My new paper for Common Weal, Wellwashing: why a superficial approach to wellbeing economics will failHowever, their approach to addressing poverty and the climate crisis is essentially the same as that taken by First Minister Humza Yousaf in his 2023 Programme for Government.
Wellwishing is the expectation that hitherto unaccomplished social or environmental outcomes, such as closing the poverty gap or halting climate breakdown, can be achieved without the structural and institutional reforms fundamental to the wellbeing economy vision. For example, the solutions set out to address poverty in Forbes’s paper: tax changes, subsidies and welfare payments, represent what Donella Meadows argues – in her seminal work Leverage Points – are the least powerful ways of enacting deep change. Instead, they are minor, temporary alterations that feed the broken system.
This paper is an attempt to build common understanding from which to build meaningful interventions to the emergencies faced. It proposes we focus on understanding the work of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance . It is not vague or ill-defined.: “A wellbeing economy delivers social justice on a healthy planet. It prioritises meeting our needs before our wants.
A WBE is a crisis-driven reorientation of the economy, led by mindsets open to understanding the unsustainable and damaging nature of fixating on the measurement of GDP growth. Goals like GDP matter because all the infrastructure, institutions, flows of information, materials and processes within a system act to achieve them. By changing the goal, all these elements move towards achieving something new.
Iain Black is professor of sustainable consumption at the University of Strathclyde Business School and a Common Weal Board memberWe know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.