Roundtable - Sufficiency: The Backbone of the EU Strategic Autonomy

Co-organized by the CARE Program and the World Sufficiency Lab at Sciences Po Paris on Thursday 4 June 2026, this year's roundtable edition focuses on Sufficiency as the Backbone of EU Strategic Autonomy. This public event is part of the CARE-WSL Sufficiency Summer School taking place in Paris from 1 to 6 June 2026. It provides the opportunity to students from across partner institutions to meet with experts and reflect and exchange on policies and practices of sufficiency across various domains.

Sufficiency is neither an environmental concession nor an economic constraint. It is the precondition for genuine European strategic autonomy in an era of contested globalisation, weaponised interdependence, and accelerating resource competition.

Every unit of energy and every tonne of material the Union does not need to import is a dependency that cannot be turned against it. Every pipeline that no longer needs to flow, every critical raw material that does not need to be secured through fragile supply chains, every fossil cargo that does not need to cross contested waters, is a vector of coercion removed from the hands of geopolitical adversaries. Sufficiency shrinks the surface area through which external powers can pressure, blackmail, or destabilise the Union.

The geopolitical case extends beyond resources. Every citizen whose essential needs including energy, housing, mobility, food, are reliably met is a citizen whose loyalty cannot be purchased by disinformation, whose anxieties cannot be weaponised by hostile narratives, and whose vote cannot be captured by forces that thrive on scarcity and insecurity. Social cohesion is, in this sense, a hard-security asset. There is no resilient Europe without a sufficient Europe.

The EU Sufficiency Gap Report, launched on May 21st, provides the scientific evidence that sufficiency has the potential to  deliver on the EU agenda. The report i)  provides policy recommendations to closing the autonomy gap by reducing import dependencies, lowering exposure to price shocks, and strengthening, and ii) quantifies, for the first time, the wellbeing of EU citizens, at the decile level, through the lens of Man-Fred Max Neef needs theory.   This round table asks the question that follows from that evidence: if sufficiency is the most cost-effective, fastest, and most democratically legitimate path to strategic autonomy, why is it still absent from the core of EU geopolitical doctrine and what will it take to put it there?

PARTICIPANTS

• Presenter: Dr. Yamina Saheb
• Moderator: Glen Wright
• Discussants: Olivia Lazard and Barbara Nicoloso

The roundtable will be followed by a networking reception.