GROWTH METRICS, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE OVERLOOKED CONDITIONS OF SOCIETAL SECURITY

Анотація

Regional development policy across the European Union continues to rely predominantly on growth-oriented metrics such as GDP, employment rates, investment absorption and productivity indices to evaluate whether regions are progressing. Yet these measures are structurally blind to two conditions fundamental to long-term societal security: social sufficiency floors, meaning minimum acceptable standards of well-being and inclusion, and environmental sustainability ceilings, meaning maximum levels of ecological pressure compatible with stable, liveable communities. This paper argues that this measurement gap constitutes a genuine security vulnerability: one that allows regions to appear successful on paper while social deprivation deepens and environmental conditions deteriorate.Drawing on the beyond-GDP economics literature, human and societal security studies, and EU cohesion policy evaluation research, the paper develops three interlocking arguments. First, dominant evaluation frameworks are structurally insensitive to social shortfalls and environmental overshoot: regional well-being measures and GDP diverge systematically at NUTS-2 level, and cohesion policy assessments anchored in growth metrics fail to detect environmentally meaningful progress. Second, these omissions correspond to documented security pathways: persistent regional inequality erodes institutional trust, fuels populist voting and generates political instability, while environmental deterioration creates deferred but compounding insecurity through climate exposure, health burdens and transition risk. Third, a dual-boundary approach that assesses regions against explicit social sufficiency floors and environmental sustainability ceilings as joint necessary conditions offers a principled and practically feasible direction for evaluation reform. This approach adapts the intellectual lineage running from Rockström et al. (2009) and Dearing et al. (2014) through Raworth's Doughnut Economics (2017), translating the insight that the central policy question should be not merely how much growth, but whether societies are operating in a space that is simultaneously sufficient and sustainable, into the EU regional development and cohesion policy context.These arguments are illustrated at two territorial scales. At the national level, a comparison of Lithuania and the Netherlands demonstrates that GDP convergence and dual-boundary performance are empirically decoupled: Lithuania records strong GDP growth yet fails its social sufficiency floor, while the Netherlands meets social conditions but presses its environmental ceiling. At the urban level, Rotterdam illustrates the same decoupling within a single prosperous city: strong aggregate economic performance coexists with concentrated social deprivation in specific districts and one of Europe's largest sources of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. The main finding is that current metrics systematically reward growth while remaining insensitive to the structural conditions upon which durable regional security depends, and that this failure is detectable at both national and urban scales.

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