A different vision of Greece

How could we fight for a healthy environment and a better life for everyone without fighting for a truly sustainable model for the national economy?

Seeking a way out of the crisis, Greece is unfortunately employing the same tools and attitudes that led us to it in the first place: enabling illegality, following short-sighted investment plans, shifting to outdated development models that should have been long forgotten, bringing forward concrete-filled tourism bills, breathing deeply the air of burning lignite, turning back to past visions of easy enrichment and downgrading environmental legislation as a supposed obstacle to growth. On the chosen course, the environment is viewed as a troublesome impediment to glorified investments that actually only yield ecological and economic destruction.

A chance for change

Now more than ever, we must find our way towards a truly sustainable future. We are in need of an ecologically sustainable and socially just economy, one that protects the natural capital as its indisputable base.

With that in mind, we drew on WWF’s knowledge and experience and formulated our vision for a truly sustainable economy. We developed a roadmap thoroughly examining the Greek reality: a fragile economy and state that still has tremendous potential for good governance, innovation and competitiveness.

We observe that Greece continuously undermines the prospects of sustainable economic activity and social development, actively enabling clientelism, the lack of transparency, bad law and governance, disregard for court decisions, and complex and vague planning. We push for a state characterized by absolute transparency and public accountability, participation, motivation for sustainable business, legal certainty and clear rules for everyone. We push for a society built on knowledge, participation and solidarity—a society that seeks and develops positive solutions.

We recognize that the Greek society has a slowly awakening potential for building a truly sustainable economy. We promote solutions for a strong production, sustainable and socially just economy.

We realize that the course of development that Greece has unswervingly followed in the past decades has created an immeasurable ecological deficit. We stand behind the need to reform fundamental sectors of the real economy and to implement absolute transparency and public accountability in both state and businesses.