João Marques (p)

Ronald Miranda

The Regional Spatial Planning Programme (PROT-Centro) represents a comprehensive effort to define a territorially based strategy for sustainable economic and social development in Portugal's Centro region. This initiative is focused on establishing a strategic vision, anticipating major contextual challenges, and ensuring alignment with national policies and local development strategies for the period leading up to 2030.
The work specifically highlights the methodology of the foresight exercise utilized in the development of the PROT-C, which was structured around two fundamental components. Firstly, the process involved the identification of guiding principles of the major strategic objectives for the region. This stage was achieved through the development of exogenous scenarios, in which the experts were required to foresee a variety of future contexts for the region, each shaped by different external conditions and influencing factors. This was followed by an extensive participatory exercise using a multi-criteria analysis framework in which key stakeholders in the region voted on different policy alternatives. This inclusive approach not only facilitated the identification of regional priorities, but also provided a platform for extensive discussion and analysis of the results. This exercise was designed to gather and understand the preferences and expectations of the participants, to assess their perceptions of the current realities and to explore the diversity of views on possible changes and transformations needed for regional development.
Involving over 120 key stakeholders, the exercise facilitated a detailed comparison between the participants' preferences and expectations. It involved a nuanced assessment of their current reality perceptions using a single-round Delphi method, and concurrently, a focused evaluation of their preferences regarding potential changes, conducted through a targeted multi-criteria analysis. The exercise encompassed a wide array of participants, ranging from municipal leaders and university rectors to a diverse group of representatives across various sectors, ensuring a comprehensive cross-section of perspectives and expertise.

Mu-Jeong Kho (p)

joão Marques

With the growing concerns on socio-economic inequalities-poverty deepening in capitalism, we are now facing challenging times: an economic crisis and food crisis. To tackle such inequalities, major ‘adaptations’ (‘self-organising changes’) are necessary. The fundamental challenge in those ‘adaptations’ must be institutional: existing institutions are improper, and a greater period of experimentation such as ‘basic income’ is necessary. This is why we must look at the basics of institutional economics, particularly in radical traditions such as Karl Polanyi in the context of basic income, outside of the ruling neoliberal consensus. Although the Polanyian literature seems not to be a stranger in the ‘basic income’ context; however, it has weakly connected to the issue, how a basic income can truly act as a ‘trigger’ for the self-organisation of a new resilient systems of food community resilience. This question in turn leads to sub-questions: (1) how capitalist system of food gets to organisation-structuration in real-world (objectivity); (2) what its origin-of-disorder is; (3) in the crisis, how the basic income acts as a trigger for the self-organising; (4) whether or not it truly acts as a ‘trigger’ for the self-organisation of a new systems of food community resilience in philosophical value-history; (5) if untruly, what the normative solution is, addressing in political literature the duality of reformism-versus-radicalism. This paper, which defines self-organisation as an ‘institutional process of recovery’ through reorganising and reconstituting order out of disorder (i.e. order as structure), seeks to answer such foundational question, together with the institutional matrix of self-organisation full of institutional variants structurated by market versus non-market; on the other, pro-capital versus anti-capital, through the application of a deeper understanding of Polanyi to an empirical case study (with quantitative-data analysis) on the food system in Korea. By doing so, this paper argues: beyond superficial issues such as private-versus-public, market-versus-state, Keynesianism-versus-neoliberalism, institutional economics in Polanyian literature addresses the deeper and ‘real-world’ issue of structuration in capitalistic systems of food in Korea which act as the roots, substances of long-term crisis in food system. In the crisis, the basic income in turn can act as a trigger for self-organisation in a short-term, but only valid when it is truly connected to the Polanyian long-term ‘radical’ vision with an essential telos such as ‘Universal Basic Income (UBI),’ which in turn helps us to look for a transition towards a new system of food justice and resilience, beyond such a capitalistic system.

Ronald Miranda (p)

Mu-Jeong Kho

In this article, we empirically analyse the impact of social public spending on human development distribution in a sample of 82 developed and developing countries over the period 2010-2021. Specifically, we focus on the impact of the three components of social spending (health, education and social protection) on the distribution of human development as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI) and its dimensions (health, education, and income). Applying data panel analysis, our empirical evidence shows that the three components of social expenditure reduce the loss of HDI caused by inequality. Hence, public resources allocated towards social spending have an important redistributive impact with regards to human development outcomes related to life expectancy, years of schooling and income per capita.