Helping to build the 'new economy'

This article was written for Uncover magazine - Meaningful Leisure Experiences. 

Author: Ger Pepels is an expert in transformative social innovation and founder of ‘Wat Aarde vraagt…’. He worked for BUas in different roles from 1988 to July 2025. Contact via [email protected]

While society seems trapped in a growth imperative and strict market rules, which is recognisable in the traditional commodified leisure sector, leisure can also make a powerful contribution by focusing attention to alternative forms of leisure pursuits. This means a shift of focus: no longer primarily focusing on forms of leisure pursuits delivered by the capitalist market that mainly respond to hedonistic needs and consciously create scope for the eudaimonic interpretation of leisure pursuits, for instance, by actively contributing to the flourishing of social and natural environments of local communities. 

Taking joint responsibility for the common good outside conventional paid working hours thus becomes more prominent and offers people a meaningful way to spend their (leisure) time. Academic research supports this approach: “... there is solid empirical research showing that it predicts outcomes which are uncontroversially considered valuable, including physical and mental health, other aspects of societal well-being and productivity”. Furthermore, it happens all the time in practice as the Diverse Economies – Iceberg (Community Economies collective) shows. The important thing is to draw attention to it.

Such a shift of perspective opens paths to alternative economies that, for example, focus on sustainable food production, innovative care facilities, and creating a high quality environment. These essential basic provisions function less around cash flows and more on the basis of intrinsically motivated time investment of those involved, thus providing a basis for another valuation system. This approach is a concrete and practical elaboration of concepts such as the ‘plural and embedded economy’, in which attention and appreciation explicitly go to the contributions of people in family relationships, communities, and the meents (commons), respectively, as fully-fledged economic sectors alongside the conventional market and state. 

Such a holistic approach to the economy falls outside the current mainstream economic perspective, while it directly connects to the urgently desired social transitions. This calls for transformative social innovations in the economic domain, going beyond mainstream innovation approaches: the “agentic, relational, situated, and multilevel process to develop, promote, and implement novel solutions to social problems in ways that are directed towards producing profound change in institutional context”(Ledingham, K., 2024).

Working on transitions in HEO is necessary, yet challenging
The challenges we face are now widely known, scientifically acknowledged and increasingly urgent: climate collapse, global inequality, food security, housing shortages, biodiversity loss, depletion of raw materials, stress and the focus on performance, and ongoing technological acceleration. These complex issues require transitions in areas ranging from energy production to digitisation and from mobility to agriculture.

Higher education has a responsibility to anticipate these transitions adequately. This is happening, albeit cautiously. This is also the case within higher economic education (HEO). The HEO Exploratory Report titled ‘Met regie naar verantwoordelijkheid’ (HEO Steering towards responsibility) notes that these transitions require graduates “who, where necessary or possible, can provide guidance for these transitions, while maintaining the performance and (social) earning capacity of organisations”. To achieve this, the report states that students must learn to think and work in crossovers and focus on multiple value creation. The report sees “(e)conomics programmes as a skewer piercing through the social domains and other sectors”. The hospitality domain of HEO even considers this crossover way of working to be the domain's characteristic contribution to making connections outside its own sector.

Our New Economy (ONE) has formulated a framework in partnership with the HEO Sector Council to structurally anchor New Economic Thinking in the curriculum. ONE identifies this innovation in three dimensions: embedding existing subject-specific expertise in a stronger orientation towards social challenges, integrating systems thinking and the approach to transitions, and on top of that, strengthening the orientation towards the individual and the relationship with others and the world.

TSI appreciates the scope that the new national Leisure & Events profile (LOP in Dutch), fully in line with these sectoral developments, creates for the leisure manager as a social innovator, change-maker and sense maker. This offers fertile ground for contributing to transformative steps in society. 

TSI considers all the above developments as an invitation to teach students to add value via crossovers in plural value systems. With regard to subject matter content, this requires the social innovator to become proficient in developing meaningful experience (experience design) and the development of new communities (community design) by facilitating in-depth dialogues (process design), with a thorough understanding of alternative economic approaches to develop organisations in a sustainable manner (new economics design). An understanding of the social challenges, transitions, and a foundation in systems thinking, form the basis for this. Orientations towards the individual, others and the world make up the starting points for the pedagogical choices. TSI can thus work on both the BUas cross-academic programme with hospitality domain partners tourism and facility management and on the necessary social transitions from HEO.

However, getting started with this is no easy task in higher professional education. The professors' platform Vernieuwing Economieonderwijs (Renewal of Economics Education) aptly describes the necessary efforts as being in the ‘trouble spot’, which means that working from the third learning loop of the triple-loop learning approach is necessary. In other words: “the critical questioning of values and deep convictions that are not only embodied at the individual level, but that are culturally maintained through largely implicit, collective processes” regarding subject matter, pedagogy and organisation of education.

After twenty years, TSI has a real feel for what it means to work in this challenging ‘trouble spot’. The key question here is what is involved if you really want to fathom and implement alternative economic approaches.

Deep change calls for changing mental models
What is actually required to achieve the intended transitions? Johan Schot (professor of Global History and Sustainability Transitions) points out the necessity to primarily seek the deeper connecting causes of all those crises in addition to the more sectoral transition efforts (such as around energy, mobility and agriculture). This presupposes ‘deep change’ at the level of values and beliefs. According to systems thinker Donella Meadows, the power to effect change is greatest at precisely this level by questioning, visualising and purposefully changing these mental models (values, assumptions, beliefs). However, realising this transformation is a challenging matter.

Business consultant Jennifer Wilkins has made a valuable picture of the playground of economic approaches on the basis of underlying values, beliefs and assumptions. 

The figure (model 5) in this article builds on Wilkins' work, placing the 'capitalist logic' and the 'cosmological logic' on a conceptual axis to highlight the profoundly different ways in which alternative economic approaches address the balance between economic, social, and ecological logics. Where Wilkins primarily wants to highlight ‘degrowth’ as an approach, we enrich the figure with the broader overview of economic  approaches from the study ‘Economics that dare to care’.

In the efforts to fundamentally renew economic thinking, we recognise the ‘soft reform’ and ‘radical reform’ approaches based on the capitalist logic. 

In soft reform, economic growth remains central, while efforts are made to reduce negative social and/or ecological impact. Neoclassical economic thinking also forms the basis of these alternatives. In the Green Growth approach, the SDG approach and also the Circular Economy, economic growth is a condition for successful investments.

In radical reform, economic growth is no longer the absolute condition for achieving greater well-being, even though the underlying capitalist relations of production remain largely intact. Doughnut Economics takes a growth-agnostic stance: growth is possible, but selectively, especially in view of the desired ‘absolute decoupling’ of economic activity and environmental impact. 

On the other side of the axis, we see the cosmological logic opposite the capitalist logic. In its most pronounced form, this is an approach based on a holistic world view, for which indigenous economic approaches serve as a model. The diversity within this perspective is also considerable, with some denominators themselves being overarching concepts (Degrowth Economics). A common denominator for these approaches lies in the ambition to operate from a ‘caring’ perspective on people and nature. Therefore, these approaches are referred to as transformative, anti-capitalist or ‘beyond reform’. 

Economic science offers a wealth of alternative approaches while the dominant neoclassical approach is generally the one used. Transition thinking assumes openness to fundamental alternatives, in which the underlying views of humanity and world views emerge.

World views and views of humanity
The different logics are connected to underlying world views and views of humanity. The economic theories that are positioned closer to the side of capitalist logic are based on an approach to the world referred to as the ‘narrative of separation’.

This narrative of separation fundamentally approaches the world as a collection of separate, independent entities, rather than a web of relationships and interdependencies. People are considered truly different from nature, and the environment is primarily a resource that can be controlled and exploited. Individual autonomy is prioritised over interconnectedness, with competition considered the primary mechanism for progress and development. This world vision fragments knowledge into specialist domains and addresses systems as mechanical and reducible to their component parts. The view of humanity and world view of the homo economicus is in line with this, with the centrality of the autonomous individual, instrumental rationality, the transparent and knowable world, and the central position of man in analysis and decision-making. 

In contrast with this, the cosmological logic recognises the ‘narrative of interconnectedness’ as the fundamental connectedness that is the essence of existence. Everything is understood as dynamically interconnected, in which the boundaries between self and other become fluid and permeable, and together form a coherent ecosystem. Instead of seeing the world as a collection of separate objects, this perspective sees reality as a living web of relationships in which each element co-creates and is created by its connections to the whole. People are seen as participating participants in, not as external controllers of a complex living network.

So, the two approaches are fundamentally different, without an inherent value judgement being attached to the concept. When assessing concrete initiatives, the underlying view of humanity and world view should be explicitly taken into account to look beyond just the symptoms (see events in the systems iceberg) for tackling an issue and for opting for an appropriate approach based on the desired value orientation. In view of the potential of a eudaimonic approach to leisure, other activities and other qualities come into play that can prove valuable in crossover approaches to transition challenges.

Conclusion
Higher economic education (HEO) is expressly committed to the transitions. However, it is crucial to realise that contributing to transitions is more than a merely technical exercise. Assessing the direction and approach requires a more detailed definition of what we mean by the economy and making value-driven choices. In other words, it requires a political stance. Not making a choice is also making a choice. The meta-crisis calls for an exploration at the ‘trouble spot’ to critically examine what we should dare to question during the transitions from an economic perspective, and how we can do so by taking into account the world views and views of humanity that underlie our thinking. Thanks to its leisure background, where the systems world and the experiential world emphatically touch each other, Transformative Social Innovation can make a meaningful contribution to this.

Sources
- Abdallah, S., Measuring eudaimonic components of subjective wellbeing, OECD working paper, No. 30, 2024.

- Ledingham, K., Hartley, S., Owen, R., Rethinking Innovation. Alternative Approaches for People and Planet, 2024.

- Lorek, S., Power, K., and Parker, N. (2023). Economies that Dare to Care - Achieving social justice and preventing ecological breakdown by putting care at the heart of our societies. Hot or Cool Institute, Berlin.

Credits

• Model 1: Diverse Economies Icebery: Community Economies Collective - Creative Commons
• Model 2: The Embedded Economy: Kate Raworth and Marcia Mihotich
• Model 3: Framework New Economic Education: Our New Economy & Sector Council of Higher Economic Education- Creative Commons
• Model 5: Economic Playground: Ger Pepels, adapted from Jennifer Wilkins