The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
The GHN is effective and works to secure happiness
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- Development necessitates satisfaction of human needs before growth
The GHN is effective and works to secure happinessPillay ’18 [Devan; 2018; Former trade unionist, is Associate Professor and Former Head in Sociology, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, Co-editor of Labour and the Challenges of Globalization; Climate Crisis, The: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, “CHALLENGING THE GROWTH PARADIGM: MARX, BUDDHA AND THE PURSUIT OF ‘HAPPINESS’,” Ch. 7, pg. 159-160] SPark Alternative society-centred pathways have been attempted in the Indian state of Kerala, and in countries like Bolivia17 as well as the small mountain country of Bhutan. While not conventionally associated with the radical alternatives, Bhutan deserves closer examination as it tries to navigate out of its feudal past into a multiparty democracy and the challenge of pursuing gross national happiness (GNH) based on balanced development. Its GNH Index offers a deep and extensive methodology to measure development in all its dimensions, and all development plans must first be subject to a GNH audit.18 Fioramonti (2017) prefers the term ‘wellbeing economy’, which avoids an association with pop ‘happiness’ surveys, and focuses on practical alternatives to GDP growth economics based on local economies and meaningful artisanal work. By breaking down the economies of scale, his ‘artisanal revolution’ means ‘more mechanics, electricians, plumbers, architects, gardeners, teachers, nurses, therapists, doctors and caregivers, and fewer bankers, lawyers, CEOs and chartered accountants’ (Fioramonti 2017: 220) who service big business and big government. Development necessitates satisfaction of human needs before growthPadilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “The Origins of Human and Sustainable Development as UN Paradigms,” Ch. 4.4, p. 175-179] SPark It has been more than four decades since the United Nations promoted research that focused on responding to the means to satisfy basic human needs without transgressing the outer limits of the biosphere, that is, within the framework of the resolutions of the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972) that were published in the book Another Development: Approaches and Strategies (Nerfin 1977). In this collective work, papers on different topics written by authors like Johan Galtung, Marc Nerfin, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Bolívar Lamounier, Cinthia de Alcántara, Paul Singer, and Sergio Bitar presented an innovative vision of development which is not based on growth and capitalist modernization. Since then, the narrow concept that considered development to be synonymous with economic growth and industrialization7 is not the generally accepted paradigm in academia. A good number of Latin American scholars - including the Norwegian Johan Galtung, who was living in Chile at the time - were among the pioneers of the new paradigm of sustainable development. The kind of “other development” which these Latin American pioneers were talking about is one that must be orientated towards satisfying a more comprehensive conception of human needs, i.e. one which encompasses material, economic, social, and cultural and spiritual needs, as can be seen in Neef and Elizalde’s matrix of needs and satisfactions reproduced in Table 4.1. This comprehensive understanding of development is a matter of human development and not simply economic development measured by GDP. It began to be used by the United Nations in the 1990s with the annual publication of human development reports that introduced social categories such as health, education and political freedom as parameters for assessing development in this broad sense. This concept of human development is based on the ideas in the seminal text Development on a Human Scale: An Option for the Future, by Neef et al. (1989), which gave continuity to the paradigmatic line of research initiated in the previous decade by academics such as Stavenhagen (1981, 1990, 2013), Cardoso (1969, 2006), Singer (1980, 2002), Galtung (2003a, 2003b, 2004), and Nerfin (1978), who were among the authors of the innovative book Towards Another Development: Approaches and Strategies (1978). Hence, Development of Human Scale Development was the result of a collective effort that crystallized in a theoretical systematization of theses that in 1978 outlined only its more general features. It was designed to give precision and coherence to such ideas, and to establish the framework for a new approach to the theory of development that was not reduced to a “mere cosmetic arrangement of a paradigm in crisis”, as the authors of the text say, but instead was a genuine effort to transform and substantially modify existing thinking (Neef et al. 1989: 12-13).8 Indeed, in a recent book on sustainable development, the German researcher Göpel reproduces the same matrix in her criticism of mainstream economics. To the extent that it is based on economic growth and the individual search for profit, mainstream economics can be seen as responsible for the multiple obstacles and difficulties that sustainable development has suffered in all parts of the world. For Göpel, a change of mentality and the adoption of a new holistic paradigm that effectively seeks the full satisfaction of human needs in all their complexity are indispensable tools. Not only the most elementary and primary needs such as subsistence, protection and shelter, but also affection, creativity, freedom, political participation, leisure, and understanding, must be properly articulated within sustainable development processes (Göpel 2016: 64-65) Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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