Intergenerational fairness in the context of demographic change in the EU

Expected Outcome

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Enhance the understanding and engagement on intergenerational fairness among policy makers, researchers and citizens on future trends and drivers of intergenerational fairness in the EU through quantitative and qualitative analyses;
• Provide policy makers with scientific knowledge (including knowledge generated through SSH) and data for evidence-informed policies to address the drivers of intergenerational inequalities, tailoring interventions to diverse demographic groups, ensuring inclusivity across gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status;
• Develop an action plan to inform policy making, including a set of viable policies to adapt the European economic and social model to reduce intergenerational imbalances and help prevent them in the future, taking into account cross-policy synergies in terms of factors influencing intergenerational fairness.

Scope

Demographic trends over the last decade and future projections show that the share of the population aged 65+ is growing, both in comparison to the working-age population and to the child population. This is due to an increasing life expectancy and lower fertility and poses major challenges for intergenerational fairness and affects the implicit social contract across generations.

There is a growing need to provide an adequate framework for addressing fairness across generations (including knowledge on past generations, current and in particular future ones) related to education and labour market opportunities and outcomes, wealth accumulation and distribution of economic gains and costs, housing affordability, well-being and health, including environmental impact, role of institutions and public services, in the face of new challenges, such as ever-faster technological and climate change and changing public preferences.

• Proposals should provide in-depth analysis of at least 3 different drivers of intergenerational inequalities such as, but not exclusively, from the ones listed above, and the interdependence between them.
• Proposals should investigate intergenerational fairness, solidarity and trust through an intersectional lens, considering gender, family structure, racial or ethnic origin, socioeconomic and migration backgrounds.
• Proposals may have a regional and/or national dimension.
• Proposals may focus on developing and/or forecasting intergenerational fairness indicators.
• Proposals may draw lessons from recent policy interventions in EU Member States in a contextual and transdisciplinary manner and propose adjustment measures or test them through social innovation experiments.
• Proposals may focus on democratic participation and socially inclusive pathways to co-creating public values for current and future generations.

Clustering and cooperation with other selected projects under this call and other relevant projects is strongly encouraged.

Applicants are encouraged to consider the data offered by European Research Infrastructures in the social sciences domain, particularly SHARE (ri-portfolio.esfri.eu/ri-portfolio/table/). Where applicable, proposals should leverage the data and services available through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud, as well as data from relevant Data Spaces. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).

Proposals should consider the involvement of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) based on its experience and with respect to the value it could bring in providing an effective interface between research activities and policymaking.