Marvin Formosa – författare

The United Nations Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing (MIPAA) offers a bold new agenda for handling the issue of ageing in the 21st century. It focuses on three priority areas: older persons and development; advancing health and well-being into old age; and ensuring enabling and supportive environments. This book brings together global perspectives on the MIPAA and focusses on and assesses the success and failures of governments to implement its recommendations.

Despite its pivotal importance in international ageing policy, the MIPAA has been relatively neglected by academics in their writings and studies. This book mitigates this analytical and empirical cavity. Each chapter focuses on one specific geographical region and addresses five key themes: national ageing situation; twenty years of MIPAA; ensuring ageing with dignity; healthy and active ageing in a sustainable world; and priorities for the future. It presents an overall summary of the findings, future challenges and opportunities related to ageing, recommendations for future actions to be taken, and policy adjustments needed. The authors also present lessons that were learnt from managing the impact of COVID-19 on older people, together with an outlook on the most immediate priorities for the future so that the recommendations in the MIPAA are achieved in post-COVID-19 and sustainable ethical scenarios.

An important contribution towards the advancement of ageing policy, the book will be indispensable to students and researchers of gerontology, ageing, and health. It will also be of interest to policy makers, geriatricians, dementia care specialists, social policy makers responsible for ensuring active and healthy ageing, and all public sector departments which have specific responsibilities towards improving the quality of life of older adults.

The United Nations Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing (MIPAA) offers a bold new agenda for handling the issue of ageing in the 21st century. It focuses on three priority areas: older persons and development; advancing health and well-being into old age; and ensuring enabling and supportive environments. This book brings together global perspectives on the MIPAA and focusses on and assesses the success and failures of governments to implement its recommendations.

Despite its pivotal importance in international ageing policy, the MIPAA has been relatively neglected by academics in their writings and studies. This book mitigates this analytical and empirical cavity. Each chapter focuses on one specific geographical region and addresses five key themes: national ageing situation; twenty years of MIPAA; ensuring ageing with dignity; healthy and active ageing in a sustainable world; and priorities for the future. It presents an overall summary of the findings, future challenges and opportunities related to ageing, recommendations for future actions to be taken, and policy adjustments needed. The authors also present lessons that were learnt from managing the impact of COVID-19 on older people, together with an outlook on the most immediate priorities for the future so that the recommendations in the MIPAA are achieved in post-COVID-19 and sustainable ethical scenarios.

An important contribution towards the advancement of ageing policy, the book will be indispensable to students and researchers of gerontology, ageing, and health. It will also be of interest to policy makers, geriatricians, dementia care specialists, social policy makers responsible for ensuring active and healthy ageing, and all public sector departments which have specific responsibilities towards improving the quality of life of older adults.

This comparative resource charts the interface between the University of the Third Age (U3A) movement and active ageing, and in doing so, offers a comprehensive and thorough understanding of what U3A means in different geographical and sociocultural contexts. After first providing introductory chapters to introduce the U3A movement and active ageing in global perspective and tracing the origins of U3As in France, the book sets off charting the international development of U3As in both European and Asian-Pacific contexts. Deliberately, the book moves away from the dominant Anglo-centric US- and UK-rooted analyses of U3As to account for contexts of different political ideology, sociocultural values, geography, and degrees of urbanisation and industrialisation. Lastly, it thematises foreseeable issues, concerns, and predicaments that the global U3A movement faces while meeting the challenges and seizing the opportunities presented by active ageing.

The chapters’ comparative perspectives encompass:

The University of the Third Age and Active Ageing boasts welcome contributions to the scholarship on the different histories, structures, and challenges posed by national U3As. Readers from a variety of backgrounds and research interests including gerontology, geriatrics, active ageing, older adult learning, comparative education and educational technology will find this a necessary and valuable resource in better understanding a globalised U3A world.

"The University of the Third Age and Active Ageing: European and Asian-Pacific Perspectives contributes to the deep well of histories, experiences, structures, accomplishments and problems of national U3As.  It emerges as a tapestry of extraordinary research that offers to guide the U3A movement as it soon enters its fiftieth year of existence." 

- Prof. Stephen Katz. Trent University

This important book builds on recent publications in lifelong learning which focus on learning and education in later life. This work breaks new ground in international understandings of what constitutes later life learning across diverse cultures in manifold countries or regions across the world. Containing 42 separate country/regional analyses of later life learning, the overall significance resides in insiders’ conceptualisations and critique of this emerging sub-field of lifelong learning and adult education.

The sub-title of research, policy and practice conveys the territory that authors traverse in which rhetoric and reality are interrogated. Coverage in chapters includes conceptual analysis, historical patterns of provision, policy developments, theoretical perspectives, research studies, challenges faced by countries and “success stories” of later life learning. The resultant effect is a vivid portrayal of a vast array of learning that occurs in later life across the globe.

Marvin Formosa is Head of the Department of Gerontology, Faculty for Social Wellbeing, University of Malta, and Director of the International Institute on Ageing (United Nations - Malta).