Ron Colman

Listen in today as Ron and I discuss Gross National Happiness, full cost accounting, political will, social change and integrated ways of looking at progress.

Biography

Dr. Colman is founder and executive director of GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research group that, over 15 years, constructed a comprehensive index of wellbeing and sustainable development in Nova Scotia, Canada, called the Genuine Progress Index.

Ron received his Ph.D from Columbia University, taught political science in universities for two decades, worked as a researcher and speech-writer at the United Nations, and has authored numerous studies on measures of population health, social wellbeing, economic security, natural resource health, and environmental quality. From 2001-2005 he served as editor-in-chief of the national magazine, Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing.

Ron worked with the Royal Government of Bhutan for more than a decade on its holistic measures of progress, on bringing its integrated Gross National Happiness (GNH) development approach into the education system and national accounts, on the new GNH Centre, and on hosting a major high-level meeting at the United Nations with 800 government, academic, religious, and civil society leaders to launch a new development paradigm. In 2005 Ron and GPI Atlantic hosted the Second International Conference on Gross National Happiness, titled ReThinking Development: Local Pathways to Global Wellbeing in Canada, with 450 leading delegates from 33 countries. He is presently working on the Samdrup Jongkhar Initiative, a civil society-based development project in southeastern Bhutan.

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