International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP)

Many wealthy societies face challenges and developing countries tend to attempt to imitate their solutions in order to end poverty and hardships instead of finding new models. Can we hope for a better society in the future?

Societies are being impacted profoundly in current times by a number of interconnected forces, such as the weakening of the nation state, unequal transformations in health and education outcomes, contestations between the religious and the secular and powerful forces of technical change which are altering the world of work and the power relations between capital and labour.

The International Panel on Social Progress is uniting hundreds of researchers from social sciences and the humanities in an effort to develop research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-driven solutions to these challenges. The result is to be published in a report covering the following issues:

Democracy and Citizenship
Poverty, Inequality and Well-Being
Global Risks, Resources
Markets, Finance and Corporations
Private and Public Governance
The Future of Work
Violence, Peace and Security
Global Health
Religions and Secularisms
Gender-Family-Reproduction-Sexuality
Urban Issues, Urban-Rural Relations
Education, Communication and Media

Four cross-cutting themes will be weaved through the report: (i) technology and innovation, (ii) globalization, (iii) social movements, (iv) identity/community.

For each of these topics, the report will examine the following three questions:

What is the current situation and what are the historical and prospective trends?
What direction of change can be inspired by the search for social justice?
What are the drivers and barriers for such a change?

We are partners of the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP), which will publish a report with 22 chapters on social, economic, environmental and political challenges in Cambridge University Press 2018. With funding from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, we have organized six workshops with the authors of the chapters of the report and in connection with them arranged a number of open lectures. Parts of the report and a brief summary will be published in Swedish by the Institute for Futures Studies.