The S&D Group is getting prepared for the future and the next European elections by asking a group of renowned experts and thinkers to come up with groundbreaking policy proposals to solve today’s most pressing issues. The Progressive Society Report proposes to address these interlinked crises with interlinked policy responses.
This second Progressive Society Report, ‘The Great Shift’, will, as did its predecessor, feed into the 2024 election manifesto, the next Commission’s Work Programme and the ongoing legislative work of the S&D Group in the European Parliament.
THE GREAT SHIFT - From a broken world to sustainable well-being report 2021 can be consulted and downloaded for free here
The re-launch of the Progressive Society Initiative
At the instigation of Iratxe Garcia Perez (S&D Group President) and Eric Andrieu (S&D Group Vice-President), Progressive Society will now re-launch its work in this new parliamentary term in order to offer renewed support for the S&D Group’s parliamentary work and to reinforce the Group’s political impact on and influence over future European policy-making and progressive political thinking.
This has now become ever more important due the Covid-19 crisis, which exacerbates all the challenges that Progressive Society’s first report already addressed, highlighting more strongly its central call for a new sustainable model of development. The new focus of the initiative will be to draw the lessons from the current crisis and from the prevailing political agenda to develop an even more comprehensive and forward-looking strategy for change, embedded in the vision of sustainable well-being for all.
This new strategy will build on the initiative’s first report on Sustainable Equality, on the new political situation deriving from the ongoing European Green Deal and other EU initiatives in the economic and social fields, on the multiple challenges of the digital transition, on the implications and consequences of the Covid-19 crisis, on the need to build new transformative resilience, and on the most recent evidence regarding climate change and inequalities. Drawing all this together it will formulate a comprehensive set of policy recommendations for medium- and long-term action.
The new policy report, to be released by June 2021, will be submitted to the S&D Group by the initiative’s re-composed and gender-balanced Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality (ICSE), co-chaired by the former Danish Prime Minister and former President of the Party of European Socialists Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and by Spanish Deputy-Prime Minister Teresa Ribera.
The Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality – members
Prior to the final report, the ICSE and the S&D Group will engage in extensive talks with a wide range of stakeholders including NGOs and trade unions, in particular at the start of 2021 (including through a public conference in February).
Progressive Society initiative: a brief history
Since its inception in 2018, the Progressive Society initiative, with the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality (ICSE) at its core, has been assisting the S&D Group in getting to grips with the failures and continuous crises produced by today’s prevailing model of development. To this end, the initiative developed a progressive vision of a new model of society based on the idea of sustainable equality and sustainable well-being for all. By presenting the Report of the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality 2019-2024 with 110 concrete policy proposals ahead of the last European elections, the initiative and its first Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality (ICSE) broke ground for the development of a new transformative policy agenda t