This harmful way of measuring a country’s success pits countries against each other to gain a bigger slice of the economic pie, which has to grow continually, so that ever larger slices are shared out amongst the richest countries as a symbol of their success. What goes into this growth is irrelevant - it could be ecological destruction, poverty and exploitation, even natural disasters and war, which both grow the economy.

The dominant neoliberal-capitalist economy (the extractive economy) is based on a religious-like belief in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measurements.

Economy measured by GDP growth:

• measures products and services regardless of whether they are beneficial or harmful to society and nature (e.g. disasters, accidents etc. raise the GDP)

• does not measure or value natural or social wellbeing

• does not take into account inequality and injustice of any kind

• does not count unpaid labour (including hidden labour- e.g. domestic labour/ childcare) or consider the informal economy.

Therefore, we need a different measure of success, one that abolishes GDP and replaces it with better indicators for guiding an economy's production, consumption and contribution to wellbeing – we call this approach “post-GDP”. Any new GDP metric could also reward regeneration efforts by linking them dynamically to the remaining carbon reserve. Replacing GDP with a better alternative, however, is not straightforward. There have been several proposals to overcome the limitations of GDP, including those mentioned above, and others such as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Genuine Progress Indicator, Ecological Footprint, Happy Planet Index, Adjusted Net Savings, Comprehensive Wealth, and the Inclusive Wealth Index. The most dominant ones are created from the perspective of the Global North, which is also acknowledged by those involved in their development.

The most promising are as follows:

• The Social Wealth Index, currently being developed by the Center for Partnership Studies, which measures “the economic value of caring for people and planet” and aims to change “economic thinking in ways appropriate for our post-industrial, climate change impacted and post-COVID 19 eras”.

• The wellbeing government economy project – where Iceland is participating with New Zealand and Scotland among others – is another attempt to develop a new economic model which is centred on wellbeing rather than on production and consumption, and is reinforced by the OECD (a sign that this has the potential to become mainstream).

• Finally, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance has recently launched a new briefing paper and webinar on how to go beyond GDP, which sets out a three pronged strategy, firstly to harmonise the “beyond-GDP alternatives” indicators based on their commonalities, to develop policy tools, and finally to change the social narrative and the growth mindset. Including the Global South perspective has been identified as crucial to the next phase.

It is vital to implement any alternative systems that do not rely on GDP in as many countries or places as possible, which will also reflect the need for a pluralistic approach. For society to function within ecological limits, with the wellbeing of people in mind, we need to make growth irrelevant, by adopting an a-growth, (growth agnostic) approach. Neither the pursuit of growth, nor the reduction of material and energy uses for human use in order to achieve degrowth, would be effective in all cases because of the different needs and contexts. The real target of public policies should be the satisfaction of basic needs for all and some sectors will need to grow in order to achieve this.

Advocating to limit the scale and power of companies

Some criteria for an alternative measure of success which limits the scale and power of private companies, described as The Common Good Product, are summarised here:

• Measure all relevant aspects of life quality. Developed as a national policy tool it should sit above GDP as the first economy steering tool.

• Transitioning of multinationals over a certain size to smaller companies and cooperatives and requiring Common Good Balance sheets/B corp such as certificates, specifically in priority areas such as energy, food, housing and commons such as personal data, knowledge, biodiversity reserve lands and waters. The transition should start with moving away from energy monopolies to community energy schemes. Support should be given to small and medium enterprises and other cooperative businesses and their activities should be shielded from large companies.

• Companies must transform their business models to legally comply with the 1.5C temperature goal agreed by the Paris Agreement and introduce a ban on toxic dividends.

• No public money to companies which are:

  • • • registered in tax havens and

      • whose activity endangers biodiversity and keeps us above 1.5ºC.

• Better rules and regulations to limit negative effects of the shareholder economy and of advertising in public spaces.

• Limit the power of companies, ensuring democratic control (power of law above corporate power), independent public regulators, mandatory unbundling in regulated sectors, ban oligopolies, i.e. limit the share of any company or corporation (including subsidiaries and sisters) within any given sector to a maximum of 15%.

Work with allies to promote wellbeing as a consistent indicator for Beyond-GDP

As mentioned above, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance has recently launched a new briefing paper and webinar on how to go beyond GDP, which sets out a three pronged strategy, as follows:

1. Harmonise - because there are too many Beyond-GDP alternatives, international institutions need to step up and help harmonise Beyond-GDP indicators to ensure there are consistent measures of success for the performance of a Wellbeing Economy.

2. Develop Policy Tools which show governments how to enhance wellbeing, sustainability and equity in their societies.

3. Change the Social Narrative - the development of globally harmonised statistics and policy tools will help journalists and the general public to shift their belief on economic success to a narrative which values wellbeing, sustainability, and equity.

The work on harmonisation will be taken up by the author of the briefing, Rutger Hoekstra at the United Nations University with one of the goals being to include all countries but especially the Global South.

Work with allies to promote alternatives that use wellbeing as a measure of success

For the Global South, where basic wellbeing needs are lacking, there should be support for prioritising the expansion of activities such as healthcare, education, access to clean water and healthy food (including economic activity) - as long as any economic activity also preserves planetary boundaries and a just and fair society worldwide. Collaboration with allies, in particular Indigenous communities, already working in these areas might be a good approach, especially on issues that Greenpeace isn’t known for. Greenpeace also wants to test if such collaboration could add value to allies’ work and bring important voices to the mainstream where voices from the Global South can influence the global debate on alternatives to GDP.

Work with allies to promote tools for organizations and wider society to measure wellbeing

The organisation Economy for the Common Good has a “Common Good Matrix'' to provide guidance for evaluating an organization’s contribution to people and the planet. The “Common Good Balance Sheet” is based on this matrix and can be used by companies, municipalities and other organizations to draw up a Balance Sheet to describe their own contribution, alongside a conventional balance sheet listing its assets and liabilities. This reporting innovation is perhaps better described as a scorecard. It awards participating organizations points based on the extent to which they have acted in a humane, co-operative, sustainable, just and democratic manner. There are minus points for violating labour standards, pollution, unequal pay for women and using tax havens. According to Christian Felber, the founder of the Economy for the Common Good “Money is only the means, it is not the goal. The present system’s slogan is: the business of business is business. My alternative vision says the purpose of business is the common good.” (as reported in the Financial Times).

We are at a crossroads, where society has to decide what should grow and what should degrow. What is lacking at the moment is voices from Global South and especially Indigenous communities which have a lot to offer to this debate. These perspectives need to be integrated into the beyond GDP alternatives and discussions on redefining wellbeing. In this sense, Greenpeace is, for example, promoting the growth of decentralized renewable energy and the managed decline or abolishment (i.e. degrowth) of fossil energy systems. As such it is not about universal ‘growth’ or ‘no growth’ or ‘degrowth’, it is about reducing our material and eco-social footprint by radically reducing non-renewable resource use and its consequences (emissions, degradations, impact on local economies, etc.). Therefore, it makes sense to support partially maintaining economic growth for economic activities such as renewable energies or labour intensive small eco-farming.

Narratives in the media about wellbeing, equality, justice and restoring the rights of nature and Indigenous peoples become mainstream, taking over from the narrative about the economy and growth. Many local projects and initiatives have demonstrated how beyond-GDP indexes can be used in practical ways to protect and regenerate nature and society, promoting their use. As a result, a new accounting framework is set up globally to measure the Wellbeing Economy, with GDP and the concept of growth no longer the dominant measure. The focus is on improving wellbeing as the core lens to view what is meaningful to society, with the different perceptions of wellbeing of the Global South and North reflected and accounted for. The new measures reward regeneration and care as the basis of the social fabric of successful and sustainable societies.

Case studies:

Gross National Happiness

• • Bhutan: "Being a latecomer to macro-level processes of development, Bhutan is well-known for trying to avoid – despite a tight dependency on the Indian economy – the negative consequences of globalisation. Among many other initiatives, the government of Bhutan has invited prominent ecological economists favorable to post-growth ideas to provide advice on how to strengthen its “new development paradigm". Although Bhutan's GDP has been growing fast over the past three decades, largely through a series of peaks following important hydroelectric projects (almost one half of GDP is produced by the private sector, including farmers, while the rest comes from state-run corporations), the country has also put in place a number of original policies limiting GDP growth and seeking to enhance wellbeing and sustainability, for example: free education and healthcare for all; severe restrictions on foreign investments; no WTO membership; no outdoor advertising; heavy taxes on car imports; severe limits on mass tourism (and ban on alpinism); limits on mining; half of the country under protected areas; constitutional 60% of forest cover; and a declared willingness to shift to 100% organic agriculture.

  • Bhutan has also launched a new concept which looks beyond GDP: Gross National Happiness (GNH). Although the researchers point out that the example of Bhutan is unique to circumstances in that country and may not be easily applicable to other circumstances, the example of Bhutan – with all its limitations – shows that elements of a post-growth, or a-growth programme are not as utopian and far away as they might sound.

  • The Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership (WEGo) is a collaboration of national and regional governments promoting sharing of expertise and transferrable policy practices. It’s current members are Scotland, New Zealand (which has a pioneering Wellbeing Budget that is designed expressly to prioritise the wellbeing of citizens), Wales, Iceland and the OECD, with Ireland likely to become the latest member and a hub being established in Costa Rica. It is another attempt to develop a new economic model which is centred on wellbeing rather than on production and consumption, and is reinforced by the OECD. It is connected to the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, a collaboration of organisations, alliances, movements and individuals globally, with articles on many subjects including Indigenous Peoples, Nigeria, and Bhutan.

Wellbeing and ecological footprints

• • An index (2020) by the New Economics Foundation is based on a ratio of a country’s well-being measurements (such as life expectancy, equality and satisfaction) divided by its Ecological Footprint. It measures who gets the best lives per unit of renewable natural resource. The top country is Costa Rica, home to amazing biodiversity and residents who have higher well-being than the residents of many higher-income countries, including the US and the UK. Residents in Costa Rica also live longer than Americans. All this is achieved with an Ecological Footprint per person that is one third of the American Ecological Footprint and a GDP per capita that is less than a quarter of that of many Western European and North American countries.

Care is the social fabric
When care is factored into any measure of progress, it takes a surprisingly important role. For example:

• • The Social Wealth Index (SWI) is designed to provide business and government policymakers data highlighting the economic return from investing in caring for people and nature. It considers findings from neuroscience demonstrating that the "high-quality human capital" required for our new knowledge-service economy largely hinges on ensuring good care and education for children in their early years. In short, the SWI points to new ways of thinking about economic health, which recognizes value, and rewards the typically non-market areas such as women's work, care work, and environmental regeneration, and includes social and economic justice work as "productive work."

When accurately accounted for, counter-intuitively, care emerges as both a prime mover of economic growth and a reliable indicator of a nation's current and future societal wellbeing, including economic vitality and disinclination towards criminal activity. Care offers a social fabric, an ecosystem of connections, based on trust, reciprocity, and sharing It increases the resilience of society in the face of crisis.

Reinventing the idea of credit
Tying credit to real improvements in natural ecosystems could be a practical way to encourage people to regenerate nature.

• • A tree mortgage scheme in the Indian State of Kerala enables farmers and residents to mortgage their trees in return for an interest-free loan. For example, residents can plant a tree, and after three years they can mortgage each sapling for an interest-free loan that can be renewed annually for 10 years. The money need only be repaid if the tree is chopped down. The tree banking scheme has an ambition to reverse the damage and turn Meenangadi, a town of about 35,000 people into a carbon neutral region. So far 300,000 saplings have been planted and it is guaranteeing a sustainable income for farmers (the aim is to double the income of the farmers without overly industrialising the region) and bring supplementary income to residents through the sale of fruit and other products.

Use this moment of disruption to

SHIFT MINDSETS

FROM: Growth is crucial to our economy and a good thing in any case. Even if it has some negative manifestations, it balances out and things become better over time,

TO: Belief in infinite and mindless growth is causing irreparable damage to the planet and destroying communities and individuals’ lives. We must refocus where we need investment and growth to rebalance the system and increase wellbeing and happiness.

FROM: Corporate profits are a reflection of how healthy our economy is, and it is effective and efficient to privatize as many sectors and services as possible

TO: Companies need to benefit the community, nature and the social fabric. We should invest in and grow our cooperatives and our connection with nature - not polluting and extractivist industries.

FROM: It's unethical to deny developing countries the development opportunities that come with economic growth and the creation of capital wealth that trickles down to improve living conditions for everyone.

TO: The development model of endless and radical growth realized by industrialized countries has created the very problems we are facing today – natural degradation, social inequalities and alienation, detrimental global footprints etc. Global South countries do not have to simply repeat these mistakes. Indigenous wisdom and ancestral practices are central to sustainable living. We promote pluralism and economies that don't leave anyone behind and respect the needs and limits of nature.

SHIFT POWER

1. People’s identities and life goals are closely aligned with the idea of growth – shaped by ideas of social progress, personal status and success through careers, rising income and consumption. Even seemingly alternative goals such as ‘personal fulfilment’ and women’s ‘empowerment’ can be infused with ideas that remain tied to the growth paradigm, for instance if fulfilment is sought through high consumption and high emissions practices such as extensive long haul travel or expensive hobbies and gadgets are automatically considered a natural right. This collective fixation is the power basis of the growth economy; shifting this power requires changing the mindsets and the culture in our societies. We need realisation and recognition that greater fulfilment in living lies in wellbeing and community, which cannot be found in increased consumption.
   

2. Replacing GDP with alternative measurement(s) globally will require a big political power shift. This will be helped by many different examples of how countries and regions are using alternative indicators to improve wellbeing and environmental sustainability. The experience of using alternative indicators, or of taking alternative strategies such as a-growth will provide the impetus, and evidence of success, beyond the crude measure of GDP, will be the most persuasive.

SPARK STRUCTURAL CHANGE/ CREATE ENVIRONMENTAL BOUNDARIES

1. Any alternative indicators that replace GDP need to incorporate boundaries, indicators and incentives around the following:

• Use economic (post-GDP) indicators that measure economic success not merely by the quantity of produced goods and services (GDP) but by the contribution to the preservation of public resources and welfare, sustainability and common good goals.

• Such indicators are predominantly qualitative, focusing on basic needs and wellbeing. An alternative indicator is for example, Gross National Happiness (GNH), in Bhutan.

• Incentives and value on the health and wellbeing of communities, including the value of unpaid care work.

• Respect for Indigenous peoples, land rights for ancestral lands, and value given to their cultural perspective.

• Establish economic strategies and plans that identify which activities will have to grow (e.g. cooperatives, gardens, community-based organizations) while others will have to decline (e.g. polluting firms, extractivism, the advertising industry), the ultimate goal being to find a global and sustainable steady state.

• Boundaries around what needs to stay in the ground (fossil fuels, minerals), and what needs to be protected (forests, marine ecosystems and important habitats), with incentives and value on the regeneration of nature (forests, marine ecosystems and important habitat).

• Limits to corporate power

The Wellbeing Economy Alliance, includes webinars, links to organisations, alliances, movements and individuals and publications such as the recent "Measuring the Wellbeing Economy" on how to go beyond GDP.

“The Spirit Level" Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, 2009, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

Gerber, Julien-François & Raina, Rajeswari. (2018). Post-Growth in the Global South? Some Reflections from India and Bhutan. Ecological Economics. 150. 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.02.020.

The organisation Economy for the Common Good has resources and tools to build a comprehensive economic model, emerging from a holistic world view and based on grassroots democracies.