In Glasgow, Scotland, the non-profit Common Weal bills itself as a grassroots think tank. They have recently published a report called “Resilience Economics,” which they describe as “a new economic framework to begin the process of rebuilding our economy after the Covid pandemic, and to ensure that future crises do not demolish it again.”
Resilience means that we create a society in which people can live good lives – and in which they can continue to live good lives even as things change and crises hit us.
To achieve it we must create a resilient society where inequality is low, democracy and participation are high, public infrastructure and services are top quality and readily accessible and community cohesion and public trust are strong.
We need a resilient economy, one which creates the good jobs that give people the income to live good lives now, which has the security to make us confident we can live good lives in the future, which useful, diverse, non-exploitative and which does not contain high levels of risk or which falls over in a crisis.
And this must all be based on a resilient environment which is always able to regenerate itself after human activity and can therefore sustain our lives now and in the future.
This is what would make Scotland resilient.
The report explains:
- Why our current economic model is failing;
- How the Covid pandemic exposed the failures of neoliberalism; and
- Why resilience should be a central part of the rebuilding strategy.
The report then examines the principles of Resilience Economics which demand that economies satisfy metrics such as sufficiency, well-being, participation, transparency and infrastructure and outlines where Scotland has particular opportunities in sectors such as energy, timber, food, human resources, innovation and our land.
Photo of Glasgow, Scotland by Charlie Irvine from Pixabay.