Sustainable Economy and Sustainable Employment: Approaches to Measuring Sustainability in Regional and Local Labour Market Monitoring
Sustainable economic activities are complex processes: they are often driven by contradictory or conflicting goals and strategies in regard to reaching a balance between economic growth, ecological goals and social concerns. Besides acknowledging the importance of technological and organisational innovations in these dynamic processes, the sustainability discourses are increasingly concerned with human resources. They address the im-portance of securing the skilled labour force for the green sectors and explore how the changing skill needs can be covered by designing new qualification offers in VET, tertiary education and further education. However, sustainability is not an issue, which would concern just the green(ing) sectors. As a direct result of demographic change, the European regions and localities are becoming aware of the need to ensure the employability of the ever-decreasing labour force across different sectors. Thus, they are developing regional labour retention measures. The Annual Meeting of the EN RLMM was concerned with sustainable economy and sustainable employment, concentrating on employment in the green sectors in particular and on sustainable employment strategies of regions, companies and individuals in general.