Reasons to be Cheerful #5: Creating Wellbeing and Going Green
Stewart Lansley of Compass on the steps needed to create a sustainable, human-scale future
In the wake of a transformative General Election, the cross-party group Compass shares its findings on the positive, practical steps in the right direction already happening at a local level in the UK, and on a national scale abroad – exploring how these small but significant solutions could point the way ahead for an era of change for our country.
In this series of short articles, which first appeared in the July print edition of Byline Times, Compass highlights just some of the work from its ‘New Settlement’ project.
In 1945, Labour treated the crisis that came from the hardship of the 1930s, and then war, as an opportunity for a new start. The country was ‘broke’, but that didn’t stop a new society from being built. This vision led to a new governing philosophy, constructed around the principles of egalitarianism, a more regulated economy, and the creation of a pro-security social state.
Like those who formulated the post-war social contract, reaching a different sort of future from where we are now will require ingenuity, creativity, adaptability and energy – things that humans have in abundance.
In a good society, government would take on a more far-sighted investment and entrepreneurial role required to make the shift to net zero, while reshaping our economy into one that is more resilient and geographically balanced.
With greater social control, money could be steered, through a mix of social ownership and a state investment bank, directly into social infrastructure and green technology or to households.
To reach a greener, wellbeing society, we need a good economy that serves society, rather than the other way round: sustainable, restorative, planned, long-term, and human in scale.
Achieving this means that we all need to change our way of life – but governments have a key role in making that possible.
If we need energy production to be entirely from renewable sources, this will require considerable investment. While UK emissions have fallen by 46% since 1990, according to the Climate Change Committee – the fastest reduction over the last decade in the G7 – progress is stagnating.
Governments, both local and national, can involve a far wider range of stakeholders in economic decisions, and actively support smaller scale local enterprises that contribute more to social wellbeing than global corporations.
The ‘Community Wealth Building’ approach to local economic development pioneered in Manchester and Preston involves the town hall working alongside local businesses and community organisations to create circular economies, supporting each other and ensuring that gains from the creative powers of local people stay in those communities.
In Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth sets out a way to build an economy that matches humanity’s current challenges and long-term goals. Her ‘doughnut’ recognises “a social foundation of wellbeing that no one should fall below and an ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond”. In between is the safe and just space for humanity. She proposes an economics that understands systems, redistributes resources, regenerates our natural environment, and only values growth that is congruent with these things.
The Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) was recently launched as an international community exploring these ideas. In the UK, groups are setting up in Oxford, Manchester, Bath, Lincoln, Leeds, London, Exeter, Milton Keynes, Cheltenham, Wales and Scotland.
As a similar initiative, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, has argued, “we need an economy where solutions are people-centred, geared towards environmental protection and regeneration, and long-term”.
In 2018, a group of wellbeing economy governments, both national and regional, was formed – involving the governments of Scotland, Iceland, New Zealand, Wales and Finland, with Canada actively participating – to share expertise and transferrable policy practices. Its aim is to move forwards in the governments’ shared hopes of building Wellbeing Economies.
New Zealand recently launched the first ‘Wellbeing Budget’, with an aim to prioritise five key areas: mental health, child wellbeing, building a productive nation, transforming the economy, and supporting the aspirations of the Māori and Pasifika populations.
The UK as a whole could create a Wellbeing Economy, and work with international partners to develop innovative approaches.
It is time to move away from equating social improvement with the growth of GDP, which ignores the costs of pollution and the depletion of our natural resources. We need to measure the progress of our economy in ways that count the cost of pollution and environmental harm, and include indicators of ‘social wellbeing’, social gains and losses, including lowering levels of poverty and homelessness.
The UN human development index takes into account life expectancy, education, and per capita income, while the UN World Happiness Report attempts to measure the psychological states of populations. Surprise, surprise: they announce a positive relationship between happiness and altruistic behaviours, and find that where life satisfaction is highest, income is most equally distributed.