Bhutan & Gross National Happiness

This half-hour film began as a 2009 interview with the Honourable Jigme Yoser Thinley, the first elected Prime Minister of Bhutan, whose government aimed to entrench and extend Bhutan’s long-standing goal of expanding Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product. You can see that interview with the Prime Minister here. To put the interview in context, we prepared this original half-hour documentary film, using footage of Bhutan shot by Silver Donald Cameron and by Nova Scotia film-maker Kent Martin. For the film, we re-interviewed Dr. Ronald Colman, who had earlier spoken to us about his work on a Genuine Progress Index for Nova Scotia, Canada. That first interview with Dr. Colman is here. The work in Nova Scotia had led to Dr. Colman’s appointment as an adviser to the Royal Government of Bhutan on how to implement and measure Gross National Happiness – and his comments on GNH were so fascinating that we decided to post that entire interview too. You can find it here.

This episode of the Green Interview features Ronald Colman, the founder and Executive Director of Genuine Progress Index Atlantic, a non-profit research group that has constructed an index of wellbeing and sustainable development using Canada’s province of Nova Scotia as its test-bed. GPI Atlantic is one of the world’s most comprehensive attempts to supply a GPI to a government to guide its legislative decisions, using a wide range of social, economic, and environmental indicators that have been ignored by mainstream economists. Colman’s Nova Scotia work lead to an engagement with the Royal Government of Bhutan to help that country implement and assess its policy of maximizing Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product. In this second Green Interview with Colman, he focuses on these developments in Bhutan and in particular on the 2009 workshop in Bhutan on “Educating for Gross National Happiness,” which he helped organize for the Royal Government. The conference featured the participation of educational visionaries from around the globe.