How can Greater Melbourne respect the wellbeing of all people? This was the prompt for a series of workshops we held in August to explore the role Melbourne plays – and more importantly, can play – in the global social, political and economic context. Alison Whitten, Regen Melbourne’s Systems Lab Director and facilitator of the workshops, reflects on what came out of them, and what comes next.

Just as ‘no man is an island’, no place is an island, even if it might look like one on a map. Australia is no exception, and the same goes for Melbourne within that. 

While Regen Melbourne exists to serve Greater Melbourne, we are well aware that the boundary around the city is not hard and fast. (Well, except for that time during COVID-19 lockdowns when it was, but even then it wasn’t really. Pretty much everything we needed, and a lot of things we didn’t, made it into the city from elsewhere in the world…) With this in mind, we are often zooming in and out to better understand Melbourne’s relationship with the rest of Victoria, Australia and the world. 

As part of the Greater Melbourne City Portrait released last year, we started to unpack our ‘Global-Ecological’ relationships by measuring our city’s impacts on global environmental health. The outside of the Melbourne Doughnut quantified how much pressure Melbourne is putting on earth’s ecosystems across dimensions like Biodiversity Loss and Land Conversion. Not surprisingly, the answer was a lot.

When it came to human wellbeing, though, the City Portrait started by focusing on the people of Greater Melbourne. How are we faring? What do we need to live good lives? This ‘Local-Social’ view formed the inside of the Melbourne Doughnut.

Now, we are ready to complete a ‘full’ City Portrait according to the Doughnut Economics Action Lab methodology, adding two new lenses. We have started with the ‘Global-Social’ lens, which helps us to explore the question, How can Greater Melbourne respect the wellbeing of all people? 

Unlike the existing lenses of the City Portrait, the approach to the Global-Social is much less clear. Not only did we need to generate content for this new lens, but we also needed to work out a methodology for doing so. True to Regen Melbourne form, we kicked off with a workshop series in August covering different Global-Social dimensions across eight sessions, including:

1. Education & Knowledge

2. Supply Chains

3. Colonial Histories

4. Policy & Legal Regimes

5. Military Conflicts

6. Waste Management

7. Financial Flows & Conditions

8. Cultural Connections

Diving into this range of humbling topics can help us to place Melbourne in a broader social, political and economic context. We were joined on Zoom by a diversity of ‘friends of the City Portrait’ – some new, some old, some who came along to one session and some who contributed to the full series. We are grateful to everyone who participated for the chance to learn, reflect and explore together.

As we wrap up the series, we now have a mega Miro board to start making sense of, looking for patterns across sessions. Some reflections have already emerged from the experience which will continue to guide our thinking.

First, these are heavy topics, and we all hold different relationships to them that are tied to our own global connections and identities. We realised quickly that the virtual workshop room needed to be held gently and openly and allow space for reflection. For example, talking about Colonial Histories is challenging when those histories are still alive and significantly impacting the wellbeing of people in Melbourne, not just far from the city. Likewise, the prevalence of Military Conflicts elsewhere in the world is weighing on us, too.

Related to this, it became evident that the workshops offered a space for all of us to listen and learn from each other, not just share what we know. Many participants noted that they were joining the sessions simply for that reason – to listen and learn. Regardless of the size of the group, this mindset created a sense of generosity and care in each session. It also reminded us that collective measurement – the act of shaping the content together – carries value beyond what it may produce on paper.   

We still are uncertain about what we will produce on paper in the end, because these topics are complex. Tasks like untangling the global financial system and describing what it might look like for Melbourne’s waste addiction to turn around were acknowledged as difficult and daunting. Going a step further to unpick Melbourne’s contributions to these systems is likewise difficult, let alone landing on measurable impacts that are useful to track.

Finally, what is the point of measurement in relation to topics that are so vast, and often seem abstract and removed from our realities? We concluded each workshop by bringing the conversation back to how the topic of the day relates to our work and personal lives. How do we ground our understanding in global wellbeing in a personal way? Not surprisingly, this generated many ideas about action that can be taken locally to begin to shift our systems. Focusing on action was not our primary goal for these sessions, but the natural tendency to do so was encouraging. Indeed, what is the point of measurement if not to help us move towards positive change, for the benefit of all around us.

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