SUMMARY
This past year we continued to push the UN Beyond GDP agenda through our Youth Network, launched our New Economy Influencers Collective project in the UK, and continued to support campaigning for ecological economics in the UK and Europe. We published crucial research revealing that the economics discipline maintains ideological conformity.
Additionally, we continued to provide support to our global network of national and
university groups, while beginning to redirect the work of the staff team to supporting a youth movement, built on individual membership with a renewed governance structure. We worked hard internally to build new systems to support this work, as well as to generate a strategy and plan for member development.
OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES
We organise our objectives and our activities under three main pillars.
Our Pillars of Organise and Educate help us transform a disenfranchised and alienated audience, receiving a toxic education into a youth membership body ready to promote a truly scientific and emancipatory economics.
Organising our members and community is how we build power in our groups that can push for change in institutions and wider society. Groups help us root our activities and decentralise our work to give members in Ecuador, Philippines, India and elsewhere the autonomy and resources to define their own direction and respond to their contexts. Youth membership helps us build a powerful collective voice for the international movement, putting our generation at the centre of systemic change. Building a community helps us create a new democratic and inclusive culture both to transform our members into Rethinkers and challenge the existing culture of hierarchy, prejudice and monothinking of the economics discipline.
Critical education is the spark that mobilises young people by connecting today’s crises to the economics that’s taught at the university, researched in academic and policy setting and practiced in the wider world. Taking control of our own education will enable the collective emancipation of our members from mainstream economics and generate new ideas and initiatives towards changing education and wider society. Popular economics education will help us democratise economics knowledge, helping us to take up our role in service of our communities and social movements. Collective and critical economics education traversing borders will help to decolonise and diversify our education as we root our understanding in an internationalist perspective.
We support our members and groups to Agitate for changes in the teaching, research and practice of economics to move us towards our vision of an economics and economy that serves people and planet. Agitating (campaigning) is how we test our power by pressuring universities and other decision makers to concede to our demands and ultimately make change. It creates the motivation and urgency to organise our community. It is itself political education as members face power and the decisions that contribute to an unjust world. University undergraduate economics education still requires major upheaval and is a key determinant of how economists are trained to think.
Simultaneously, we will also challenge journals and institutions to reflect the implications of the planetary emergency. As one of the few organisations mobilising young economic thinkers internationally, it gives us a unique opportunity to work in coalition with others to challenge global financial architecture and its use of outdated ideas, models and instruments.
Rethinking Economics International (REI) delivers public benefit through making economics education more engaging and accessible to young people and society. The trustees consider how best the charity can maintain its public benefit at each quarterly board meeting with due regard to the Charity Commission’s guidance.