What a new map of the EU wellbeing economy means for funders

For years, describing Europe’s new economy meant reaching for anecdotes. A cooperative here, a community energy project there, a think tank pushing a wellbeing budget through one ministry. This growing constellation of civil society organisations, cooperatives and research groups — all working to reshape economics around people and the planet — was clearly multiplying. It reflects the broader idea of a wellbeing economy. But no one could say how many there were, where the gaps sat, or where funding would do the most good.

What the field lacked was a map. That gap has now been filled.

The first real map of Europe’s wellbeing economy

Fertile Ground is the most comprehensive mapping of Europe’s wellbeing economy produced to date. It was commissioned by Partners for a New Economy (P4NE) — which NILO Foundation backs as a recent funding partner — and researched by the consultancy Metabolic. Documenting 735 organisations across 35 countries actively working to rebuild the economic system around the needs of people and the planet, it sets out a typology for sorting that work by activity and theme. The authors describe this as the groundwork for a living directory of the field, which launched in early 2026.

One detail from the underlying dataset stands out on its own: roughly half of the organisations mapped were founded in the past decade. This is a field still forming, not a mature sector settling into place.

Three principles and ten findings behind new economics

At a recent Alliance magazine webinar, P4NE Director Jo Swinson and Metabolic founding partner Chris Monaghan walked through what the findings mean in practice. Their framing is worth taking seriously by any funder still weighing whether this field belongs in a giving strategy.

Jo Swinson, first set out the intellectual core of new economics in three ideas.

The first is regenerative rather than extractive activity. It’s asking whether growth actually leaves the world better off once its full social and ecological costs are counted, rather than celebrating a rising graph that hides depleted natural capital underneath it.

The second is interdependence: a rejection of the assumption, baked into conventional economics, that atomised individuals each optimising their own utility somehow add up to collective wellbeing. In reality, as the pandemic showed with public health, outcomes are shared, not individual.

The third is time horizon. Current economics systematically discounts the future, which is exactly why climate investment gets treated as expensive rather than plainly sound.

Between them, the three ideas describe a sustainable economics that measures success by what it builds for people and the planet, not by growth alone. It picks up where sustainable development left off, asking not only how to grow more cleanly, but whether growth is the right measure at all.

What the findings mean for funders

The report’s ten findings translate those principles into something close to a funding brief. Two stand out for philanthropy.

First, funding is the field’s binding constraint. Organisations report spending disproportionate time chasing small, short-horizon grants, partly because systems-change work resists the neat metrics that make traditional funders comfortable. Chris Monaghan was candid about the other side of that: this is precisely the kind of field where patient, risk-tolerant philanthropic capital can do more good than almost anywhere else, if funders are willing to look past a two-year logframe.

Second, the report flags a risk it calls the “Brussels technocracy bubble”, referring to organisations drifting into policy jargon and Brussels-specific advocacy that loses touch with what people actually feel day to day: the cost of living, stagnant wages, the outsized influence of wealth on politics.

The missing middle, from grassroots to policy

A third finding, the “missing middle”, is arguably the most structurally important. There is a persistent gap between grassroots experimentation, such as community land trusts and cooperative energy schemes, and the policy development that could help those models scale or replicate. There is a related gap between promising local pilots and the capital, governance support and orchestration needed to carry them from one town to many.

Both gaps point to the same conclusion. The field does not simply need more funding. It needs organisations able to translate between registers, from grassroots and policy, pilot and scale.

Keeping the EU wellbeing economy grounded

The Brussels finding reads as a caution as much as an observation.

Much of the policy conversation around a wellbeing economy now runs through EU institutions — the European Commission, member states, and initiatives spanning the European Green Deal to the circular economy. That proximity to power matters. However, a field that talks mainly to itself, in technocratic language, risks losing the people whose everyday economic anxieties are driving political volatility across the EU. The same anxieties that erode social cohesion when they go unanswered. Keeping the work legible, across Europe and to the communities it is meant to serve, is part of the task.

Where this connects to NILO Foundation’s work

This is, in miniature, the theory of change behind our wellbeing economy programme, and behind our support for P4NE. P4NE brings together funders and organisations across the field, and has spent years working the connective tissue this report identifies as missing — funding, convening, and now commissioning the shared infrastructure (a map, a typology, an evidence base) that lets a still-forming field begin to act like a coordinated movement rather than hundreds of disconnected experiments.

Fertile Ground gives funders something concrete to act on. It points to three priorities for the next phase: funding horizons long enough to match the pace of genuine systems change, rather than electoral or fiscal-year cycles; direct backing for the organisations doing the tedious work of connecting grassroots practice to policy, since that is exactly where value is currently lost; and vigilance against a field that speaks mainly to itself, at the expense of language that reaches the economic anxieties shaping politics across the continent.

The community around new economics is moving toward a more evidence-based, better-coordinated phase, supported by the kind of infrastructure P4NE has chosen to build. NILO Foundation’s role, as with all our partnerships, is to keep resourcing that infrastructure with allyship, patience and care.