We elucidate the significance of active ageing from an individual as well as from a societal perspective. Taking an individual perspective, maintaining activity in later years is linked to successful ageing because of empirical relationships to positive self-perception, satisfaction with life, and development of competences, whereas from a societal perspective, active ageing implies usage of older people’s life competences as a human capital of society—a societal imperative, particularly in times of demographic change but also more basically substantiated in an ethics of responsibility, intergenerational solidarity, and generation equity. We focus on the psychological construct of generativity which is interpreted as an aspect of the philosophical-anthropological category of joint responsibility. Our own research in Mexico and the Baltic States supports the notion that maintaining access to the public sphere and active engagement for others is a more basic individual concern than a life-stages specific developmental task. We report background and results of a Dialogue Forum Project Funding, a research cooperation between our institute and the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future aimed to improve generativity in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine by implementing and supporting local initiatives offering opportunities for intergenerational dialogue. 1. Active Ageing in Individual and Societal Perspective Associating successful ageing with maintenance of activity has a long tradition in gerontology. Already in the 1960s, in the context of the classical controversy on propositions of disengagement theory, decreases in social roles and functions were interpreted as primarily reflecting prevalent misconceptions of old age and ageing, ageist stereotypes, and attitudes that contaminate external perception as well as self-conceptions and development of competences [1–4]. Although this pointed line of reasoning obviously neglects the significance of economic, political, and social structures as well as interindividual differences, the hypothesized relationships between role activity, self-concept, and satisfaction with life are still important for understanding positive or successful ageing [5, 6]. More recent gerontological theories elucidate that role activity in younger ages is a significant moderator of the relationship between older people’s actual activity in specific social roles, satisfaction with these roles, and satisfaction with life. From the perspective of continuity theory [5] what predicts satisfaction and well-being is not the number of
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