Actions for Progressive Politics and the Architecture of a Wellbeing Economy
Citizen Renaissance calls for an end to the Focus Group Politics that have emasculated leadership and severely constrained our ability to effect change, just when change has been most urgently needed. Short-termism, based on electoral necessity (or greed?), must be replaced by a rigorous longer-term view, grounded in the scientific facts of the Perfect Storm surrounding Climate Change and a new compassion for a fairer and more equal society, linking Global North and South.
Current political institutions remain weak and imperfect on both a national and supra-national level. Urgent reform is required to address both – setting new standards of accountability and delivery for both local Citizens and a new, global Citizenship.
At a national level:
- Shift towards a Wellbeing Economy measured by the desired endpoints of maximised human and planetary Wellbeing, not GDP
- Shift towards the politics of conversation, not confrontation. Use of engaged debate to inform policy and change
- Shift towards considering the benefits to the many and not the few. A shift away from the use of narrow political dogma to guide actions
- Shift towards a real system of proportional representation that enfranchises the Citizenship in a way that is commensurate with the democratising power of Digital. Allow every voice to be heard and every Citizen to be counted, in equal measure
- Shift towards articulating and protecting a genuine, longer-term view; cross-party alignment on the 2020/2050 Vision in the context of the Perfect Storm – and the measures required to deliver this. A determination not to deviate from this goal, whatever the short-term political ‘need’ and to remain grounded in scientific fact. (In Britain, this could provide an interesting role/function for a re-modelled Upper House of Representatives?)
- Shift towards a new openness – both of information access and programme delivery; access to the funding of political parties and the scale and reach of the lobby
- Shift towards national depletion quotas for resources and eco-taxation
- Shift towards Personal Carbon Allowances or Tradable Energy Quotas, in which each adult Citizen is given an equal free entitlement of TEQ units
At a global level:
- Shift towards a new international institutional trade framework
- Shift towards a radical and urgent reform of the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF to democratise it and deliver the above changes
- Shift towards a new institutional financial framework that would lengthen the time-horizons of investors and enable better and more thoughtful longer-term thinking
- Shift towards a globally agreed contract and converge equity-based model for radical reductions in carbon emissions
- Shift towards a new landscape of national outcomes-based regulation to drive carbon out of the global economy and fast-track low carbon and sustainable infrastructure and business model developments. Questions over the relative benefits of price versus quantity market mechanisms show that current trading and other price mechanisms are failing
