wellbeing into its policy.
It’s an important development that people within our movement should be aware of, and one initiated by an enormous (and enormously well funded) body of highly respected academics and specialists. It should probably also be interpreted and presented to those without the commitment to read it in full! Maybe it needs a blog post somewhere, or being shared on Twitter in bite-sized chunks?
Thanks for sharing Oliver!
I represent WEAll in the MERGE consortium alongside @Margreet . Our comms colleague @KatePetriw has also been involved with the media work around this open letter, and I’m sure has plans to amplify it in WEAll’s global channels.
Going forward I’d be happy to share periodic updates from MERGE on the Together platform as well.
Hello Lisa
I went to the MERGE website, I’m trying to figure out what they are actually about, to see any projects they have initiated. I’m struggling but was hoping you might be able to shed some light on what they do and their vision is. Thanks.
Hi James, it’s a huge initiative with lots of partners that aims to bring together a lot of great work on alternative economic metrics and advance these at the EU level and beyond in a coordinated way. It’s only 1 year in (it’s a 3 year project) so there haven’t been so many outputs and activities yet but over the coming months WEAll will be involved in for example the delivery of policy lab events with EU and country level policymakers; and events to seek coordination across EU, UN, OECD and WHO beyond growth agendas. Other partners are right now doing research work and synthesising lots of knowledge that already exists - so there will soon be more publications coming out of the project as well.
If that all sounds quite high level and vague, I suppose it is for now, and I’m sorry about that! What I can tell you is that everyone in the project shares a vision for economic system change, towards economic systems based on wellbeing, sustainability and inclusion.