No ads, more forests: Emerging lessons from Bhutan, the ‘land of happiness’

‘Field Notes’ is a fortnightly column in which Regen Melbourne’s Lead Convenors provide on-the-ground updates and insights from their work and focus areas.

Did you know that there are no billboards in Bhutan and nearly every retail business is a small, local enterprise? Recently returned from a trip to the country famous for pioneering Gross National Happiness, Director of Research Alison Whitten shares lessons and insights from the road.

Landing at the international airport in Bhutan is not for the faint-of-heart. The plane weaves between the peaks of the Himalayas as it descends towards the Paro Valley, as if feeling its way through a narrow ravine.

At first, you can only catch glimpses of the mountains through the mist, but then the pine-covered slopes appear, startlingly close, nearly scraping the tips of the plane’s wings. And soon after that, large, white houses that seem frozen in time begin to speckle the mountains, near enough to the aeroplane’s windows that you can almost see into their front rooms.

A mere 2.5 seconds before landing the pilot aligns to the runway (as we learned afterwards, thankfully), landing smoothly to welcome passengers to the most ornate airport you’ve ever seen. It’s surreal, but it’s a fitting way to arrive in this beautiful and remote mountainous kingdom that was largely sheltered from the rest of the world until the 1970s.

I visited Bhutan in April as part of the Small Giants Impact Safari exploring Gross National Happiness (GNH). The GNH framework is of particular and obvious interest to me based on my oversight of Regen Melbourne’s City Portrait in Greater Melbourne. I entered into the trip with a big appetite to learn more about what has enabled an entire country to orient its policymaking around wellbeing, and what this could teach us back in Australia.

The trip was much more than an intellectual exploration, however. Impact Safaris are described as “a cross between a study tour and leadership experience” where “you can expect to be engaged through your head, heart and hands.” This is a tall order for a 10-day experience, but it was all true – and is actually insufficient to capture what I felt and took away from my short stay in Bhutan.

I think everyone on the trip left feeling a bit like extended family, owed in large part to the gracious hospitality of the GNH Centre and the many delicious meals we shared. But it was the framing of the trip itself, the opportunity to experience GNH as a spiritually and culturally grounded practice, that allowed the tangible and intangible elements to come together in a rich and integrated way.

Of course I’m not the first person to visit Bhutan and write about its beauty or the merits of its cultural values. I also know that I still have much to learn about the complexity and challenges of Bhutan’s development journey. However, the positioning of my work in Melbourne, very much aligned with the vision of GNH, gave me a purposeful vantage point from which to understand GNH at multiple levels. I am still processing what has emerged from the trip for me, but the reflections I’m sharing here feel like a good place to start.

Bhutan is sometimes called the “happiest country on Earth,” largely in reference to its policy and measurement system prioritising happiness as a national goal. This is not a superficial understanding of happiness: at a policy level, it is underpinned by a framework that describes individual and collective wellbeing. This includes nine domains with a total of 33 indicators:

We explored the framework and its origins with the GNH Centre team, and learned about the periodic survey conducted to assess the nation’s happiness from the Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies. Suffice it to say that there is much we can draw from Bhutan’s experience implementing GNH as a policy framework since the 1970s.

Beyond the intellectual understanding, GNH is deeply felt and embodied culturally and spiritually, as it is fundamentally entwined with the country’s Buddhist tradition. As a result, I found that the core tenets of GNH show up everywhere. Some of these places are squarely within individuals. Some, though, are intentionally visible.

Here’s some of what I observed, broken down by the four pillars of GNH:

Good Governance

We visited the Bhutanese Parliament and covered 400 years of political history in 20 minutes. GNH is embedded in the constitution, meaning that the government MUST work towards this policy framework – I’m still processing that. Beyond this, what struck me was that Bhutan, as the youngest democracy in the world, had the advantage of learning from other systems to inform its own. In doing so, it has established an intricate set of checks and balances that support constructive debate and decision-making.

For example, politicians (and also the monarch!) must step down by the age of 65; local government is apolitical and defined not as the smallest, but as the ‘closest to the people’; and religion is strictly above politics (monks do not vote). Even spatial design plays a role: seats in Parliament are arranged alphabetically by district instead of by party. So simple…and yet, could you imagine any of that in Australia? Or my home country, the US? These and other features don’t mean the system is perfect, and politicking and corruption came up in discussion and the news while we were in the country. They do, however, reinforce the holistic purpose and service orientation of government that is taken seriously at every level.

Sustainable Socio-economic Development

Bhutan is a middle-income country, and economic development is still a priority alongside GNH. The balancing of these two sets of objectives is obvious, though. First, there are NO BILLBOARDS in Bhutan. None. That alone calmed my nervous system as soon as I arrived, I’m sure of it. Since my return, I’ve been especially attuned to the onslaught of marketing influence everywhere we turn, not least a death-by-advertisement feeling every time I pass through Southern Cross Station.

While I noticed a few familiar multinational brands in shops, nearly all businesses are small, local enterprises. This ties back to Bhutan’s focus on ‘sufficiency’ as the aspiration for growth and happiness, a far cry from our system, which begs us to buy stuff we never knew we needed. A GNH-infused economy means that tourism is tightly managed, local employment is prioritised and, since COVID, teachers and healthcare workers are now the highest-paid civil servants.

It also means that GNH shows up VERY visibly in education, with the vision literally painted on the exterior of schools. Of course, some of the same challenges that we face – youth unemployment, gender differences in paid work - persist in Bhutan, and do not have simple fixes. The commitment to GNH creates a mandate and platform for addressing these directly, though.

Preservation and Promotion of Culture

The preservation of Bhutanese culture is endlessly visible. Nowhere was this more obvious than in architecture, which carries a distinct regional style attuned to climate, social and spiritual considerations. In Thimpu, the capital, we passed through growth areas where traditional design and construction methods continue to be applied, even as new construction abounds. Every building –from Parliament to petrol stations – is beautifully painted. As I learned, this painting carries religious symbolism and the care associated with the craft itself is a reflection of the mindfulness associated with Buddhist practice.

Environmental Conservation

Bhutan is the first and only carbon net-negative country. Aligned with this, the constitution specifies that at least 60 percent of the country must permanently remain under forest cover, which is supported by a large-scale tree planting program that counters the impacts of periodic forest fires. Everywhere we went, we saw clean water and ate local, organically-grown food. And yet, Bhutan is not immune to the effects of climate change, as we heard that weather patterns are noticeably changing.

Just as my time in Bhutan came and went all too quickly, I know that these reflections and observations only start to scratch the surface. I’ll continue to explore in writing what has emerged from the trip, but in the meantime, reach out to me at alison@regen.melbourne if anything piques your interest or you’d like to add to my understanding of this special place, from which I’ve learned much already.

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