Isabelle Cassiers is Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and Research Associate at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research.

1. Can Prosperity be Disentangled from Growth? 2. A High-Stakes Shift: Turning the Tide From GDP to New Prosperity Indicators Isabelle 3. Towards a Transcultural Definition of Prosperity. Insights from the Capability Approach 4. Consumerism and Positive Liberty 5. Prosperity in Work 6. Out of the laboratory into the field: the stakes riding on a paradigm change 7. Environment, Growth, and Prosperity: Possible Models of Integration 8. Prosperity and the Crisis of Politics 9. Collective Action and the Redefinition of Prosperity: On the Democratic Governance of the Transition 10. Conclusion: Who will redefine prosperity?

Society today faces a difficult contradiction: we know exactly how the physical limits of our planet are being reached and exactly why we cannot go on as we have before - and yet, collectively, we seem unable to reach crucial decisions for our future in a timely way. This book argues that our definition of prosperity, which we have long assimilated with the idea of material wealth, may be preventing us from imagining a future that meets essential human aspirations without straining our planet to the breaking point. In other words, redefining prosperity is a necessary and urgent task.