The Future of Ageing in Europe

Making an Asset of Longevity

Alan Walker, Alan Walker, Alan Walker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789811314179
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Biología

This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the challenges created by Europe's ageing population. Grounded in state-of-the-art scientific assessments by leading European researchers, the book is strongly policy focused. Indeed this book contains a detailed account of the policies required across a broad field, from economic sustainability and extending working lives, to healthy ageing, technological innovation, long term care and political citizenship, for the successful adaptation to the challenges of ageing in Europe and globally. It is a policy manifesto to ensure that the future of ageing in Europe is transformed into a highly beneficial one for both citizens and societies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Alan Walker (ed.)The Future of Ageing in Europehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1417-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alan Walker¹

(1)

Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Alan Walker

Email: [email protected]

URL: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/socstudies/staff/staff-profiles/walker

Keywords

Ageing EuropeActive ageingSocial innovationActive Ageing IndexAgeing research

End Abstract

Population ageing is acknowledged by governments globally as one of the grand policy challenges. This is especially the case in Europe because it is the most aged continent in terms of the proportion of its population aged 65 and over. Thus, this issue has been high on the research and policy agendas for several decades (Walker and Maltby 1997), and the European Union (EU) has played a prominent role both in drawing the attention of Member State governments to the implications of population ageing and in searching for optimum policy responses. The origins of the EU’s coordinating role in this field can be traced back to the European Year of Older People in 1993, which represented the first proclamation by Europe of the idea of a new active and participative discourse on ageing. It has been followed up in the intervening period by numerous demographic and policy reports and, while these have not always been consistent in their approach and have often been overly economistic (Walker 2009; Walker and Foster 2013), the European Commission has consistently pursued the goal of promoting greater participation among older people, even though this has often been rather myopically focused on the labour market. This was definitely not the case with regard to the very specific goal of HORIZON 2020, established in 2010, and which provided the spur for the research upon which this book is based. Within the innovation framework of HORIZON 2020 the European Commission (EC) established the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Health Ageing (EIPAHA) with the ambitious aim of raising healthy life expectancy (HLE) across the EU by an average of two years by 2020. This bold target provided the context for the EC’s Research Directorate to issue a call for proposals to investigate how increasing longevity may be an ‘asset for Europe’. The successful application for funding, entitled Mobilising the Potential of Active Ageing in Europe (MOPACT), is one of the largest multi-disciplinary projects on ageing ever mounted in Europe. Its scale and disciplinary spread warrant its status here as the centrepiece of this volume, as the next section demonstrates.

MOPACT

The MOPACT project comprised 32 partners in 13 countries, including more than 100 researchers, and took place between 2012 and 2017. It sought to concentrate the highest possible quality of scientific analyses on the key policy issues in ageing and, further, to develop innovative policies and practice aimed at assisting public authorities and other key actors, at all levels in Europe, to transform approaches to this grand challenge. This huge research and development effort was focused specifically on five key dimensions of the social and economic impact of ageing:

• Economic and financial consequences of ageing
• Societal structures, civil society and cohesion
• Social support, long-term care (LTC) and quality of life
• The built and technological environment
• Health, well-being, biogerontology and frailty

These five key themes were tackled in nine scientific thematic clusters or work packages, which comprise the main chapters of this book:

• Realising active ageing (Chap. 2)
• Economic consequences of ageing (Chap. 3)
• Pension systems, savings and financial education (Chap. 4)
• Extending working lives (Chap. 5)
• Health and well-being (Chap. 6)
• Biogerontology (Chap. 7)
• Built and technological environments (Chap. 8)
• Social support and LTC (Chap. 9)
• Enhancing active citizenship (Chap. 10)

The first of these work packages acted as the core for the whole project, not only pursuing its own distinct research agenda but also continuously synthesising the results from the work of the other thematic clusters. This process helped to avoid the tendency of such large multi-dimensional projects to operate along parallel lines rather than as an integrated whole. This integration was reinforced by regular work package ‘leaders’ and periodic whole team meetings. In particular, the inclusion of biogerontologists within a policy-orientated project is novel and a special case had to be made for it in the application process. The validity of this cause is demonstrated in the depth this perspective added to our understanding of the potential for life course interventions to improve well-being (Chap. 7 and passim).

Given the explicit policy and practice focus of MOPACT, there also had to be a high level of integration of the various stakeholders in this field. We achieved this by, first, ensuring that all work packages engaged with relevant stakeholders and, second, by adopting the model of stakeholder forums pioneered by ERA-AGE (http://​era-age.​group.​shef.​ac.​uk/​). The latter consisted of a series of feedback loops wherein researchers presented their work to a forum of policymakers, practitioners and product producers and received constructive suggestions on its relevance and how it might be developed further. Three such forums were held (Fig. 1.1) and, because of the highly uneven nature of the development of policies on ageing between Member States, with the Central and Eastern European countries invariably lagging behind their Western counterparts (see Chap. 2 and passim), two of these forums were staged there. More than 100 stakeholders were involved in the forums.

Fig. 1.1

The MOPACT consultative architecture

To complete the sketch of how MOPACT was organised, there were also two work packages concerned with management and dissemination. In all there were more than 50 reports and other outputs from the project, including 12 lay summaries of the main findings from each of the work packages. This book represents a synthesis of that huge body of research. The MOPACT website contains further details of the activities of the project and its outputs: http://​mopact.​group.​shef.​ac.​uk/​.

Centrality of Active Ageing

Why was active ageing placed at the heart of MOPACT? First of all we followed the prescription of the Road Map for European ageing research (Futurage 2011) because it represented the most comprehensive consultation on this topic ever undertaken in Europe, spanning all scientific disciplines relevant to ageing and adopting a comprehensive approach. On the basis of this extensive groundwork, the Road Map argued that active ageing across the life course should be the keystone of all research in this field. The Road Map made a compelling case for this centrality of active ageing. It is a helpful umbrella term to encompass various quality of life essentials such as labour market participation, active contribution to domestic labour (caring, housework), active participation in community life and active leisure. It is also valuable in synthesising strands of research on ageing and developmental science which traditionally have not had much in common. For example, the need to combine research able to drive social policy or cultural investments with that concerning the individual level of ageing, such as with regard to health, cognitive functioning and motivation. In social gerontology too, the concept of active ageing links the macro, meso and micro aspects of ageing and ageing research. Furthermore, active ageing requires a social-ecological view of ageing (Lawton 1980; Wahl and Iwarsson 2007). Different levels of evidence-based policy action (macro), community and neighbourhood arrangements (meso) and individual intervention (micro) must go hand in hand in order for active ageing to be realised, as discussed in more detail in Chap. 2. Because of the interplay between active ageing and these different social and environmental dimensions our approach to it must also be multi-disciplinary—no single discipline can provide the evidence necessary to support it. This, in turn, means that the concept of active ageing has the power to connect disparate disciplines—sociology, social gerontology, psychology, engineering, economics, medical sciences and biogerontology—and build bridges between them. This proved invaluable in the MOPACT project because of its multi-disciplinary nature and the need to integrate the five major themes it focused on.

Secondly, we were keen to build on the pioneering work undertaken by the EC/UNECE’s Active Ageing Index (AAI) Project (Zaidi and Stanton 2015; Zaidi et al. 2017), which began as one of the activities of the 2012 European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity Between Generations. As explained in greater detail below and in Chap. 2, the AAI provided a helpful starting point for the development of a deeper understanding of the strategies required to promote active ageing and how these vary across Europe.

Thirdly, while there were compelling scientific reasons for the centrality of active ageing, the political ones were no less so. The European Years of Older People (1993) and Active Ageing (2012) have been mentioned already. In between them there were several elaborations of what a European policy on active ageing might consist of; the most comprehensive and clearly envisioned of them was the one prepared for the 1999 UN Year of Older People (EC 1999). At the global level, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has advanced a multi-dimensional concept of active ageing:

The process of optimising opportunities in health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age. Active ageing applies to both individuals and groups. It allows people to realise their potential for physical, social and mental well-being throughout their lives and to participate in society according to their needs, desires and capacities, while providing them with adequate protection, security and care when they require assistance. (WHO 2002)

This important conceptualisation emphasised the case for ensuring that active ageing is not a narrow idea, focused only on the labour market, but a broad one that embraces all of the different factors that contribute to personal well-being. Specifically, it placed participation at the centre of consideration rather than employment. In addition, it stressed the initial importance of a life course perspective: in order to prevent some of the negative aspects of growing old, it is essential to influence individual behaviour and its policy context at earlier stages of the life span. The WHO’s approach to active ageing also reinforced the growth of the positive discourse on older people as active participants in society stretching back to 1993. The priority of active ageing was adopted by the UN’s Madrid International Action Plan on Ageing, in 2002, along with the principle of older people’s right to participate (UN 2002; Sidorenko and Walker 2004).

It was for these scientific and political reasons that we adopted the idea of active ageing as an organising concept within MOPACT. But we did not do so uncritically. First of all, following the European ageing research Road Map, we adopted a broad view of ‘activity’ to include all meaningful pursuits, mental, as well as physical, that contribute to well-being. This is to ensure that the common reduction to working life would be prevented, within the project at least. Secondly, we enforced a whole life course approach to ensure specifically that the oldest old were not excluded, as is so often the case in discussions of active ageing. This novel stand is demonstrated strongly in Chap. 9, where the concept is operationalised with regard to LTC. Thirdly, we added a multi-dimensional division of labour to the WHO definition, to underline the fact that active ageing depends on a wide range of different actors and cannot simply be imposed top-down by policymakers. Thus, active ageing is a comprehensive strategy to maximise participation and well-being as people age. It should operate simultane...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Strategies of Active Ageing in Europe
• 3. Achieving Economic Sustainability in Ageing Societies
• 4. Effective and Sustainable Private Pensions
• 5. Extending Working Lives
• 6. Healthy Life Years and Social Engagement
• 7. Improving Health in Later Life: How a Life Course Approach Could Improve Health and Well-Being in Old Age
• 8. Technology for All
• 9. Social Support and Long-Term Care for Older People: The Potential for Social Innovation and Active Ageing
• 10. Promoting the Political Inclusion and Participation of Older People: Social, Psychological and Institutional Perspectives
• 11. Conclusion: Realising Active Ageing