International Forum for Well-Being by the Youth Press Agency

WELL-BEING INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR WELL-BEING

BY THE YOUTH PRESS AGENCY INTERNATIONAL FORUM IN GRENOBLE

A CHANGE OF SCALE

A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

For the first time in Europe

Personally, what does Well-Being mean to you?

New alternatives to the economic indicators

PUBLISHED BY:

IN COLLABORATION WITH:

GRAPHIC DESIGN BY:

CONTENTS 04

EDITORIAL

05

ME AND THE INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR WELL-BEING

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PERSONALLY, WHAT DOES WELL-BEING MEAN TO YOU?

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SYLVIE BUKHARI-DE PONTUAL: THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL FORUM FOR WELL-BEING IN EUROPE

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PATRICK VIVERET: HOW CAN WE TURN INTO A WELL-BEING SOCIETY?

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METHOD GUNDIDZA: THE NEED TO RESTORE THE BEAUTIFUL DANCE OF LIFE

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PICTURES OF WELL-BEING

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DASHO KARMA URA: A MEASURE OF BHUTAN'S WELL-BEING

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ASIER ANSORENA: GREATER ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE AND SOVEREIGNTY

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PABLO SOLÓN: DECOLONIZATION TOWARDS A WELL-BEING VISION

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OUR TURN TO SPEAK

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EDITORIAL How to write about Well-Being For the first time in Europe, the International Forum for WellBeing was held from 6th to 8th June 2018 in Grenoble (France) with the support of the University of Grenoble-Alpes, FAIR (Forum pour d’Autres Indicateurs de Richesses), the CCFD-Terre Solidaire, the municipality of Grenoble and Grenoble-Alpes Métropole.

The main goal of the Forum was to promote and share diverse experiences based on the well-being of society rather than on economic growth. The event hosted around 75 workshops in which 1000 people took part. Participants were mainly researchers, elected representatives, local government workers, civil society organizations and committed citizens coming from 25 countries.

The intense three-day forum has been covered by an international Youth Press Agency, a team of 12 young reporters coming from South Africa, Argentina, Vietnam, Brazil, Romania, Italy and France. The Youth Press Agency produced articles, interviews, videos and pictures with an innovative and creative spirit. These products are published online on the website www.youthpressagency.org.

This e-book is an extra output created by the Youth Press Agency and summarising the greatest moments of the Forum.

Here is the completed list of the members of the Youth Press Agency at the International Forum for Well-Being:

PARTICIPANTS

EDUCATORS

Dominic Brown Paulo Lima Fabio Trapani Giulia De Paoli Florencia Pistan Diego Chitarrini Kim Pham Margaux Deygas Pauline Meary Chabbrey Natália Aquino Phuong Nguyen Ngoc Tram Nguyen EDUCATORS Oliana Quidoz Paul Sopon Paula Bonfatti Sizwe Nyuka Thao Nguyen

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me and the international forum for well-being

BY OLIANA QUIDOZ Almost three years from now, back in November 2015, I had the unique opportunity to participate in the Gross National Happiness (GNH) Conference held in Paro, Bhutan. I travelled there with fifteen friends from Belgium, France and Colombia.

The quality of the human encounters we made in Bhutan, the simplicity with which we were welcomed, the brightness of the vision spreading all over the country have had a strong effect on me indeed. When we came back we were convinced that the challenge to organize an international event on those issues in Europe, and more particularly in our dynamic home-town of Grenoble was worth the bet! After two years working with this group on alternative indicators of wealth and Well-Being I flew to different walks of life, but I couldn’t miss the concretization of this long-term inspiring project, so I joined the Youth Press Agency team… Gathering over a thousand persons over three days, exploring aspects as diverse as agro-ecology, community organizing and health, culture, and even the many dimensions of the personal feeling of Well-Being and satisfaction over one’s life.

Personally, the Forum of June’s 2018 has been the time to reconnect with friends from Bhutan, from Thailand - among others (there were twenty-five foreign delegations!), and also to pick up ideas from deep perspectives exposed by participants from South America and Africa…As a matter of fact, it was also the first time I heard about groups from South Africa describing their own vision of Well-Being (through the concept of Jangano) and their words have reached directly to my heart, because of their honesty and their clear, bright, illustrated way of speaking about community values.

The smile of the South African friend Method Gundidza is one of the first image that comes to my mind when thinking back on these much well-filled three-days…

Moreover, this new format of the participative forum, organized over seventy-five workshops, was also very distinct from the more formal Bhutanese conference: even allowing us to add topics and informal times that weren’t planned beforehand, such as the feminist workshop that also very much brought love and hope to my personal understanding of the new world to create together.

Now almost four months after the event, projects and desires to contribute come to my mind each day, dynamizing my day-to-day life and helping me keep with positive energy even in the most difficult times. Even though we may not see this full societal change in our lifetime, I do believe it is only good to try and enjoy building a collective memory of those bright-hearted social movements – and other energies at stake in the public policies and university setting as well – and to write and tell to the youngers our own tales about the world we are trying to relate.

That is, spreading an inter-generational desire to live on a living planet while developing our ability to care for others and for ourselves, through our personal passions and our taste to share.

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Personally, what does well-being mean to you?

A very simple question was asked by the Youth Press Agency to each protagonist of this e-book at the International Forum for Well-Being: “Personally, what does Well-Being mean to you?”.

The variety of received answers has revealed the profoundness of the concept of Well-Being.

Personally, what I call Well-Being is the art of living at the right time. That is to say, it’s the art of being fully present to life. It’s the fact of saying I cannot live everything, I cannot do everything, but the things I live, I am going to live it intensely. So, at this moment I am not seeking happiness in the sense that it has to be an ephemeral happiness or a stroke of luck, or a capital one would be trying to conquer but also afraid to lose. We are living at the wrong time all the same if we prevent ourselves from sorrow when losing a beloved one, for instance. It is really an art of full presence to life, to my mind, and in this respect living at the right time is in the end very synonymous with Well-Being.

PATRICK VIVERET

To me, Well-Being is happiness, which means the type of strength that we make collectively as a group. I believe that we are better with our peers than being alone.

SYLVIE BUKHARI-DE PONTUAL

My understanding of Well-Being is that people are healthy in terms of their own bodies living in a healthy environment, in which there is no pollution of water and air, there is enough of other non-human friends to be available to interact with animals, trees, insects, mountains and river. This is a greater and a bigger community than humans only.

Well-Being is when humans are able to interact with other non-human beings, but also when they interact among themselves in singing, dancing in ceremonies that celebrate life, working together on different issues and talking to each other. Eating food which people like and gives them health and happiness, talking to them culturally, socially and economically.

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METHOD GUNDIDZA

After all the other conditions are met, Well-Being can be created by a combination of good sleep, emotional peace, meditation and some exercise every day. That will create well-being at a personal level. There is also a long-term idea about well-being, you should have education, health, income, a good family, a good environment... you know, go to New Zealand, go to the United States for work, go to Japan to die, [be free] etc.

This is a long-term idea about well-being. But Well-Being is also generated on a moment by moment basis, so the best scale and the period for looking at Well-Being is also twenty-four hours. So, if I don’t sleep tonight, if I don’t do any physical exercise and stay without moving for a whole day, or if I allow myself to be emotionally disturbed by exposing myself to that experience, tomorrow I won’t have well-being. So, you have to take care, hour by hour, day by day.

ASIER ANSORENA

DASHO KARMA URA

I think that Well-Being is realized not only by providing economic opportunities to the most vulnerables - as we are doing through our community bank Banco Palmas in Brazil. More important than a line of microcredit, is social inclusion, is building skills, providing time for leisure and encounters. Well-Being is also taking into account the psychological factors: it is looking inside before looking outside, is living with an internal peace.

The concept of "Vivir Bien", which can be translated to Well-Being, is a cosmo-vision, it is a way of life of indigenous communities coming from the Andean Region in South America. This cosmo-vision has different elements, one element is that it’s holistic, that says everything is interconnected, not only human life and nature but also whatever is in the cosmos, or under the ground and that there is no space without time. This vision also puts forward that time does not function in a linear way, but rather that time functions like a spiral. Therefore, for this vision the concept of progress, to always going somewhere more advanced than from the past, is really not true. So in anything in the future, there’s something from the past. There’s always complementarity between different aspects, for example, you cannot have happiness without sadness, so to think only of happiness is an illusion, pure happiness does not exist, it can only exist in a complementary way, with its opposite sadness, and we can go on in the same vein with many other aspects of life and existence. The most important thing for humans is how do we bring balance between this whole that has different elements that are contradictory. So the purpose is not to grow forever or to advance and progress forever, but how do you bring a balance between these different elements, but you don’t bring about balance with getting rid of the other but by trying to see how you can create complementarities with the others, in order to have a whole. Because there is nothing more important than the whole, the totality, and a totality that is in balance.

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PABLO SOLÓN

Sylvie Bukhari-de Pontual The first International Forum for Well-Being in Europe

BY KIM CUONG PHAM

Sylvie Bukhari-de Pontual is a French law professor, lawyer and human rights activist. She is the first female president of CCFD-Terre Solidaire, a French Catholic Committee committed to fight hunger and promote development worldwide. Together with a consortium of several organizations, CCFD-Terre Solidaire has organized the International Forum for Well-Being.

What are your thoughts about this first-time-ever event in Grenoble?

I think it is extraordinary. First of all, this is a long-term project. We, the organizers, know the importance of transforming the world. We also understand that we can only transform it if we live and work together. Thanks to the support of different associations, we were able to share our views, our real life experiences and to organize a forum to bring them out to society. By seeing the forum from the very start until today, I notice that all of the co-organizers have their own strengths and weaknesses. When we work together, we fulfill each other’s lack of strength to create a strong assembled group. We also all work with happiness, we are happy and we would love to make everybody around us happy. For me, that is exactly the way to transform the world. If you are happy with others, you can make everybody happy, this changes the world. It is very important to spread the spirit.

SYLVIE BUKHARI-DE PONTUAL There were just a few people. Then, we were looking around to see if there was anybody who would also be interested in this subject. And yes, there were people who were interested. We came to the city mayor, to the metropole and to the university to explain the project and ask for cooperation. Step by step, the project started. And today, here we are, in an international forum with one thousand people. I think, and I know that for tomorrow, there will be two, three, four thousand people and so on. If everybody does the same thing everywhere, I can say that there will be a new world in 50 or 60 years. We can all believe so.

How do you see CCFD-Terre Solidaire and the concept of Well-Being in the next 5 years?

What is your vision to help people understand the meaning of Well-Being in the future?

I firmly think that it will go far. When we look back to years ago, the project began from one person, a partner of CCFD-Terre Solidaire. When she first came here, she asked us, as a part of the big CCFD-Terre Solidaire group: "Why don’t you work on all fields of economic indicators?" We thought that this idea is strongly connected to social development and the fight against hunger, which is exactly what we are working at, so we agreed to work on this.

Nowadays, with all of the new technologies and mass media, information spreads very quickly so a change could happen, even sooner than we think. But instead of taking advantage of the social media which multiplies things really fast, I’m still convinced that we need time to really transform the world from the "ground", according to the way that the world functions.

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Things around the world are not changing fast. When you look at nature, you see the grass. The grass is growing day by day, not so quickly, and we are like the grass. As an element of nature, we need time to be transformed.

Do you have plans or are you working with somebody else to make this concept popular in France?

One of CCFD-Terre Solidaire’s specialty is to connect people.

We look forward to making people be together, live together, do together, work together. Here, in France, locally and nationally, we’ve seen the works of CCFD-Terre Solidaire for around 60 years now. We have created this type of connections between our partners in many countries and within our group in France. We think that the most important thing is to create links and connections not among people that are in the same situation that we are, but among people that we are far from, that are in different circumstances.

We, the organizers, know the importance of transforming the world. We also understand that we can only transform it if we live and work together.

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PATRICK VIVERET "How can we turn into a Well-Being society?"

BY OLIANA QUIDOZ

Patrick Viveret is a French philosopher, magistrate at the French Court of Audit and social activist engaged in the promotion of solidarity and new forms of political participation and power relations.

He is the co-founder of social initiatives such as the Dialogues en Humanité and the SOL Project.

Considering that the current model of development needs to be changed, on which philosophical bases could we refound it?

If I start from the great philosopher who considered those issues, who is Spinoza, he highlighted that the big deal is the alternative between, on the one hand Joy and on the other hand Fear, which is at the heart of what he used to call ’sad passions’. Therefore, cultivating the energy of joy is to me the essential element because in the end we have a system - that is the case today, of market capitalism but it is the case of other regimes as well, despotism, religious fundamentalism - when we look deeply at what drives them, it is whether direct fear, whether entertainment in the sense that Blaise Pascal explained, related to those same fears.

For instance, entertainment in relation to the fear of death, to sickness, to getting old, etc.

The whole capitalist system is deeply an entertainment system. And so the thing to do is to build, on the contrary, a type of movement in which the fundamental energy is joy.

It does not mean that this movement will renounce to anger, to indignation, to resistance, etc. But this resistance itself will be a creative resistance and not a desperate rebellion, because it is driven by the energy of joy.

PATRICK VIVERET modernity, so from the logics of emancipation, human rights and among those human rights for instance women rights, which is absolutely fundamental. Then, we also have movements coming more from the tradition side: underlining the importance of native people, the importance inside the "Buen-Vivir"; cosmovision of the relationships with Mother Earth, etc. The big deal is not to assume a pendulum movement and to say we should just give up on modernity and turn ourselves to the tradition side, which could indeed be a temptation... It is, on the contrary, to launch an open and demanding dialogue, allowing us to take what’s best in the so-called tradition as well as in modernity, and at the same time to determine dark aspects. For instance, within modernity’s bright sides are the freedom of consciousness, emancipation, individuation - which is a whole different thing than individualism - and it is all along human rights and the essential cursor of women rights. But simultaneously the dark side is the process of ’thingification’, turning nature into a thing, turning the living into a thing, and in the end turning human beings themselves into things through merchandising. Therefore, we need to keep the best,

Among all that has been discussed here at the Forum, what differences and what similarities do you see in the many ways to depict an alternative - more desirable - global understanding of the world?

First of all, something that seems very interesting to me, is that it is clear there is a meeting point between two great historical movements, now setting up a true dialogue of civilization. There are movements coming from

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So, the big deal is to manage, through this open and demanding dialogue, such an alliance of the best of freedom and emancipation with the best of binding, and to be in a creative resistance to the cocktail of the worst.

emancipation, freedom and so on, and at the same time to be critical of the worst. Same thing for traditional societies’ cultures. We could say the best in it is binding, binding with nature, with others - social bonds and binding spiritually - the question of meaning of life - those are the three points modernity no longer considers. Nonetheless there is also a blind spot within traditional societies, and it is dependence!

Because social bound may evolve towards social control, and meaning as well when becoming “identitary” and excluding, can lead to exclusion or war. Even the connection with nature may lead to a form of misanthropist ecology. So, the big deal is to manage, through this open and demanding dialogue, such an alliance of the best of freedom and emancipation with the best of binding, and to be in a creative resistance to the cocktail of the worst. The idea is well expressed by an Indian friend who is often present in the Dialogues in Humanity: "Cocacola and decision", meaning on one hand ok, I open my markets, but in exchange you stop bothering me with the rights of women. So, this is to my mind the big deal that is being played now, and it is an opportunity through this International Forum for Well-Being because, as a matter of fact, Well-Being forces us to consider the question of the criteria needed to spot what is bright and on the contrary what is dark within those great historical movements.

Civil societies all over the world try to rethink the democratic system as well. You say the main issue is to restore the ethical and political function of indicators - so we don’t need very sophisticated indicators, only opportunities to debate.

But how can we collectively guarantee the possibility to feel completely free to express all conflicts and questions?

First of all, it’s very important to inscribe at the heart of the democratic process itself the question of those debate spaces and to inscribe, therefore, the call for quality in the democratic process. Today, we have a form of democracy that is unsatisfactory because it is delegative and not participative, it is competitive, and it is quantitative. That is to say, basically, through the elections we consider that the person who won the competition has been given a blank check for x years. This process, first, is simplifying and binary... Moreover, when considering the case of whistleblower whose importance today is very obvious to guarantee the democratic process. When thinking in quantitative terms in most cases they only represent a very small minority. So, we need to introduce quality concerns: for instance, the issue of discernment, the issue of wisdom which is a very ancient one and that says a very important thing to reach discernment is the emergence of a superior quality of consciousness. This is what we call within our international network for Dialogues in Humanity, the qualitative mutation of democracy. And we need to reintroduce inside democratic structures spaces where the determining criteria is the quality of conscience and the quality of wisdom.

Not to bore all other criteria but to have in this respect as well an articulation between what’s best in actual democracy - universal suffrage - and the best democratic quality structured around the call for discernment.

Starting from here, obviously, deliberation and assessment become determining. Just like for one person the great ethical detour (how do one makes choice for his own life that are complex choices, because situations are scarcely simple) and the quality of discernment on the political scale (deliberation, assessment) also calls for participation.

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Nonetheless it is not a form of participation that drives one into collective passions or moody movements,because this could create regressive forms as well. It is participation but to serve a higher quality of conscience.

While trying to turn violence into conflict, what about the emotional part of misunderstandings? What can we do to make sure that participants will feel entirely free to express all conflicts?

One of the tools that we already experiment in citizen networks is called construction of disagreements.

That works from the hypothesis that what is toxic is not disagreeing but misunderstandings, in the strong sense of the word...including all collateral damages such as suspicion and trial of intent. The problem is that at some point part of a group feels it hasn’t been heard and so it has the feeling of being despised, or even humiliated. This is what produce, afterwards, dangerous metastasis. In a disagreementbuilding exercise, as we had spotted that most misunderstandings come from the emotional rather than the intellectual sphere, we start with moving debates techniques. We take keywords from a debate and we ask the group to position in a four-edges play: if one feels good with the word, he goes to one edge, if one feels bad he goes to the front, if in doubt he goes to the third edge, if neutral or indifferent to the last... And to begin with, the idea is simply to listen to each other about the reasons of their feelings. And so here we will see the group starting to move, in both literal and figurative meanings.

We will see that an important part of misunderstanding, because we listen to each other, are going to transform into potential disagreements - but that we are going to build - or very often into agreements, that we will record as such and it will allow groups that may be very divided to be ready to lead common actions about what they thought were disagreements but were really just misunderstandings. For instance, during a disagreement-building about marriage for all in France, we obtained that people who were opposed to it - and suspected of homophobia by the other group - declared ready to lead a common campaign against homophobia. So, it will not only allow the debate to move ahead on disagreements now truly identified, but it will also allow actors who were at the first sight identified as belonging to different sides, to act all together, to be a much stronger and to multiplicate the action’s weight, compared to an action led only by the convinced ones.

One of the tools that we already experiment in citizen networks is called construction of disagreements. That works from the hypothesis that what is toxic is not disagreeing but misunderstandings, in the strong sense of the word.

Concretely there are three periods of time: first the group gets out of misunderstandings, with an important work on emotional intelligence; then the interactive part: we get to agree about the terms of the debate. In the third part, the participative assembly, is very important because debaters are too deep in their contradictions to be able to make that exercise: we ask the participative assembly "what is there, within the position you do not share, that seems particularly receivable and important to consider?" Not to change one’s mind, not to seek for compromise! Just to say: here I reckon this is a strong point. For instance, in a debate on civil nuclear power, the pro-nuclear people had been led to say: we recognize the question of accidental risks and the question of nuclear waste are trues issues; unlike pro-nuclear from the 70s, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, we can no longer consider the question of accidental risks is a purely theoretical statistical risk. We cannot keep saying that concerning waste, we will eventually figure it out. So, it does not change one’s mind, because for other fundamental reasons they stayed in favor of civil nuclear power, but we recognize that.

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And when we turned to the anti-nuclear side, they ended up saying "even if a government was to declare the way out of nuclear power, we are aware that there will be a whole transition period that will probably last several decades, and during such period of time we know we will be in charge as well of those questions of risks and waste".This is just an example among others of what a qualitative mutation could enable. And it is true as well when seeking ways to turn violence into conflict, or ways to transform enemies into adversaries.

Don’t you think getting to really listen to each other takes a lot more time that what most people are currently willing to give, due to our conception of time-give?

It is very important to identify the question of addiction to speed as being one of the major diseases of our societies, and to understand that working on time is on the contrary one of the most powerful strategies of creative resistance and anticipatory emancipation. To stop mistaking the few real emergencies with precipitation. On the contrary, we start to consider true emergencies only when we are in a calm, coldblooded situation, not when we are on the run... Just like if we want to learn to drive on the ice, it is essential not to feel stressed when approaching danger! In the same fashion that workers movement had led a struggle against hellish rates inside factories, nowadays it has to be - as an object of creative resistance - a struggle against hellish cadences of tensed flows societies. This is why all "slowtype" movements appeared: it was first slow food as a reaction to fast food, and then slow cities in Italy... now about e-mails, and there is also a whole part of the movement that considers slow love, because relationships are also subjected to this logic of performance, excitation, etc.And this is indeed at the heart of Well-Being. The art of living at the right time is by excellence an art of the quality of presence to time.

And this comes as much from personal transformation as from social transformation. That is why it is important to help each other in this respect, for instance within a movement we could call "let’s cooperate to slow down" - because it is often quite difficult to slow down alone, but if we get collectively organized it is all simpler. Among the network l’Archipel des Jours Heureux (Happy Days citizens’ archipelago) we also initiated a process of time’s gift.

We give each other dates but we cancel right before, and as we haven’t had time to program something else, it is a gift of time. And the only thing we ask is that, if on that occasion you have discovered something, seen a movie, read a book, etc. and you feel particularly passionate about it and willing to share, you can make us that gift too.

One last question about the global structuration of global society: I read you are willing to open, for next World Social Forum, a "humanity security council". Can you tell us more about this idea and the forms it could assume?

It is indeed a project we discussed during the last World Social Forum in Salvador, Bahia, is part of a global project for world citizenship. The idea is to say let’s stop making that gift to capitalism but above all to big mafias, to the crime economy which is nowadays the true reality of world governance, let’s stop leaving them this gift of globalization.

And start moving towards what Edouard Glissant called mondialité [worldality].

For instance, for the coming Dialogues in Humanity, one of the main focuses is our country Earth, to say that our people is Humanity, and it does not prevent us from belonging to several people, but at the same time we are all members, all the people of Earth, where soil and nature as well need to be preserved. So, we offered to launch this great movement for the emergence of world citizenship,with approaches such as a Wisdom Council - to introduce wisdom within all those debates - and a Security Council of Humanity.

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Saying "is Humanity threatened?"

The answer is, unfortunately, yes.

"Does the Security Council of the United Nations take care of it?"

Unfortunately, no. So, let’s initiate with what Cornelius Castoriadis calls instituating procedures [...]: "What would happen if we were to create conditions for an actual Security Council, for instance, on topics like military nuclear power, by using the fact that there is a treaty for nuclear weapons’ abolition signed by 122 countries members of the United Nations?" So, this is an amazing opportunity, while nuclear countries are doing all what is in their power to prevent it.

Afterwards we are also willing to organize a great alliance between civil societies and moral and spiritual authorities on those topics.

And we want to make the most of the week of consciences that will be hosted at UNESCO during the month of March 2019, to launch the idea that this week should be a time for higher conscience worldwide...

During such an event, the question of the creation of Wisdom councils and Humanity Security Council will be brought into public debate. Right now, we have also started exchanging with spiritual authorities, we have an audition with Pope François with an extremely positive feedback. Of course, we are going to meet other moral authorities, but it is not negligible to see that ideas like this one are starting to move forward.

It is very important to identify the question of addiction to speed as being one of the major diseases of our societies.

Method Gundidza The need to restore the beautiful dance of life

BY DOMINIC BROWN AND SIZWE NYUKA

Method Gundidza is a Zimbabwean activist. He works with passion to protect and revive the traditional seeds, traditional farming practices, indigenous knowledge and sacred natural sites of his home country. With the Earthlore Association he advises and helps farming communities and women to achieve food sovereignty.

How do you conceive the relationship between people and nature?

The health of the natural ecosystems cannot be separated from the Well-Being of human beings because the conception is that human beings are very much part of the natural ecosystem, and that when the ecosystem in which they live is healthy, by implication the health of the people is guaranteed. So human beings are a part of the big system and by implication human beings are happier and more human when they are in a natural environment. For instance, in the background there are sounds of birds and often when we go to a natural environment, we feel that we have to activate more of our senses to hear, feel, see and smell. Every part of the being human is activated when we are in an environment that is more natural. Therefore, the connection between humans and the environment is paramount.

METHOD GUNDIDZA It also connects them to their crops and to their seeds and I think this is something that’s more connecting in terms of people to themselves and people to their seeds and their crops.

Can this be applied in globalized context within the current capitalistic framework?

When we look at concepts like Ilima, otherwise known as Jangano in Zimbabwe, in the global village it stands in contradiction to what we see in the world currently, where there’s the concentration of ownership and power in the hands of the few, and we see the power and control that comes with small wealthy individuals. That is a system that thrives on how people get separated and broken into units that cannot work together. So, if the different households are broken into small units, they become vulnerable and they lose their power to do things for themselves, not only as households but also working and counting on the support of the immediate community which is exactly the concept of Ilima, the concept of Jangano.

You use the concept Jangano. What does it mean and how does it relate to Well-Being?

As I said, we (Earthlore) are working both in South Africa and Zimbabwe and the concept of Jangano comes from the Zimbabwean context. In the South African context, the concept of Ilima (South African translation of Jangano) is when people come together and work together on different aspects of farming. For example, when people are ploughing, trashing, weeding, harvesting; every aspect of the farming cycle. People come together, they work, they sing and dance and they celebrate in different ways, and this makes the work lighter and interesting but it also helps to connect people more to themselves as a community.

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So this concept is exactly the opposite of capitalism, because Jagano is when the power lies within the local context and I think this is what this conference is about, it is about exploring ways in which we take away power from the few and transfer it to the majority and not to let things be decided by the few who are not part of the locality, in order to ensure that issues which matter to people is decided on collectively within the locality. Those local communities, one here and one there, they have the capacity to come together in local communities deciding, working collectively on the things that matter to the communities locally. That has potential to expand outwards into a nation state into a country, but without losing the essence which is that control and power needs to come from the bottom, more than it comes from the top.

What do you think of agroecology as a component of wellbeing? And what forms of ownership should it take?

Agroecology is producing food in harmony with nature and here we are talking about pest control, controlling pest naturally, that means if we want to get rid of an access of aphids in the garden, we do not need poison to kill it, we need a family of wasps. So we need a diverse and vibrant ecosystem in which there are wasps, aphids, bees and they interact in a beautiful dance of life with people in producing food agro-ecologically. The ownership of agroecology is a community because agroecology is the community of humans and non-humans interacting to produce food not just for humans but for everybody else, the bees, wasp, aphids, worm, buffalo, (animals) soil and the air. By nature, agroecology cannot be owned, it is a community. Wellbeing is when there is an interaction between different life elements and you can enjoy how the bird walks and the bird is also walking and seeing people and wondering "what are these people doing?" And that is the dance of life, when different elements mix and interact, marvel at each other in amazement or in happiness, whatever it is, that is how I define Well-Being. And agroecology is a good summary of what Well-Being is and spaces are created for everyone to participate in the dance of life.

And that is the dance of life, when different elements mix and interact, marvel at each other in amazement or in happiness, whatever it is, that is how I define Well-Being.

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How do you foresee the transition to a different world?

Who are the forces that can bring change?

One thing I will say is that power does not give away power. Those who hold power will never give it away and those who don’t have power are those who ask for it. They would demand it and will do whatever it takes to get it back. So ,what I mean is it would be naive of us to expect the world powers to give away the power to the localities.

A writer called Margaret Witley writes about how systems change, she writes about how when you light up a fire there and you light another fire there and as these fire grow, you will have a systematic change. So the work that we do with the communities that we work with feels very local and maybe specific to Zimbabwe and South Africa, but what I know is that there are similar fires elsewhere and I have friends who do similar work in Benin, for example, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and now we are here in this conference and we are hearing even more examples about similar work happening in Asia and perhaps some initiatives are beginning to happen in Europe. These are the fires that I am talking about that are lighting up in different places, and as the fires grow I foresee that this is how the world will change from purely capitalist perspective, where the few own and control, to a more social based economy where the means of production and the power is held by the community, and I see that the coalition and convergence of all these initiatives is what would one day define the systematic change for us.

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Dasho Karma Ura A measure of Bhutan's well-being

BY FABIO TRAPANI AND QUYET PHAM

Dasho Karma Ura worked as Ministry of Planning in his home country, Bhutan. He has been the Director of the Center for Bhutan Studies (CBS) since its foundation in 1999. The center is a social sciences research institute specialized in the Growth National Happiness (GNH), an indicator of wellbeing based on the analysis of the Bhutanese cultural, political and economic situation.

Which are the direct and indirect impacts of Growth National Happiness in the Bhutanese society?

Direct impact is on media, government policy, and the education system. In all these three, there is a lot of discussion about Gross National Happiness, but the real impact has to be felt in the improvement and experience of ordinary people, and that is the real indirect effect.

DASHO KARMA URA

Which is your personal opinion about this Forum, especially on the format, the workshops and the participative methodology?

It is worth it. Governments and societies spent billions on other methods, and this, comparatively speaking, is so miniscule, expending each other to obtain the understanding of the people, so it is worth it. We ask questions on various aspects of life including how you spend your twenty-four hours, like money, you have twenty-four hours to spend, how your day is in terms of quality and quantity, decided by how you spend one thousand four hundred and forty-four minutes you have in every twenty-four hours. I’m just giving an example, but you can get a detailed understanding about the way people feel about their lives, and this is the very basis of a government. Governments must have ideas about how you are feeling inside, how your mood is changing through the day, how your health condition is, what sorts of assets you have, what is your impact and interaction with the environment, in what sort of cultural activities you are engaged in your life. All these things are the very basis on which government decisions must be built, not just on the bases of factory activities and business behaviors.

The workshops are very rich and grand with the international participation. The method here is very much about discussions, it is the French style I think. The setting of a university is also preferable because all the facilities are there. But the main thing is that it is a good place for developing network, network of people sharing their ideas. These two things are the main things about any conference, so you can become known to each other and you pick up ideas.

How would you describe the progress and changes of the GNH indicator since you have started to work on it?

In the process of surveys, conducted to generate the data for the indicator, we understand people more and more, so one benefit for the research and the researchers is deepening the understanding of people’s lives. It is not possible to do it with any other method, to understand the population as a whole, except through this kind of intensive and diverse questionnaire of the GNH indicator.

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This is only one aspect of the life of the people. So, governments should have interests in funding this kind of survey and then being influenced positively by the result of the survey to make decisions about the public expenditure.

Since government collects tax from you and they spend it, they should consult this database and these findings, so that is why it is very useful.

How can the Bhutanese experience help at transforming the global society?

In terms of ecological conservation, Bhutan is ahead of others, and that comes from the care for the wildlife, the care for the forests, partly maybe because the population of Bhutan is very low but also it very much has conservationoriented ethics. That they can look at Bhutan as some sort of inspiration. The other thing about Bhutanese and Bhutan that can be some sort of place for picking up ideas is the lifestyle, a low-consumption lifestyle and a stress-free lifestyle. But maybe many other countries are advanced in other aspects.

In terms of ecological conservation, Bhutan is ahead of others, and that comes from the care for the wildlife, the care for the forests, partly maybe because the population of Bhutan is very low but also it very much has conservation-oriented ethics.

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Asier Ansorena Greater independence and sovereignty

BY NATALIA AQUINO

Asier Ansorena is a Brazilian economist and the coordinator of the Banco Palmas, a community bank which issues the social currency of Conjunto Palmeiras, i.e. a poor neighbourhood in Fortaleza.

He fights to create a global economic system which works according to the principles of solidarity and fairness.

What is a social currency?

It depends on the angle you look at. There are a lot of different models in countries such as Kenya, France and Japan, also known as local or complementary currencies.

The important thing about each currency is that one local community defines what are the principles, what is the use, how to use it and which should be the investment mechanism. Issues that are important to the sovereignty of each population. The local currency of Banco Palmas was created within the Palmeiras group, which is where Banco Palmas operates. It’s a currency that was created to contribute to the organization of local economies, and by organization I mean the dynamization of networks of local producers and consumers. When this network of local production and consumption is developed, people create a differentiated, solidarity and sustainable economy.

Currency is one of the important tools, not only in practical and operational terms, because it allows the local consumption, but also in pedagogical terms of sovereignty and symbolic, because it is a tool of local power.

ASIER ANSORENA monopoly of creating money and economic vision in the country. The first years were years of resistance and Banco Palmas faced two lawsuits. The last one in 2003, when facing the Central Bank’s indictment against the Brazilian state, we get a favourable sentence in which the judge, in other words, stated that Banco Palmas existed because the Central Bank was not complying with its mandate, which is to work for the financial inclusion of the Brazilian people.

Twenty years ago, close to 70% of Brazilians did not have access to the financial system. It was in the first place a fight of resistance, because Conjunto Palmeiras exists for 45 years. Then, Banco Palmas is another symbol of resistance of this movement. Later, during the Lula administration, the National Secretariat for Solidarity Economy was created, which allowed and facilitated the implementation of community banks in other regions of Brazil. Through this program it was possible to reach the current number of 113 community banks in the country.

First, a moment of resistance facing the financial system and then, support for the creation of community banks. This is our vision for the strengthening of civil society, with greater independence and sovereignty in economic issues.

During your speech at the closing table of the International Forum for Well-Being you said that, until a few years ago, the circulation of a currency parallel to the official currency was illegal. How and when has this changed and what is the role of Banco Palmas in this change?

Banco Palmas was born in 1998. During the first 4 or 5 years we were ignored by the economic system. When this group learnt about Banco Palmas, it certainly did not like the proposal, because this system wants to maintain this

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What is the measurable impact on local communities that social currencies have? How does this relate to the concept of Well-Being?

It has issues that are measurable and others that are not. I’ll explain that with a case: in 2010, Banco Palmas started an exclusive microcredit line for women beneficiaries of Brazil’s conditional cash transfer program.

There are other models like this in the world, but the Brazilian is the largest of them, where something around 13 million Brazilian women receive help to support their families. Nearly 30% of Brazilian families are beneficiaries of the program. Our line of productive microcredit was created to think about how these women could start different activities for income generation, with small enterprises or with small activities that they could carry out in the home to generate complementary income. That’s because it’s important to generate local wealth, which is one of the main functions of community banks such as Banco Palmas. After three months of running the program, we surveyed 100 women benefiting from the credit and one of the strongest things we’ve noticed was that in a neighbourhood like the Palmeiras complex on the outskirts of Fortaleza, a beach town, half of these women had never gone to the beach.

Think of the level of isolation of these women who were born or who have lived for over 20, 30, 40 years at that location, 50-year-old women who had never been to the beach.

We realized that more important than a line of microcredit, we had to take these women to the beach. That is well-being in the vein. Explain this to the World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank. I tried, several times. But they look and wonder, not being able to get if they understood it correctly. They call you communist, anarchist, anti-system, because you say that taking those women to the beach is more important than microcredit. Obviously, microcredit is important, but in this context of isolation, in the handcuffs on the

heads of those women who are the main local development institution of any community, who are the head of these families, caring for the next generation, thinking about the economy of the house, situations in which the husband is often not present or is not a positive reference, we realized that we needed a much more holistic look.

We created the ELAS project from this data that we’ve collected, a project of socio-productive inclusion of women from Bolsa-Família which, in addition to microcredit, it built all the skills, provided time for leisure, for women to get to know the city, to connect in a space only for them.

Our line of productive microcredit was created to think about how these women could start different activities for income generation.

Working the psychological issue, as many speakers spoke during the Forum for Well-Being, to look inside before looking outside, to have this internal peace to face this great challenge of removing families from the situation of inequality or economic poverty, which is very strong. So, this is our contribution to Well-Being. A conventional bank would never do that. But a community bank that thinks of microcredit and uses it for investments in production and generation of local wealth, uses the social currency, sees that it can intervene in this condition by the proximity to the territory, realizing that the challenge and dimensions of poverty are very broad.

A community bank has this capability, a conventional bank will never do this.

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Firstly, because they will believe that they’re very risky operations, therefore, they are not worth it, and they think that some paternalistic or assistance policy is the unique way. A community bank, where the community itself works on it, completely changes a project that had started with microcredit and turned out to be something much bigger.

We have an example with the digital currency in the city of Maricá, in the state of Rio de Janeiro: we have issued a notice of the city hall to distribute a benefit that the city of Maricá offers with the royalties of petroleum, which is the bolsa-mambuca. Basically, a local conditional cash transfer, but distributed through our digital community bank platform, e-dinheiro (e-money). It turns into local currency managed by the local community bank that owns the platform and then this money is consumed only in that territory. We already have 5 months of experience there, with over 5 thousand users registered in the platform, accessing their benefit, despite locals consuming in the area.

As a result, we have generated more than R $ 1,500,000.00 of local purchases using our digital community bank platform, and the difference of making this purchase with our platform or with a Visa or MasterCard is that these companies will charge, on average, 6% merchant fee to receive purchases with these cards. With Banco Palmas’s digital community bank model, merchants pay 2% instead of 6% and those 2% are reinvested in that territory. These R$ 1,500,000.00 generated 30 thousand reais to invest in the region.

What did the community bank in Maricá do? Talked to the community to decide what to do with the 30 thousand reais generated by local consumption. Money belongs to the community, they themselves produced and generated that income via local consumption and are a popular local sovereignty. They decided to invest in productive microcredit without interest.

A big difference from the traditional market that can charge up to 50%, 60% of annual interest of entrepreneurs for productive microcredit. These are some of the examples that have the greatest impact. Not to mention that if these same purchases had been made in the traditional system with rates at 6%, this would represent 90 thousand reais, leaving the territory never to return. The profit that Visa or Mastercard obtains from these operations goes to large financial centers of the institution’s headquarters in São Paulo or the United States and never returns to the territory that produced that wealth. That’s the differential of the social currency and the community bank, that the wealth that you generate within the territory, most of it circulates and is distributed in the region. Issues such as well-being help to better work this multi-dimension of a situation of inequality or poverty.

Issues such as Well-Being help to better work this multidimension of a situation of inequality or poverty.

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Pablo Solon I

Decolonization towards a Well-Being vision

BY FABIO TRAPANI, DOMINIC BROWN AND SIZWE NYUKA

Pablo Solón was the Bolivian Ambassador to the United Nations between 2009 and 2011. He is a social and environmental activist. He has been a promoter of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoptions of several resolutions, including the recognition of the Human Right to Water and the declaration of International Mother Earth Day. Additionally, Solón has been responsible for the Bolivian UN climate negotiations as the Executive Director of the Focus on the Global South in Bangkok (2012-2015).

How do you conceive the relationship between human beings and nature and the relationship among human beings considering the conception of "Buen-Vivir"?

The concept of nature was created to separate nature from human beings, we humans are part of nature and when we start speaking about nature, we start to distinguish ourselves as different from nature. Therefore, we have to reconnect ourselves with nature because we are a part of nature, and everything changes if you assume these perspectives because you stop having an anthropocentric perspective. For "Buen-Vivir" that is precisely the case, in reality you will not find a concept of nature as separated from human life. So, when we speak about mother earth we are not referring only to nature, instead we refer to everything.

PABLO SOLÓN

own head and mind; you have to analyze and see with your own eyes because only if you have that ability you will be able to find new ways to balance the different elements of the whole.

According to your experience, which are the risks for the integration of Buen-Vivir within the state’s politics?

During the conference, you said that we have to accept that we are colonized in the way we think. Can you elaborate more on this?

In my opinion, Well-Being is mostly a cosmo-vision that come from the grassroots, it cannot be built by a top-down approach, it has to emerge from the local communities, socials movements. The role of the state should be to facilitate that process not to try to control it, nor use it or direct it. The role of the state is to accept that the state is not everything and that more important than the state is the self-organized society.

We have to decolonize, which means we to get rid of the process of colonization that we are all in. The colonization process is not only a problem of having some superpower that is colonizing us, this process in our time, is based on many values and beliefs that we repeat without having thought about it and analyzed deeply. So to decolonize means you have to begin to think with your

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The role of the state is to accept that the state is not everything and that more important than the state is the self-organized society.

So, I am guessing that it has to be dialectical because we cannot simply expect the state to give up power?

No. It’ll be the pressure, the mobilization and initiatives of grassroots movements that will take spaces and power from the state, because in reality the more power society has the less power the state has. Of course, the state will try to defend itself and will react, whether the state is under the control of rightwing forces, or left-wing forces, that is why we have to a different approach to the issue of the state.

During your intervention, you said that development is the antitheses to Well-Being. Is it possible to have development without growth? In another world, can development be a component of Well-Being?

The concept of development originally comes from the understanding of progress, to advance or to move forward, but in the vision of "Buen-Vivir" we do not always move forward, nothing moves forward always. To think of development as always advancing is an illusion for this vision. Therefore, it’s not in the development framework, it’s a very different way of seeing life. For "Buen-Vivir" the most important thing is a dynamic equilibrium, not development. In dynamic equilibrium some parts will have to grow whilst other parts will have to degrowth, there will be some kind of development in some areas and underdevelopment in other areas in order to achieve a balance in the whole.

Can Well-Being be realized in the current globalized society?

Indigenous communities have practiced the "Buen-Vivir" for centuries even before capitalism but if the question is "can it flourish and expand within the current capitalist system?", no it cannot, it’s not possible. It will come into contradiction with the capitalist system because the capitalist system needs growth, if there is no economic growth capital cannot expand, it cannot have profit, therefore it will not exist. So, who wants endless economic growth? It’s capital. We have Well-Being on the other hand saying the opposite, so at some point between "Buen-Vivir" and capitalism you will have a clash. So, can this way of life be realized in globalized world that is dominated by capitalism everywhere? No. You can have it at some local communities, and local experiences, but even at a national level it is very complicated because all nations are part of this globalized world.

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In your talk you were positive about the concept of Well-Being, in the same you mention weaknesses and limitations. Could you please explain on this?

"Buen-Vivir" is not the answer to everything, it is a vision that has some strengths and weaknesses, one of the weaknesses is that it does not know how to deal with patriarchy and we cannot imagine a new kind of society if we do not dismantle patriarchy. Furthermore, it is a vision that has not really theorized about the issue of the state, what I am saying is coming from my experience in the Bolivian government with Evo Morales. We did not have that perspective before. So the "BuenVivir" has these weaknesses and therefore needs to be complimented by other visions like the commons, ecofeminism, degrowth and deglobalization and only by complimenting it with these other visions are we able to develop real systemic alternatives to our situation.

our turn to speak

During the International Forum for Well-Being we, as the Youth Press Agency, tried to interact with the participants in a new and creative way. We asked them to give their personal contribution in a unusual activity: a photo-performance. We gave them pens and a speech bubble on which we invited them to write their answers to two questions: If I could, what would I change?

What is Well-Being for me?

Here you can see some of their very personal and challenging answers.

After participants wrote, we took pictures and printed them. We exposed the shoots around the conference venue and then, at the end of the event, we distributed the pictures as a small gift and as a reminder of the international meeting.

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We have the power to act for

A MORE JUST

WORLD

Let's be strong

CHANGE!

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