Bisogni e Democrazia nella transizione ecologica

The present work discusses the notion of well-being and needs aiming to build bottom-up policies for the ecological transition. It uses a multidimensional perspective of well-being, recognizing its subjective and subjective perspective, and its material and immaterial dimension. It provides a discussion of the process of needs-formation with insights from the theory of needs of Marx explained by Heller. It discusses the necessity to reconfigure our democracies and involve the civil society, suggesting the use of innovative methods, for defining its needs and satisfiers. It runs an exploratory experiment for defining the needs and drivers of well-being in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina, during the Covid-19 pandemic. It uses the methodology of virtual ethnography harvesting tweets from Twitter account and explaining the results through network semantic analysis. It concludes that in a moment of material constraints and changing relationships with time and money, inner/radical or soul’s needs appear at the same time that material needs decrease. This is an important insight for building the narrative of Degrowth in the Global South, which, instead of top-down policies prohibiting the satisfaction of material needs, can build bottom-up policies for incentivizing the satisfaction of immaterial needs, leading to the same result. KEY WORDS: , NEEDS, PANDEMIC, , , , , MAR DEL PLATA.