Rivers of Change: Envisioning a Global Wellbeing Economy
Jennifer Wilkins
Personification of rivers has influenced how we integrate nature into decision-making, even bending governments to respect their rights. But perhaps the next step is the ‘riverfication’ of people. This was one of many inspirational provocations pondered at a gathering in Costa Rica in July 2024, attended by an international group of actors in economic transformation.
Conceived and facilitated by the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll), the purpose of the gathering was to explore reforms to initiate a global wellbeing economy (GWE). This continued a process WEAll had started the year before, involving interviews with indigenous and global majority world leaders. Six key themes emerged from those interviews, providing the backdrop for the July gathering.
The theme of ‘embracing home’ means that a GWE should focus on reconnecting us to our ancestry, land and each other. Being ‘in service of life’ means restoring a reverence for nature. We must also ‘expand our time horizons’ to honour past, present and future generations. The concept of ‘sharing the sacred’ involves a transition from efficiency and scarcity to sufficiency and abundance. ‘Respecting self-determination, sovereignty and dignity’ is about cultural autonomy while also maintaining the local-global relationship as we face planetary scale challenges. Finally, ‘learning, practicing and governing together’ recognises that developing a GWE requires us to ask deeper questions of ourselves, democratic processes and the role of the state.
Participants came from all corners of the globe: South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, the USA, Canada, India, Ireland, the Philippines, the Netherlands, the UK, Bahrain, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Kutakachi Nation in the Andes and Amazon and the O'Odham nation on the US-Mexico border. Some of us work within the current system, able to share insights into the global decision-making framework; others operate on its edges, crafting visions for a new global economy; a few of us work in bridging these spaces, generating dialogue. How could such a diverse group advance GWE initiatives given our array of worldviews? Over three days, the plan was to connect, deepen dialogue and crystalise actions.
Gathering Workshop
On day one, we connected around sensing our collective field of possibility. Mutual trust and curiosity would be paramount foundations for the following days. Smaller conversations swelled to a full circle where we aired our anxieties and hopes about the economy, as it is and how it could be. We discussed our shared sense of loss, urgency and fatigue and our fear of physical tipping points. We acknowledged our complicity in reproducing capitalist modernity and the challenge of unlearning in order to move from incremental to systemic change. We concurred on the ongoing trauma of indigenous and marginalised peoples, demanding systemic decolonisation. We discussed the inadequacy of the nation state as a unit of governance for social and ecological recovery and agreed on the need to regain empathy with non-humans. We lamented the inadequacy of using a global common language, such as English, when words are so important for expressing intentionality and enabling accessibility.
There was plentiful common ground yet there was also heterogeneity in our perspectives and priorities. To build the emotional maturity to relate to others with differing views, we were coached to envisage ourselves as multifaceted non-Cartesian persons, harbouring internal contradictions. We individually grappled with an exercise to symbolically apportion our hopes across three hard choices for resolving climate change: the current inequitable growth-based economy, an emerging known alternative economy requiring a difficult transition, or an unknown phoenix-from-the-flames economy following a global catastrophic event. We bore witness to each other’s discomfort in letting go of the normative, perhaps even Utopian, inner narratives that guide our work in order to place our hopes in imperfect alternative futures.
Day two found many of us eager to make linear progress on the meeting plan, ready to dive into deeper dialogues on GWE reform initiatives. But there were ‘things unsaid that needed to be said’. A fishbowl council of three participants from indigenous and marginalised backgrounds spoke of the ground separating them from the group. They described how the meeting was extra mundum for them, outside their worlds. For instance, they do not belong to nation states but to their own nations and they have no formal birth certificates, which meant that getting passports to come to the gathering had been difficult. The timing of the meeting had taken one of them away from a corn harvest that was vital for their community, but the meeting was not going to help their community. They were there, they said, only so that others would not speak about them without them. They criticised the six meeting themes for not addressing racial and gender violence, a constant reality for them. They asked what sacred things have the global minority shared with us? The global minority commercialises indigenous knowledge and markets beautiful things about being Black, but does not value the indigenous system that holds the knowledge or the Black person who creates the beautiful thing. It is cool to be an activist, they said, but what happens when the performance of activism ends? Indigenous and marginalised people do not have the luxury of environmentalist day jobs because their whole existence is focused on survival. Poor people live a circular economy every day, handing down clothes; they don’t drive cars and they don’t fly. Now white people are preaching that the world must move to a circular economy and reduce overconsumption to solve ecological problems caused by white people. Poor communities have more urgent problems. It’s disturbing that global minority researchers have a romantic idea of Indigenous life and global NGOs see Indigenous people as artefacts to be saved. Why don’t they leave us alone, they asked. The unintentional colonialism embedded in the ostensibly universalist proposal of the gathering – to advance a global wellbeing economy – was made stark and obvious.
We returned thoughtfully to the planned task of deepening dialogue. Several topics were volunteered, ranging from how we can hear nature to what narratives are effective for activating global policy at local scale. We could join or float between conversations according to our interests. Still ignited by the morning’s fishbowl conference, I joined a conversation about the complicity of those in low-intensity struggles (e.g., rich nation activists) in harms caused to those in high-intensity struggles. Significantly, this conversation’s participants were mostly from settler colonial countries – South Africa, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand – indicative that these nations are the front line of the clash between low-intensity and high-intensity activism. A view was proffered that the global majority has had things done to them and the global minority needs to see that these things have been done by them and are continuing to be done by them and must be repaired by them. The global minority sees the outcomes of this harm and rushes to solutions, disseminating these by force of its cognitive majority, but misses out the crucial steps of reflexivity and reparation. I conveyed something told to me by a Māori leader, that white saviour ideas of equality sound like assimilation. Māori want the freedom to self-determine what equality looks like for them. Dominant white New Zealanders have not done the self-work to see that Māori self-determination is a just reparation. I wondered, how do we initiate reflexivity by the dominant groups in Aotearoa New Zealand, in business and in governance? What frameworks exist?
I joined a second conversation that somewhat answered my previous question, dissecting the psychology of cultural superiority into six ‘A’ factors: entitlement to authority over morality and epistemology, the right to arbitrate truth, unrestricted autonomy, affirmation of virtue, appropriation and accumulation. This dopamine reward system reproduces the modern ego and the relative power of the global minority. An example was given: the traditional, white intellectual can discuss virtually any idea, but when a Black, non-traditional (or organic) intellectual discusses their ideas they are described as militant.
There was so much to think about. I was grateful for several hours of solitary retreat as a dramatic lightning storm in the tail of Hurricane Beryl passed through the Alajuela region, drowning out any means of conversation and reminding us of nature’s energy.
Day three invited crystallisation of the numerous conversations into reform initiatives. We shared our reflections, introducing our own work as a lens onto our perspectives. This re-engaged us with our collective field of possibility, while we also started to formulate personal takeaways: the things that touched us, the things that opened up for us, the things we found we could let go of, the things that challenged us, the insights that could seed and deepen our work, the allies and communities we had formed, and the resources we could offer or help generate.
This last day was rich with ideas. Here are some snapshots:
Nature creates value. How do we engage with that capacity? How do we listen to nature and build alliances with it without later destroying them? The human and non-human worlds can be part of an ecological democracy. We can have a multi-species economy.
Global governance is not shaped for people but for corporations and the nation state. We need a global governance system prioritising people. How do we replace ineffective global governance institutions with others that can provide security for local governance? How do we transition from nation-state to bio-regionality without reproducing the current system?
Are we searching for universality of ideas or unity of direction? Different movements are not collaborating, making working on specific issues isolating. We should develop a confluence of movements.
We need to erode the universal acceptance of inequality and billionaires.
Universal basic income is not a welfare scheme but a recognition that we all add value. It is justice. It can enable many small changes that can rewire society, increase participation and dismantle the concept of citizens as clients and beneficiaries.
Grounds at Brave Earth (Tierra Valiente)
How did we do? Over three days we planned to connect, deepen dialogue and crystalise actions. We didn’t entirely succeed in this. We connected without fully reflecting on our positionalities. We deepened some dialogues but not cohesively and with little reference to the gathering’s pre-determined themes. We informed and inspired one another but crystalised no joint actions. But we could say we succeeded differently. The plan had flexed around the group’s dynamics, bonds were formed, stories were told and heard, differences were navigated, many of us were challenged, our respective projects were co-validated and we recognised a wide field of possibility. If this motivated, values-aligned international cohort found it difficult to land on universal actions after three days of knitting ourselves together, perhaps it is a lesson that our power lies in the confluence of many ideas shared and supported in solidarity, a unified pluriverse.
The gathering ended before we discovered the results of France’s parliamentary election, in which a centrist-left coalition harnessed strategic unity. Ultimately successful, they must now maintain unity by finding a medium for constructive relationality. What does that look like? Returning to rivers might give us an answer. Viennese artist Eva Lootz explored the human relationship with waterways. It is a boring relationship, she said, because water is a servant; but better this than our relationship with fire. “If water gives itself to adding, fire strives to subtract.” A global wellbeing economy cannot be a reductive single burning fire of ideals to which we all gravitate, but a worldwide pluriverse of wellbeing economies navigating many courses through the same river of change toward the betterment of multiple imperfect futures. Boring? Not at all: la pura vida!
Jennifer Wilkins is an active supporter of WEAll Aotearoa and advisor, researcher and advocate for post growth Enterprise and Economics.
