The New Care Contract: Is Europe ready for the transition?

The summit brings together experts and practitioners across various fields, including care, housing, work, governance, economics, and technology, to collaborate on designing new care institutions for Europe. 

When and where? 

• Online, 21st April 2026, 14:00–15:30 CET 

Care has, for too long, been treated as a standardised service to be delivered.

Care is commonly framed as a transaction between a provider and a recipient, with labour and financial assets as the only currencies supporting it. However, this logic constrains care to just these two types of resources which has become difficult to sustain and failed to protect people from the vulnerabilities of the 21st century: ageing, long-term illness, mental health problems, isolation, and polarisation. This is not just a policy failure. It is a social contract failure: the implicit agreement about accountabilities, safety, and justice — who takes care of whom, under what conditions, and at whose cost — has broken down.

If providing citizens with adequate care is a question of resources, then our resource book must be expanded. If we want to build a society where care is fundamental, then the social contract itself must be renewed.

Care is one of the crucial points at which the European social contract can be won or lost. It is the point where institutional promises meet everyday life, and where the gap between the two is most acutely felt. We are living through a society-wide care transition as fundamental as decarbonisation or digitalisation.

This requires acknowledging that: 

• The ‘care crisis’ is a logic in transition. The current friction, labelled often as a crisis, is a collision between an outdated economic logic and the reality that care is always built on relationships, time, and human capability, not just capital and labour.  The central assets of care are the very foundations of every person and community that need to be recognised and highlighted. 
• The resources of care are distributed, not limited to one sector alone: Care doesn’t just happen in carehomes. It is built (or dismantled) in our public spaces, our dwellings, our libraries, and delivered in ordinary daily encounters. This is where Europe’s cohesion is made or frayed.
• Care is a relationship, not a product: Care is a holistic, reciprocal human activity. Trust, community, and social cohesion cannot be achieved through economic support or access to services alone. 

There are pathways to build the structures that convert these principles into lived capability, from time policy and relational hubs to care conscription systems, renewing how we care for each other, for society, and for the planet. 

Join our summit to get the conversation started. Register here.