The economic, social, environmental and climate crises are so deep and interconnected that incremental silo solutions alone are just not enough. The European Green Deal brought more coherence, but too many contradictions and gaps persist. The EEB pro-actively breaks down barriers between policy areas and steers towards the sort of system change that is deep and fast enough to truly face up to today’s challenges.
Piecemeal policies at best alters or outsources challenges and merely symbolic progress on the symptoms takes away a focus on the deeper problem itself. In a highly specialised and segregated EU policy-making arena, such flaws go a long way to explain the still dire state of both our environment and social plight. The EEB’s policy specialists and EEB members collaborate to think beyond their own policy files to seek broader and more comprehensive solutions that are often ahead of the curve, not yet on the political agenda. That is, until either we or a deepening of the unaddressed crisis puts them on the agenda.
We build alliances such as the EU Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a growing civil society coalition for moving policy beyond economic growth and towards a wellbeing economy. We keep our fingers at the pulse of global crisis situations and megatrends such as the pandemic, war or inflation crisis. We expose how during a crisis, systemic flaws of a fundamentally unjust political and economic system manifest themselves. We work with unions and social movements towards a just transition because the political-economic system needs to produce justice by design, not as some afterthought. From climate and energy to work and inequality and from racial injustice to gender and intersectional discrimination: in this field of work we establish the necessary connections across the many specialisations.
