What Makes a Flourishing Society?

Goal

While various national wellbeing tools may measure GDP, health or happiness, few have utilised interdisciplinary approaches and diverse community responses to define what a flourishing society is. Current wellbeing indexes miss factors such as social cohesion (particularly the way communities address prejudice), and none have asked how members of various communities in different countries understand human flourishing for themselves. Instead, these formulas are applied in an ethnocentric, one-size-fits-all approach.
The goal is to advance our understanding of flourishing societies by investigating how the concept is understood in low, middle, and high income countries, with a focus on how and why it may differ between countries. Given growing global social polarisation, focus will be placed on the role prejudice plays in societal flourishing. Led by an interdisciplinary team representing diverse communities, the emerging generation, and key leaders in planetary health, wellbeing and prejudice, this project will synthesise learning through hubs in key regions to reveal cultural variations in understandings of what makes a flourishing society, identify what systems changes could be best applied and can substantially contribute to the Foundation's interest in developing more robust and nuanced models for human flourishing and building social capacity.

Opportunity

Although the field of Planetary Health is defined as health of human civilization and the natural world, this and other definitions lack sufficient interrogation, and neglect two key areas:
1. They do not investigate nor compare how people in different communities (low, middle, high income countries) understand what flourishing means to themselves. Do people in low income societies define flourishing differently to high income countries? What can be learned by the differences to improve global flourishing?
2. None consider the definition of flourishing in relation to each other, particularly grappling with one of the greatest challenges of our time: prejudice.

Roadblocks

Prejudice: prejudice can be culturally contextual. An agreed-upon working definition of prejudice is needed for meaningful research across cultures
Appropriate local teams: ensuring field research is run locally in culturally appropriate ways.
Reach: ensure representative samples of people in diverse global communities are engaged
Leadership: leadership teams must be interdisciplinary, leaders in fields connected to human flourishing and include strong representation from younger generations and diverse communities.
Questions: questions on flourishing need to be uniform enough for meaningful cross-analysis yet have cultural relevancy in all locations.

Breakthroughs Needed

There is an urgent need to define human flourishing, both during and post Covid, in meaningful, truly global ways. .
We can develop a genuinely interdisciplinary instrument to investigate understandings of human flourishing. To do so, a global interdisciplinary taskforce needs to be established.
This task force will be able to ensure, through global consultation, that a reasonable definition of prejudice is established, and that diverse communities are reached. The findings are likely to reveal new understandings of effective ways to consider and mitigate against prejudice, and develop a global cohesion to our understanding of what human flourishing means, developed through genuine global collaboration. A range of experts will need to be consulted, including local experts. Staggered grant funding for various levels of investigation should be offered, with funding contingent on intercultural and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years – can we establish a global interdisciplinary task force to investigate this topic? Can we develop a strong measuring instrument (eg survey) that translate well across cultures? A no indicates failure.
5 years – are the answers emerging clearly led by participants? If not, may indicate failure
10 years – Is all the field research completed? If not (unless for exceptional circumstances, such as natural disaster), this indicates failure. Have reasonable patterns in defining human flourishing emerged? If no patters, this indicates failure. Can conclusions be drawn about the role of prejudice to human flourishing?

Additional Information

Project collaborators and developers:
Professor Anthony Capon directs the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and holds a chair in planetary health in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. A public health physician and authority in environmental health and health promotion, his research focuses on urbanisation, sustainable development and human health.
Tony is a former director of the International Institute for Global Health at United Nations University (UNU-IIGH), and is a member of the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health.
Dr Selina Lo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute focusing on Civilisation Health and Planetary Health and the SDGs. She is also a long-term commissioning editor at The Lancet medical journal on global and planetary health. Selina has a medical and law background and has worked across the Asia Pacific with Doctors without Borders and Clinton HIV AIDS Initiative since the mid 90s.
Maithri Goonetilleke is an Australian medical doctor and Associate Professor in Global Health at Monash University. He works as a clinician and public health worker in both Australia and Eswatini, Sub Saharan Africa. His PhD research looked at the impact of structural factors involved in the Swazi HIV epidemic on sex workers, rural grandmothers and migrant labourers.
In 2019 Maithri was selected by the World Assembly of Sciences and Inter-Academy Partnership as one of the worlds twenty two young physician leaders of 2019.
Dr Susan Carland in the Director of the Bachelor of Global Studies in Monash University's Faculty of Arts. She has a PhD in Sociology and Politics, and is a Churchill Fellow and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, specialising in social research of prejudice, discrimination, and social cohesion.
Relevant references:
Whitmee, S., Haines, A., Beyer, C., Boltz, F., Capon, A. et al (2015) Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on planetary health, The Lancet, 386:10007
Horton, R. & Lo, S. (2015) Planetary health: a new science for exceptional action, The Lancet, 386: 10007
Goonetilleke, M. (2020) Global healthcare systems: design and reform. In: Kickbusch, I. (eds) Handbook of Global Health. Springer, Cham.
Carland, S. (2020) We know racism and recession go together. Australia must prepare to stop a racism spike here. In: Molly Glassey (ed) 2020: the year that changed us, Thames & Hudson