Research agenda: What subjects do policy makers overlook at the moment?

[Oskari Niitamo]

The SPREAD team is crowdsourcing a research agenda for sustainable lifestyles. Your answers will be incorporated in the SPREAD project research agenda, which will be finalized by November 2012. The first draft will be presented to EU policy makers on October 2nd in Brussels. Have you say now!

This discussion is about subjects policy makers may have disregarded or failed to notice.

Have policy makers indeed put enough attention on factors that make our societies liveable? 

What are the areas most pressingly in need for a wake up call?

[Sylvia Breukers]

First of all, it would be good if policy making generally becomes more responsive to local initiatives.

Second, it could be helpful to learn more about (or better acknowledge) policy makers’ daily political-institutional environments that hamper the adoption of an integrated and systems-perspective - e.g. because they are tasked with energy policy or spatial planning sec. Having cross-domain initiatives and networks can help but then these must have long-term character as well as budgets available. It would be interesting to evaluate cross-domain policy initiatives that have been set up to address sustainability and transition policy issues to see how this has impacted the policy makers’ perspectives and the policies themselves.

[alvaro porro]

i think we should pay attention to the inequal distribution of enviromental impact and resource use within our societies. Policy makers should start thinking in new social contract that integrates the ecological vector wihtihn the social justice paradigm. Social justice dimension to enviromental policy will yield increasing support to those policies.