Rethinking Society for the 21st Century

Location: NHH Norwegian School of Economics, Auditorium A

The University of Bergen is proud to announce that on June 20, the report “Rethinking Society For The 21st Century” will be launched at Bergen Summer Research School.

Marc Fleurbaey


Chair IPSP, Robert E. Kuenne Professor of Economics and Humanistic Studies, Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Comments by:

Katrine V. Løken


Professor, Department of Economics, NHH Norwegian School of Economics

Varun Gauri


Senior Economist in the Development Economics Vice Presidency of the World Bank. He co-leads the Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (
eMBeD), which integrates behavioral science into the design of anti-poverty policies worldwide.

Jackie Dugard
, with a background in social sciences and law, is a human rights activist and scholar and is Associate Professor in the School of Law, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Ole F. Norheim


Professor, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen

– Lead author of Chapter 18) Global Health and The Changing Contours of Human Life; and Chapter 22) The Contributions of Social Sciences to Policy and Institutional Change

The report, published by the Cambridge University Press, outlines what the best social science has to say about positive social change.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists – supervised by Nobel Prize economist and philosopher Amartya Sen – have worked with the report from 2014-2017. More than 300 authors selected by an international and multidisciplinary scientific council have contributed, and the drafting process included collecting comments from a global network of scholars, civil society, activists, governments, and international organizations.

The authors offer a cautious optimistic conclusion: multiple ideas for social progress and better policies are already available and deserve to be tested and implemented!

The International Panel on Social Progress
(IPSP) is an independent association of top research scholars with the goal of assessing methods for improving the main institutions of modern societies. IPSP unites many of the world’s leading researchers from social sciences and the humanities in a single effort: developing research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-driven solutions to pressing challenges of our time.

This event is open to the public!