A radical shift in technology is necessary to enable future air transport solutions. Sustainability targets for aeroengine manufacturing mean more than reducing CO2 and NOX. The future will open up possibilities and bring new challenges when introducing hybrid- and electrical propulsion technologies using new materials, technology solutions and new business models. This article reports on findings from a longitudinal study and many years of collaboration between researchers and industry experts, where a first-tier aeroengine manufacturer transforms their product development capabilities to enable sustainable product development. The article highlights some activities undertaken and identifies critical challenges and opportunities remaining for a manufacturer of next-generation aeroengine solutions. It is argued that the challenge for aeroengine manufacturers to develop new-generation propulsive technologies will require a systemic change in the undertaking of design and development. The opportunities of sustainable technologies are evident yet require: (1) means to tighter integrate business and technology development, (2) the ability to quantify and assess sustainability impacts of different concept solutions, and (3) means to utilise natural resources, alloys and materials for a circular and life-cycle optimised solution.

Manufacturing companies are urged to take responsibility for their impacts on the environment and on society, to contribute to a more sustainable development. The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has therefore gained a lot of interest in the last decades. The Product Development Process (PDP) is a key activity in the operationalization of CSR in a company. However, little is known about the capabilities needed for companies to integrate and manage their CSR issues in their PDP. Therefore, this article aims at contributing to (1) identifying the capabilities to integrate and manage the CSR issues during the PDP, and (2) providing a maturity model to assess the level of capabilities for the integration of the CSR issues in the PDP. Insofar as CSR aims at contributing to sustainable development, the existing literature on capabilities for integrating sustainability in the PDP has been studied and taken as a basis to identify the capabilities for integrating and managing CSR in the PDP. A maturity model has then been built based on these capabilities. This contribution lays the foundation for a methodology to support companies in the improvement of their maturity level in terms of CSR-PDP interaction.

Mainstream economists argue that unemployment must be tackled with ‘flexibilisation’ or ‘labour market deregulation’. The public policy application has been the principle of ‘flexicurity’, with mixed labour market outcomes and limited success. Central contributions to theoretical and empirical economics writing on unemployment issues still espouse ‘flexibilisation’ as a general approach and warn about the detrimental effects of systematic deregulation under expectations of outcomes such as lower unemployment. Departing from a review of this literature, we take a step further from the ‘flexicurity’ prescription, to follow the capabilities approach of Sen and others, and develop a concept of social capabilities – based flexicurity for a learning economy, arguing that labour market performance must be targeted in an approach that includes a strong commitment to social well-being.

The ‘Wellbeing Budget’ presented to the New Zealand Parliament in 2019 was widely described as a world-first. This article explores the possibility of a distinctive Australasian contribution to our understanding of wellbeing economics in public policy. The introduction section presents an analytical wellbeing framework showing how human actions draw on services provided by the country’s capital stocks to create and sustain personal and communal wellbeing. The second section chronicles some landmark policy initiatives in Australia and New Zealand for understanding and monitoring wellbeing, culminating in the Wellbeing Budget. The third section highlights four areas for further development: (1) the role of family wellbeing in intergenerational wellbeing, (2) the role of cultural capital in providing foundations for future wellbeing, (3) the role of Indigenous worldviews in enriching understandings of wellbeing and (4) the role of market enterprise in expanding capabilities for wellbeing. These are all areas where Australasian researchers have demonstrated expertise.

This paper argues that beliefs about human nature are central for animal ethics as beliefs about animal nature ground human treatment of animals. It shows that what constitutes animal nature is a contested question, and that animals have long been considered inferior to humans in Western thought. In Judaeo-Christian ethics, God gave humans dominion over animals. This exacerbated the long-established prejudice in Western culture in favour of rationality as the defining characteristic of human beings. Rene Descartes was influential in arguing that animals were but machines that moved and made sounds but had no feelings. In such a context it was easy to portray animals as quasi-clockwork animated robots — ‘furry clocks’. Jeremy Bentham first advocated the direct inclusion of animals in our ethical thinking, introducing the concept of sentience, or the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, as the central criterion. Peter Singer's work is in this tradition. He also popularised the notion of speciesism — a bias in favour of one's own species. Now, Martha Nussbaum has introduced a new approach, the capabilities approach, a Quality of Life approach which lists ten capabilities, nine of which apply to animals as part of their nature. It applies to the whole range of animals (and throughout this paper the term ‘animals’ refers to sentient animals unless otherwise specified) — companion animals, farm production animals, animals in zoos, rodeos, museums and laboratories. Her work is the main focus of this paper. It is argued, therefore, that the capabilities approach contributes to understanding the relation of notions of animal nature to animal welfare, and what a good life for animals entails.

Oliver E. Williamson, who died on May 21, 2020 at the age of 87, was one of the most influential social scientists of modern times. In 2009, he was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. As of mid-October 2021, he had been cited an astonishing 317,838 times according to Google Scholar. His measured influence outdistances that of even his fellow Nobel Laureates Elinor Ostrom (230,667), Douglass C. North (187,577) and Ronald H. Coase (123,686). This special issue of the Journal of Institutional Economics brings together a distinguished roster of scholars to remember Williamson, to elucidate some of his key ideas and influences, and to extend the reach of his ideas to new arenas.

We revise Atkinson’s concept of a ‘participation income’ (PI), repositioning it as a form of green conditional basic income that is anchored in a capabilities-oriented eco-social policy framework. This framework combines the capability approach with an ‘ethics of care’ to re-shape the focus of social policy on individuals’ capability to ‘take care of the world’, thus shifting the emphasis from economic production to social reproduction and environmental reparation. In developing this proposal, we seek to address key questions about the feasibility of implementing PI schemes: including their administrative complexity and the criticism that a PI constitutes either an arbitrary and confusing, or invasive and stigmatising, form of basic income. To address these concerns, we argue for an enabling approach to incentivising participation whereby participation pathways are co-created with citizens on the basis of opportunities they recognise as meaningful rather than enforced through strict monitoring and sanctions.