The fear of the pandemic has not disappeared, but it must share the limelight with other fears.
Some are circumstantial, such as shortages and the disruption of supply chains, others are permanent, such as the consequences of climate change, social unrest or the obsolescence of certain types of work (39% of employees according to a study of PWC believes that their work will be obsolete in five years) or training. It is, in short, the fear of not being able to adapt personally and collectively to a series of irreversible transformations. Obviously, there are actors and interests that feed and reinforce fear, that exploit it politically, and that take advantage of it economically. These practices and their effects on social cohesion will be clearly visible in 2022.
At the intersection between the digitization processes of the economy and the need to finance post-pandemic stimulus programs, the search for fiscal solutions will gain importance. 2021 marked a turning point, among others, due to the commitment at the G-20 summit in Rome to apply a global minimum corporate tax of 15%. For 2022, the implementation of these decisions remains, and even a new discussion on the rise if the public debate on tax justice and the assumption of responsibilities by the billionaire founders and large shareholders of the main global companies intensifies. Among these, the rise of the digital stands out, since in the lists of great world fortunes there are more and more “tech billionaires” from companies whose business model allows greater access to “tax optimization” mechanisms.
The search for these tax solutions is part of a broader social agenda, which also includes fundamental issues such as intergenerational solidarity or territorial cohesion. In this transformation of labor markets and production models, the demand for the right to decent work coexists with phenomena such as the emergence, in 2021, of the so-called great resignation of workers. All this invites us to think about social, labor and also territorial solutions.
The challenge for large metropolitan spaces is to combat inequality and environmental degradation at the same time. Urban interventions to test innovative climate solutions have proliferated in the last two decades thanks to the support of city networks such as C40 and other knowledge-sharing platforms. Cities are becoming leaders in what is called “governance by experiment”: processes that test new governance and sociotechnical climate solutions in urban laboratories and, if successful, scale them up. The undoubted protagonism of the urban is counterpointed by the cry of alert from less populated and less connected areas –especially in countries with great demographic contrasts–. For these territories, the costs of falling behind in ongoing transitions pose an existential threat. For this reason, they will try to rebalance their lack of economic muscle through social demands and political action.
