Global Wellbeing Economies

Embracing home…is the idea that global wellbeing economies need to encourage reconnection – to nature, to the land, to other species, to the cosmos, to the spiritual, to our languages, to our identities, to each other, to our ancestors and to future generations. Moving towards a global economy that embraces home is partially about how we tell stories and who gets to tell them. It looks for new platforms to dialogue around the localities, laws, and provisions that ground us in our relationality.

Expanding time horizons …is about looking backwards to honour ancestral lineage and forward to honour future generations when reflecting on the current economic system – its history of thought, its myths, and the things it holds onto which we could let go of to serve all of life better. It requires a deep, gentle and honest look at what the global economy has become and the social and ecological harm it has caused. This will involve conversations on reparations to co-create a more equitable economy that avoids reproducing harms.

Sharing the sacred… is rooted in the importance of global economies that can share what we have in common. As a principle, sharing the sacred is interested in economies of “enoughness”. It raises the possibility that the end of extraction is the beginning of abundance – of provisions, of energy, of resources, of responsibilities and freedoms, of wellbeing, of kindness and community.

Respecting self-determination, sovereignty and dignity …is about working proactively with centuries of colonial exploitation and oppression across and between regions, so that social and ecological justice becomes a core and central praxis of economics. It is about rebalancing power towards the local, towards cultural autonomy, towards a respect of what we each uniquely bring. Shifting the economic system from an entity that seeks uniformity and universality to systems of economies that are unified in being a pluriverse raises questions about the role of global institutions and nation states.

Learning, practising and governing together… recognises that economies are ways of being in the world, as much as they are a set of theories and ideas. The togetherness in this principle is not only about the co-creation of new policies, strategies or social movements. It is about asking deeper questions about our place in the world and how we learn from others so economies enable self-determined responses and collective innovations to co-exist. It is about how we ladder up democratic processes to respond to global challenges and how we bring those conversations back to locally organised dialogues and decision-making processes rooted in biocultural realities and lived experience. 

In service of all life…focuses on humans’ interconnectedness with nature – and the reverence for nature which the global economy has lost. To put Earth first, to respect and appreciate nature, to acknowledge all life, and learn from the limits of natural systems to absorb exploitative human behaviour requires a different set of values than are currently shaping behaviour in the global economy. To be in service of all life will require economies that celebrate human care of nature more than human efforts to save it. As a principle, it raises questions about how we organise policy and finance, and how we pay attention to natures efforts to be involved.