Gross National Happiness: Bhutan's Model for Sustainable Development – Its Relevancy in Current Times

Introduction

Bhutan, geographically located between two of the world’s biggest economy, India and China, finds itself, sometimes, in the middle of tussle between these two biggies. Bhutan, which claims to have resolved the most daunting issue within the region, the Doklam crisis (Financial Express, 2023), which almost brought the two big neighbors, on the verge of war, is probably known to the outsider world as the land of “Gross National Happiness” (GNH). With the core value of “Collective Happiness” and emphasis on “Community Wellbeing”, Bhutan has successfully extended the process of modernization without harming the environment or its relationship (Walcott, 2011). This policy was developed against the drawback of most common indicator of growth “Gross Domestic Product”, which only consider the variables of production and consumption as a measure of growth of an economy without realizing its impact on the ecology and environment and thus its effect on human wellbeing (Masaki, K., & Tshering, J. (2021). Though the countries, especially European, which have adopted the concept of GNH from Bhutan, have shown some of the positive results with respect to their wellbeing and happiness. This is clearly evident from the latest list of countries and their ranking in the World Happiness Report, 2022 (World Happiness Report 2022). The list has eight countries amongst the top ten countries from Europe and Bhutan is nowhere in top 20 even. The reason may be, perhaps, there are issues which makes the measurement of GNH in Bhutan difficult. With deprivations in education and increase in domestic violence, many, even Bhutanese, feel that only lip service is being done to implement GNH properly across all areas and domains of life and economy (Luechauer, 2013).

There are certain doubts with regard to the application of GNH philosophy, with the current trend of economy all across the world. To what extent the GNH can be considered as genuine replacement or alternative to the conventional and most prevailing model of economic development? What is the possibility of GNH getting success in the modern globalized world? (Helena See, 2022).

Finland, for example has always remained in the top five of the world’s happiest countries. The reason, that they have taken the happiness as free education, generous parental leave and a healthy work-life balance which ensured that people have the time and the means to pursue their pleasures, no matter how mundane (The Economist, Mar 26th 2018). That is their way of taking the happiness in the real time. They have renovated their own way of happiness, which is though not different from the basic philosophy of GNH. In recent times, they have also included the immigrants in their survey of happiness to have the holistic understanding. And the finding was that the happiness of immigrants stems from a strong support network and integration policies (The Economist, Mar 26th 2018). Which clearly means that, happiness of people is very subjective and very specific to the circumstances and situations. It is not that world’s most developed nations also comes as world’s happiest country. If we look the ranking of world’s most developed nations like US and UK, we will find that they are not finding their place in even top ten. Though United States have doubled their per capita income in the last 40 years, but they may have not sufficiently invested in the wellbeing on people.

This chapter is an attempt to understand the philosophy of Gross National Happiness vis a vis its impact on the development of country in economic terms. This chapter will try to unfold the relevance of GNH in current times in Bhutan. It will study the impact of application of GNH philosophy in some of the important sector of Bhutanese economy i.e. Tourism and also it will try to understand the impact in management of natural resources.