Educating for Gross National Happiness

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.