Bhutan measures national performance with happiness index

On the roulette wheel of hope for the future, you should put your money on gross national happiness and Bhutan, not Copenhagen.

by Chris Benjamin

As the environmentalist eyes of the world watch the Copenhagen climate conference, waiting for our leaders to fail us again, something truly hopeful emerges from the foot of the Himalayas, in a country with fewer people than Nova Scotia.

Bhutan, which is surrounded by India and China, has been a little-known environmental leader for decades. Leaving the north-south rich-poor blame game to its neighbours and North America, Bhutan has adopted the measurable philosophy of gross national happiness. Its decisions are guided by the principle of maximizing society's well-being; more specifically, creating sustainable development, cultural preservation, conservation and good governance.

GNH offers a viable alternative to the paper economics of gross national product, but it's more than just another measure of progress. "Bhutan has fully protected 26 percent of its land, and prevents old growth logging and export of raw lumber," notes Linda Pannozzo of Genuine Progress Index Atlantic, a think tank dedicated to measuring sustainable development in Nova Scotia.

Pannozzo is one of 10 Nova Scotian observers in Bhutan this week for its workshop on creating a national educational curriculum in line with GNH. GPI Atlantic hand-picked the workshop's 25 international (non-Bhutanese) participants based on "extensive research in holistic and contemplative education and critical thinking, with a focus on indigenous knowledge and cultural literacy."

The list is the global all-star team of people giving humanity a chance for survival. It includes Bunker Roy, whose Barefoot College graduates have brought renewable energy and clean drinking water to 100,000 people in 110 villages in five countries; Greg Cajete, whose work brought indigenous knowledge to the academic mainstream; Satish Kumar, editor of the UK's influential Resurgence magazine and founder of two schools on ecology and spirituality; Vandana Shiva, a pioneering advocate of eco-feminism, agricultural biodiversity and the anti-globalization movement as well as numerous other jaw-dropping heroes of the disenfranchised.

These world-renowned thinkers and educators will sit down and talk schooling with 25 of Bhutan's leading educators, politicians and administrators. "The real vision and hope for the future is our children," says Pannozzo. "We need to care deeply about how they are being educated."

In a GNH system, education thinks of children as more than just economic engines in training. Their ability to lead us to a better future is tied to their understanding of the natural world. As Pannozzo puts it, "Development of eco-consciousness in education is prerequisite for sustainable behaviour."

Mainstream education has been criticized by academic luminaries like David Orr for inaccurately portraying humans and our technology as rulers of nature. Bhutanese children will know better. They will learn that we are but one species in an immensely complex web of life. Some of their teachers take students into old-growth forests to learn about medicinal plants, an experience that fosters respect for the plants and passes down ancient knowledge about health.

"Bhutan has never been conquered or colonized," Pannozzo says. "So indigenous knowledge and culture have not been squashed."

Bhutanese culture is, however, threatened by globalization, the infiltration of mass-produced Western candy, clothing and ideas. The ideas, which place abstractions like money above human and natural resources, are the biggest threat. Ideologies we learn in school---left-wing, right-wing or otherwise---pay little heed to lived experience. Economics itself is based on outlandish assumptions about behaviour.

All this matters because without the grounding of lived experience, which is essential in indigenous knowledge, we tend to forget that we are completely dependent on the natural world, that money can't be eaten. "Indigenous knowledge tends to be concerned with sustainability, with linking the wisdom and welfare of past, present and future generations," Pannozzo says.

And that's why Bhutan compensates for the hope Copenhagen lacks. The so-called leaders in Copenhagen are negotiating with their minds on their money: How will these commitments affect GDP, they wonder?

The real leaders in Bhutan are trying to reverse that culture of artificial numbers, and focus on what really matters. But will GNH catch on? "It has more political buy-in at high levels and therefore a better chance of success here in Bhutan, a small place with stronger community values, than in heavily industrialized countries," Pannozzo says.

What a pity that our blindness to the small things keeps us from seeing Bhutan as a world leader.

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What I see here in the article and its comment is the natural struggle to get to the spirit of things. Bhutan has problems, yes, and so what? Isn't it amazing that a country still preserves much of its traditional culture in a world's development worldview still pumped on aggressive colonialist or imperialist tendencies? What everyone is talking about now in the planet is the need to come back to reconnect with nature. Wouldn't it have been wiser to do it like 500 years ago, when the imperialists massacred millions of indigenous peoples in Latin America, for example, who were living in harmony with nature for centuries or millennia? When they made deserts out of tropical forests in order to finance their pseudo-development... when they ransacked mineral and botanical resources for their selfish ends through slavery of humans turned into industrialized cruelty towards animals in sad agony at the hands of slaughters... These idolized "explorers" of history books lost the chance to learn from the peoples they've met, and the same happens nowadays when arrogant so-called developers want to impose their worldview on treasures of human and natural wealth like Bhutan, or even in Central Asia or Middle East, speaking of traditional civilizations. These "objective capitalists" are not yet able to see that the cultural protective approach of such countries, even including the communist/socialist-tended Cuba, China and now Venezuela, is provoked by the incapacity of such pseudo-pragmatic materialists to respect others' world-views and learn from them. Learn from the positive through real experience and perhaps become someone able to see the world a bit from another point of view so that they can understand from within and not superficially the long standing cultural issues and conflicts such as the one with those of Nepali descent in Bhutan. If so-called westerners are able to learn from Bhutan and the GNH approach and admit the shallowness of their GDP and its tremendous failure, then they may grow more mature, and earn respect from the Bhutanese, and even help them to solve issues of human rights and so on. But if they keep looking at Bhutan as another exotic land, all they will get is not more than a tourist perspective of a millenary culture – such a waste of opportunity. It is still time to prevent that this initial tourist amusement turns again into crude invasive intervention as is the norm, which leads to the century-long opportunity-for-actual-human-growth-losses we witness globally today.

Posted by Acarya P Brahmacarii on December 19, 2009 at 4:49 PM | Report this comment

Yes, why is the West so hung up on Bhutan's ridiculous happiness index? Youths in Thimpu have to wear national dress when out in public otherwise you get arrested! There is only one newspaper, that's published by the government. A guy falling into a river is their headline news when Bhutanese refugess sheltered by Nepal are actually talking about an armed rebellion against the Royal Government of Bhutan.

So much for happiness.

Posted by Novis on December 10, 2009 at 7:11 PM | Report this comment

It's gross, it's national, but it sure isn't happy.

In 2003 Human Rights Watch urged Bhutan and Nepal to implement a screening and repatriation process that protects the human rights of more than one hundred thousand refugees of Nepalese ethnicity who were arbitrarily stripped of their citizenship and forced to flee Bhutan in the early 1990s.

See www.bhutaneserefugees.com -- an understated and reasonable effort by support groups in the UK and Ireland to detail the dismaying dark side of the Bhutanese government's benign self-portait, both during and since its arbitrary expulsion of a large ethnic group in the 1990s. Many had documented citizenship going back 100 years.

There are many other references about this problem, such as:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-frelick…

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2003/09/23/t…

Regarding Gross National Happiness -- some say it is very encouraging that Bhutan is opening itself up to an international dialog on its approach to sane development. But others say that the government had to promote GNH as an alternative to GDP so that it could qualify for World Bank funding -- its GDP is too low!

http://thesop.org/politics/2007/07/24/figh… says:

"...The planned campaign of the regime on Gross National Happiness has now been looked as the measure to plug-up the ire of citizens against the anti-national act of the rulers. It is also the time to question TIME magazine whether King Jigme Singye Wangchuk was a noble personality, who was featured as one of the 100 personalities for the year 2006."

We should individually and colletively be urging the Royal Government of Bhutan to make the benefits of development aid accessible to all Bhutanese people equally, regardless of their ethnic group, and to carry out its full responsibilities under the human rights instruments to which it is committed.

Locally, we will not hear GPI Atlantic or Shambhala International speaking about this problem, except to say that Bhutan has a right to do what it is doing, or that it is a confused issue. When the much-touted GNH converence was held in Antigonish, Ron Coleman was known to call speakers in advance and ask them, very nicely, to not say a word about the issue during the conference -- we wouldn't want to embarrass our guests! The stakeholders are many, and have much to lose by the loss of the GNH hype.

It is ironic that they are making such a fuss about children and eduation. Up to half of the estimated 120,000 Lhotshampas fleeing Bhutan were children under 18 years. The rights of these refugee children continue to be violated by the Bhutanese government, particularly their right to a nationality. There is also serious concern about continuing discrimination against Lhotshampa children still living in Bhutan.

As a loyal Coast reader, I encourage all journalists to inform yourselves on the issue, and hopefully exercise your pens on behalf of those who wish to return home or are still being marginalized inside of Bhutan. Articles such as this, which tell only the side everyone wants to hear (especially the Bhutan government!), can only serve to continue the Bhutan government's pattern of evasion and obfuscation regarding their treatment of the Lhotsampas and other Southern Bhutanese of Nepali descent.