Œconomy
Transition to a responsible, plural, and solidarity-based economy

The dead end of the current economic paradigm is the outcome of a long process, which since the industrial revolution entertains the idea of an autonomous science based on the never-ending generation of new needs and new products at the expense of the planet. Facing this dead end, the economy must return to its etymological meaning: “oikos”, home, common house, and “nomos”, the law, which is what defined the “œconomy” until the eighteenth century, before the industrial revolution, and aimed to harmonize everyone’s wellbeing with the limits of the biosphere.

To achieve the “great return forward” from the economy to the œconomy is to call into question the search for balance found only in growing consumption, in particular that of energy and natural resources, in obvious contradiction with the finite nature of the biosphere. It is to develop an economic vision that integrates the ethics of planetary responsibility and simultaneously embraces the art of organizing material and immaterial exchanges among human beings, among societies, and between humankind and the biosphere.

What are the new concepts, the new forms of exchanging, sharing, producing and consuming? What initiatives are emerging in the realm of the œconomy?