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Event Report: May 2010
Happiness the Only Meaningful Measure of Development
Download a PDF file of the complete report.
Over the course of two days, Trace Foundation, through Local Knowlegde & Sustainable Development in the Himalayas, initiated a conversation on models for economic development that preserve the environment and local cultures. On Friday and Saturday, May 14th and 15th, a mixed group of academics, development professionals and members of the local community gathered for an intimate discussion on development models for the rural communities of the Himalayas.
On the second day, during a full-day workshop and panel discussion moderated by Tsering Shakya, an influential historian of modern Tibet, opinions diverged widely as panelists sought to define the key terms of the day’s discussion, “sustainability” and “development.” For the latter, the panelists were able to agree that greater happiness must be the goal of development.
In the past thirty years more than 400 million have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the People’s Republic of China according to the World Bank. From a high of nearly 60% of the population, today less than 10% of the population falls below the World Bank’s $1.25 a day poverty line. Of those, the vast majority live in China’s underdeveloped western regions, including Tibetan areas in Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai, and the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Across the border in India and Nepal, remote Himalayan communities face many of the same challenges as those on the Tibetan plateau. For these communities, both in the PRC and India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bhutan the cost of bringing Tibetan items to market is prohibitive. “The wool of Tibetan nomads is more expensive [in local markets] than that of Australian herders” Tsering Shakya explained “and even beer in Lhasa is made with barley grown in Canada rather than from the fields of The Yarlung Valley.” With no outlet for their products, rural Tibetans struggle to escape poverty.
Today, there is near universal agreement that development is imperative and that this development must be sustainable; what is meant by the two terms, however, is frequently unclear. Across the Himalayas governments, NGOs, and influential individuals are all advocating for a wide-array of development strategies. Saturday’s panelists represented a broad spectrum of opinions.
Jigme Gyaltsen, the first speaker of the day’s event, focused his discussion on his vision of social entrepreneurship as a means of eradicating poverty on the Tibetan Plateau. A senior monk at Ragya Monastery in Golok Prefecture, Jigme Gyaltsen has worked as an educator for nearly twenty years. “In the beginning,” he said, “I focused exclusively on education. Eventually I realized that education alone could not achieve my goal. Some form of economic development was necessary, and it would support my effort to improve local education.”
The drive to permanently settle the nomads has caused dramatic change in the lives of the Tibetan pastoralists with whom Jigme Gyaltsen works. Through unique initiatives and vocational education, Jigme Gyaltsen seeks to allow Golok’s nomads to continue their traditional way of life while achieving much needed economic growth and conserving the natural environment.
His first major effort towards this goal was The Snowland Yak Cheese Factory, the fruit of a long-term collaboration with Trace Foundation. At the factory milk from nomadic herders is crafted into a European style cheese for sale across China and in the US. In 2009 he organized the Tibetan Nomadic Entrepreneur Association to further his vision. “There are two major groups of people working on these issues [in Tibetan areas],” Jigme Gyaltsen said, “those who attempt to protect local culture or the environment and ignore economic development, and those who think only of economic development. The primary mission of the association we’ve created is to combine all three: traditional culture, with concern for the environment, and economic advancement.”
Organizing local nomads and collecting initial investments from them, the association has allowed the nomadic herders of Golok access to both Chinese and international markets. Making use of local resources and local manufacture, the nomads are given greater incentive to ensure protection of the environment as it is both their home and their economic lifeline.
On the other side of the Tibetan Plateau, in Ladakh, Helena Norberg-Hodge is promoting a different model for development. As the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, she has worked over the last thirty years to examine the root causes of social and environmental crises. The Swedish national first visted the region in 1975. While living in the area, she was struck by what she perceived as a radical drop in the well-being and self-confidence of the Ladakhi people as they came increasingly under the influence of global consumer culture.
The sudden influx of mass-media and foreign culture came on the heels of the general opening up of Ladakh to foreign products and trade in the 1970s. Rather than improving the lives of local residents however, she argues that this process has created homelessness, social strife, and environmental degradation, as well as a crippling loss of self-confidence amongst the local populace, both in themselves and in their culture. Arguing against the strict use of GDP as a measure of human development, Norberg-Hodge asserted that today we need an economics that has an understanding of the interdependence of all living things.
While Jigme Gyaltsen helps Golok’s nomadic community cope with the increasing encroachment of the global economy, Helena Norberg-Hodge advocates for drastic changes in the system itself, urging for increasingly localized production, especially of food, clothing and shelter. By reducing the distance between production and consumption, she asserted, we can help rebuild both biodiversity and the diversity of the world’s cultures. Localization, she contends, is particularly important in the areas of food and energy production, with decentralized renewable energy technologies being a centerpiece of her vision of development in the region. While advocating limitations
on the flow of consumables, Norberg-Hodge asserted the importance of continued flows of information. “There is a need for deeper dialogue between Tibetans and the West,” she asserted. There ought to be “an opportunity for Tibetans to see the reality of life in the west in order to better understand the limitations of western style development.”
While Norberg-Hodge presented the risks inherent in the dominant, western models for development, Sangay Gya stressed the fundamental role of sustainable development in Tibetan culture. An educator and the deputy director of Qinghai Snowland Great Rivers Environmental Protection Association, Sangay Gya asserted, “in Tibetan culture we have various ideas and methodologies with regard to the idea of sustainable development.” “Personally,” he continued, “I find the definition of happiness, and of sustainable development within the teachings of Tsongkhapa [the eminent 15th century Buddhist master and founder of the Gelukpa sect]…what Tsongkhapa taught is what happiness is, how you can attain it, and how you can enhance it.”
In his focus on happiness as the key metric of sustainable development Sangay Gya echoed the concerns of the other panelists. He asserted: “when we talk about happiness we have to see the interdependent nature of the happiness of ourselves and others, and the happiness of the present and the future, the happiness brought about by the well-being of our physical environment and those who inhabit it.”
With many questions left to explore and models to consider, including tourism, microcredit, and community self-determination, Local Knowledge & Sustainable Development in the Himalayas represents only the beginning of a conversation to be continued in our upcoming lecture series, Visions of Development. For this weekend’s event, however, Jigme Gyaltsen best captured the panelist’s definition of sustainable development: “buildings may be constructed, and factories may be producing on a tremendous scale, but if there is no benefit for local people it cannot be considered development.”
Download a PDF file of the complete report.
