On October 7, we launched the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Austria together with six partner organizations!! The launch event was a huge success, featuring a keynote speech by Olivier de Schutter, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, and many interested and inspiring people and organizations. If you weren’t able to attend, you can find the video here.
Last Wednesday was a busy day at the Blumenfabrik in Vienna. Over 100 people filled the event space at the offices of the environmental organization Global2000. Everyone had come to celebrate the launch of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Austria, or WEAll Austria for short.
What is WEAll?
WEAll Austria is a sub-initiative (a hub) of WEAll Global, a global initiative that has been connecting organizations, associations, movements, and individuals since 2018. They work together toward a Wellbeing Economy which they define as follows:
A Wellbeing Economy is an economy designed to serve people and the planet, not the other way around. Rather than treating economic growth as an end in and of itself and pursuing it at all costs, a Wellbeing Economy puts our human and planetary needs at the centre of its activities, ensuring that these needs are all equally met, by default.
As Degrowth Vienna, we are thrilled that this initiative has now reached Austria. WEAll Austria originally emerged from the organization of the Beyond Growth Conference 2024 in Vienna and the resulting Beyond Growth movement in Austria. Thus, in addition to Degrowth Vienna, the founding organizations include Global2000, Economy for the Common Good Austria, Wachstum im Wandel, AEMS, the Umweltdachverband, and Donut Vienna. Our network has since grown to over 30 organizations and will continue to expand in the future.
The Launch Event
At our launch event, we were also very fortunate to have Olivier de Schutter as our keynote speaker. He is the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and recently published the report “Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth” with his team. He made a very compelling case that GDP growth is no longer an appropriate measure for combating poverty. On the contrary, it disproportionately harms people already living in poverty—whether through increased inequality or climate-related damages.
Afterward, Katy Shields moderated a fishbowl discussion with Olivier and two other guests: Anna Wagner from the Armutskonferenz and Fabio Bruni from the BMLUK (Austrian Ministry of Agriculture and Climate). The three discussed very interesting questions with various participants from the audience, such as:
🤝 How can we create more equality in our society? Perhaps we shouldn’t accept a society in which the “poor” and the “rich” are increasingly pitted against one another—only to then talk about redistribution. Instead, we should ask much earlier: What is truly important to us as a society? What do we want to focus our resources and our economy on?
🫶 How can we truly integrate care work into our understanding of the economy? All too often, the assumption remains that only what is quantifiable is assigned economic value. But care, care work, relationships, and the things that hold our society together cannot simply be expressed in numbers. That has to change.
💪 And of course: How can we move from talk to action?
This was followed by a gallery walk featuring posters from WEAll Austria’s network partner organizations, which are already working in a wide variety of ways toward an economy and society centered on human well-being—not blind economic growth. This sparked many interesting conversations that lasted well into the evening.
All in all, WEAll Austria’s launch event was a resounding success! A huge thank you to the other founding organizations for putting together such a great event!!
We’re already looking forward to the next steps with WEAll Austria!