Progressive European Policies Working Group

This is a new group, forming in 2016. As such, this statement of purpose and nature will be a temporary, to be revised after the 2016 IIPPE Annual General Conference (AGM). in Lisbon in September.

This Working Group (WG) will be somewhat different from the other Working Groups. In line with sub-item item v of IIPPE’s item 3 of IIPPE’s constitution (“Objects”), “to engage with activism through formulation of progressive policy and support for progressive movements objectives,” a major part of this WG’s effort will be in applying political economy (in this case to European Policies). Clearly theoretical work (covered by sub-items i to iv of the same point in the constitution) must and will be involved as well, but the difference of this WG is the strong orientation to “policy advocacy.”

The initial gestation of this WG is seen as follows. There already are a significant number of progressive advocacy groups out there. A first task will be to make contact with them, find out who they are, what they are advocating. In particular we want to know how they are doing actual advocacy work. We then want to see if any are doing work that members of this group can participate in (the answer is yes, since we already have members of IIPPE that work in several of these groups, on their own).

By the time of the AGM in Lisbon in September 2016 this WG hopes to have a small network of members of IIPPE who work with (or are interested in working with) various of these groups – both from recruiting additional members or collaborators of these groups to IIPPE, and by recruiting other IIPPE members to work with these groups. The next step will concern setting up channels for cooperation of our members between the groups, and ongoing theoretical discussions about European progressive policies coming out of the work of the various groups.

There will be a workshop at the Lisbon AGM to further determine the structure and activities of the WG, and a new statement of purpose will be written coming out of that.

There will be email discussions among people who have joined the group (link to do so below) from the time of the Call for the AGM to in the fall of 2015 until the Lisbon meetings, both informing WG members of existing organizations we will be looking to collaborate with (and indicators of what they do) as we discover more and more of these, and discussion on how the inaugural organizational panel at the Lisbon meetings will be structured. Additional panels (beyond the organizational panel) by the WG on theory or practice of advocacy of progressive European policies will also be built if we have submissions to do so.

For any questions about this group, contact the WG Coordinator, Al Campbell (al@economics.utah.edu)