WWWforEurope - Towards a New Growth Pat...

The objective of the project is to provide the analytical basis for the need, the feasibility and the scope of a socio-ecological transition, to derive policy instruments for shifting Europe to a new "high road path", and the institutional changes needed at all policy levels.

The Institute of Social Ecology (SEC) is involved in two work packages: „Assessing Past Transitions“ and „Biophysical Scenarios for Resource Constraints“. In the first work package, SEC will investigate the energetic dimension of past revolutions, following circumstantial evidence suggesting that several social and political revolutions in the past were closely linked to transitions from an agrarian to a fossil energy regime. One objective of the work package is to assess the regularities and possible causalities within this relation. Another objective is to investigate the relation between crises of several social subsystems in Western societies of the 1970s (the “energy crisis" of the economic system, the legitimation crisis of the political system and the crisis of social values in the cultural system) and the first ever stabilisation of per capita resource and energy use in the industrial age. What lessons can be learnt from the relation between social and political crises on the one hand and transitions of energetic regimes on the other? Which consequences could these lessons entail for the imminent transition form a fossil to a post-fossil energy regime and which opportunities and risks for the future development ofr Europe can be identified?

In the second work package („Biophysical Scenarios for Resource Constraints“) SEC develops a set of scenarios for future resource use in Europe, with a close consideration of the biophysical constraints involved. These scenarios will then be implemented in one or more macroeconomic models on the basis of which several different trajectories of European development can be forecast and compared. This comparison should provide the analytical basis for the development of effective policy tools to steer European development onto a more sustainable trajectory.