The Three MuskEUteers
Authors: Caro-González A. , Serra A. , Albala X. , Borges C. E. , Casado-Mansilla D. , Colobrans J. , Iñigo E. , Millard J. , Mugarra-Elorriaga A. , Petrevska Nechkoska Renata 
Published: January 2023

Under the inspiring and aspiring title: Paving the way for pushing and pursuing a “one for all, all for one” triple transition: social, green, and digital: The Three MuskEUteers, a group of remarkable co-authors and contributors have developed radically new forward-looking visions, principles, approaches, and action recommendations for an attuned indivisible social, green, and digital transition.

The triple transition is aimed at helping humanity gather around a life-sustaining purpose, as opposed to life-destroying one in terms of wars of all kinds (military, economic, political, etc.); nature decay and wreckage (carbon footprint, plastic pollution, soil poisoning, etc.); human alienation (favelas, homeless persons, refugee camps, child malnutrition, poverty, exclusion of any kind); and geographic imbalances with empty rural spaces and overcrowded megacities (creating difficult access of rural and/or remote population to care, health, and other essential services; difficulty of urban population to contact with natural environments).

The work highlights the urgent need to speed up a third social transition (Within this social transition dimension we understand the socio-cultural scope as any social shift implies a cultural transition and vice versa, with its very deep implications.), in addition to the green and digital transitions more widely recognised by the international community. Innovation, or a European industry-led twin transition aiming for climate neutrality and digital leadership, cannot be supported without a firm, responsive, responsible social and environmental engagement. Neither is it possible to tackle a JUST triple transition which is not firmly rooted in worthwhile human development, underpinned by the Sustainable Development Goals. And none of these transitions can go separately and/or isolated; they all need to intertwine around the notion of (more, firmer, and determined) just transition.

European society is presented as a huge “co-laboratory” for this “all for one, one for all” boundaryless triple transition to respond to the urgent radical changes demanded by humanity and by the planet. The chapter proposes a radically new vision to pursue a non-explored transformative way to ideate, design, develop, and deliver science, innovation, and collaboration through experimentation and learning, and throughout multi-stakeholder engagement from the n-helix spectrum. It proposes systemic innovation tactics for the “how” (green, techno-digital), for the strategic “what” (green, social), for the purposeful “why” (green, social), and for the operational “how best” (green, social, techno-digital) within the governing principles of eco-centric society. This encompasses:

Courageous goal-aligned alternatives, as a shift to new (yet ancient) principles of eco-centric rather than ego-centric behaviour.

The adoption of a “complex system mind-set” to build up dynamic, context-sensitive, and holistic approaches to co-design mission and purpose-driven actions, outcomes, outputs, and no-harm impacts.

The ignition of the transformative capacity of all forms of collaboration (international, interdisciplinary, intersectoral, intergenerational, inter-institutional, inter-genders) vs hierarchy as alternative governance and distribution models to overcome the unjust and unsustainable biased status quo within evolving, adaptable, flexible, and transformational n-helix ecosystems.

The Three MuskEUteers, deeply anchored in European values (human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law, and human rights), will pave the way and drive humanity towards the achievement of the ambitious, but achievable, targets of the United Nations 2030 Global Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals.

Europe can be the initiator of co-laboratory experiments where social change drives the “all for one, one for all” dream into transforming this three-prong transition into possible real good ecosystems working.