The Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) is the only progressive think tank in the European context and of which the Felipe González Foundation is a part. The FEPS proposes an intellectual nexus between social democracy and the European project placing renewed thought at the centre of its activity. As a platform for ideas and dialogue, FEPS works in close collaboration with social democratic organisations and in particular with national foundations and groups for reflection from all over Europe to face up to the challenges confronting Europe.

FEPS embodies a new way of thinking on the social democratic, socialist and labour scene in Europe. Its main proposal is to encourage a renewed progressive dialogue through investigation which includes the programmes ´Next left` and ´Millennial Dialogue`.  The activities organised are both on-line and in person and are available on a variety of formats. Other FEPS tools are the magazine ´Progressive Post` and the digital platform of the European Progress Observatory together with a range of other publications and events.

Its activities fall into three areas: democratic empowerment (European social future, democratic malaise and governability, gender equality, partisanship and European parties), global solidarity (a new global social accord, a sustainable world, asylum and migration, the strengthening of progressive movements on an international level, the re-defining of the community) and the sustainable economy. All of this with the objective of ´working together for a progressive Europe`, the slogan of the FEPS.

In this sense the Felipe González Foundation is part of the High Level Consultative Group at the FEPS for the Rewriting the Rules (EU) project. This FEPS initiative and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD) directed by the Nobel Economics Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz is oriented towards the creation of a sister publication to the renowned volume Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy in the European context.

Joseph Stiglitz, as a follow-up to his publication The Price of Inequality: How today’s divided society endangers our future, completed a further volume entitled “Reescribiendo las reglas de la economía americana. Una agenda para el crecimiento y la prosperidad compartida ” (Rewriting the rules of the American economy. An agenda for growth and shared prosperity), was published in the autumn of 2015. In its pages, Stiglitz reiterates that existing inequalities are in reality the product of the policies applied in the 1970s under a hard and neo-liberal agenda. In this sense he sets out the reform of the existing institutional structure and seeks a change which will turn back the trend after which and independently of the crash of 2008, the richest become richer while the numbers of poor increases while becoming even poorer.

To ensure that the debate continues to be the political domain of progressives, in March 2016 the High Level Consultative Group met in Vienna, holding intense, inspirational and instructive debates in which were forged a series of ideas which will constitute the draft for a publication. The High Level Consultative Group will meet again to debate this document and finalise its publication along with an agenda for fighting back against inequality with the approval of Professor Stiglitz.