Global Wellbeing Economies

In the face of deepening global inequalities and accelerating environmental degradation, integrating diverse worldviews into economic reform initiatives is more urgent than ever. Engaging in rigorous dialogues that challenge prevailing paradigms is essential.

The Global Wellbeing Economies project is convening a broad range of people including representatives from Indigenous Communities, major industries, think tanks, policymakers, and activists to identify reform initiatives with the potential to transform the global economic landscape.

Coming together

We began our process through researching and dialoguing with visionary global economic thinkers and organisations. Together we crafted a hopeful new vision for our global economic system with six key themes. We then brought people together in-person to explore the intersection of different worldviews and practices for the advancement of global economic reform initiatives.

Our messages for world leaders

Six key principles emerged from our discussions

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.

Promising practices from around the world

Out of the diverse economic reform initiatives we examined we chose to take a closer look at: Future Generations, Universal Basic Income and Governance of the Commons. These governance-focused initiatives were selected because they have moved beyond theory and into practice, having been implemented to some extent in national or regional contexts. This enabled us to explore both their conceptual foundations and practical applications. These analyses are based on in-depth discussions held and facilitated by a diverse group of participants, including representatives from Indigenous Communities, think tanks, policymakers, and activists. The conversations explored critical questions around the transfer of power, how global mechanisms can meaningfully support local efforts, and what pathways exist for scaling these initiatives.

Click to find out more about the three initiatives.

> Future Generations
> Universal Basic Income
 
> Governance of the Commons
.

More promising practices from around the world

Sign up for
our latest news, events & future WEAll developments

Wellbeing Economy Alliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.