Towards a Resilient Future of Europe

The dynamics of the ageing of European societies and potential crisis scenarios make up the two critical cornerstones for this project.

First, social inequalities in old age are very much a function of choices and events made at a younger age and across the life-span, as well as of stereotypical assumptions, expectations and beliefs about the elderly, ageing and old age. Hence ageing must be viewed in terms of a life course approach.

Secondly, given inherent uncertainties, new policies and revisions of old ones ought to be resilience enhancing. They should enable both citizens and service providers to cope and adapt to whatever the next shock will be.

A focus on resilience means that policies must be thought of in terms of proactive planning, adaptability, flexibility and where possible, prevention, rather than post-hoc solutions to challenges related to the ageing of the population.

But they must also factor in the way that individuals are linked through families, social networks, environment, communities, nation states and also supra-national entities, such as the European Union (EU).

An important ambition of FutuRes is to establish a transdisciplinary policy lab, a platform where decision-makers from research, politics, business and civil society engage with the project and work closely together to elaborate evidence-informed solutions based on project results.

The project will have direct practical value for the actual implementation of proposed policies, but will also ensure an enduring legacy.

This will be achieved also by FutuRes open science practices (as laid out in section 2 in the proposal), which includes for instance the FutuRes policy review and its resulting data base, co-production efforts among participants and with non-scientific audiences.