Celebrating 25 years of nef

 By hojusaram

A quarter of a century ago, the founders of nef launched this organisation with a small office, and a staff of just two people, in Elephant & Castle in London.

They never really intended it to become a conventional think-tank.  The plan was to create an international secretariat for The Other Economic Summit (TOES), the innovative series of conferences that challenged the G7 two years before.  From the start, there were questions whether an organisation with such a wide remit and bold ambition could ever attract funding.

Twenty-five years later, I feel immensely proud as executive director looking back at how far nef has come – to become one of the biggest think-tanks in the UK, one of the most influential but still one of the most ambitious.

We are still not like other think-tanks, whose timescale typically stretches maybe a few years ahead. Our intention now, as it was then, is to transform the economic system – to create a new economics that maximises well being and social justice within the limits of the planet.

It is also the centenary of the birth of Fritz Schumacher this year, whose important book Small is Beautiful included the ironic subtitle ‘economics as if people mattered’. A quarter of a century on, and partly because of nef, that no longer seems such a ludicrous proposition.

We know now the changes that are required. They are being put into effect from here in the UK and across the world . In the last year alone, we have helped achieve two long-standing nef objectives – a Well-being Index for the UK and the Green Investment Bank. It isn’t enough, of course, but it is not small. 

At the first TOES in 1984, most of the attention focused on five major shifts – alternative economic indicators, green taxation, social auditing, local money flows and local currencies. Four of those are now mainstream ideas. nef has been at the heart of making that happen and is now central to turning those ideas into reality.

We have tried to stay cutting edge, even if it sometimes risked us looking marginal. But it worked. Our ‘clone town’ campaign was taken up widely by the media and the phrase is now in the language. Over a million people around the world downloaded our first Happy Planet Index.

There is a great deal more to do, but we could not have achieved even this without the help of our staff, donors and all those supporters who send us money every month.  With your help, we have managed to launch our Great Transition campaign and a hugely ambitious project to build both a new model of the economy to guide the transition to a sustainable future and a collaborative campaign to make it happen.

In the vital race between the new economics and disaster we are not yet winning, but thanks to you we are still in the race.  The urgent task before us is to overtake.
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