Radical Well-Being Approaches for the Global South

Across the world, overwhelming evidence of the ecological unsustainability and social injustice of the current path of development has led to a range of responses. A substantial part of governmental, corporate and civil society effort has been towards ‘greening’ the economy, elaborating and trying to adopt principles of ‘sustainable development’, ‘green economy’, or other such concepts and frameworks. The most ambitious of these has been the 2015 agreement amongst countries to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With evidence of the impacts of the climate crisis mounting, these responses have been added to more recent ones like ‘net-zero’, carbon trading, nature-based solutions, and technical fixes such as geoengineering. It is understandable that there is a deep, widespread of anxiety and pessimism in society, including in today’s youth. With daily news of war and conflict, ecological and climate catastrophe, stark inequalities, health crises related to both poverty and affluence, the authoritarianism of governments, and the stranglehold of banks and mega-corporations in all aspects of our lives, it is difficult to be hopeful of humanity’s future. But there are powerful counter-trends, which we need to understand, take inspiration from, and help nurture and sustain. These include mass resistance to dominant structures and their manifestations, as also grounded radical alternatives that demonstrate the possibilities of a more just and sustainable world. What follows is an attempt to look at this in two ways, first a somewhat conventional way of setting planning goals for a country like India, and then, a more radical way of restructuring the local-to-global system itself.