Wellbeing Report seminar series: Considerations for Building Resilience and Advancing Well-Being at the Community Level

Dominick Stephens (00:00:31):

[speaking in te reo Māori] Tēnā koutou katoa. Nau mai, haere mai, ki tenei hui. Ko Dominick Stephens tōku ingoa. Nō Te Tai Ōhanga ahau.

On behalf of Te Tai Ōhanga The Treasury, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to another edition of The Treasury's wellbeing seminar series. So The Treasury is going to be releasing New Zealand's first comprehensive Wellbeing Report very late this year, in which we're going to assess the state of wellbeing in New Zealand, how that's evolved over time with a particular focus on the distribution of wellbeing and the sustainability of wellbeing in New Zealand. Now, along the way, we are running a seminar series to both to inform ourselves, to help to write the report, and also to share with the academic community and wider New Zealand community, some of what we're thinking on the way into the Wellbeing Report.

Now, the sustainability of wellbeing is particularly apt for today's presentation, I've got great pleasure introducing Anita Chandra, who is joining us from Washington D.C. and kindly giving up her evening to chat to us. So thank you very much, Anita. Anita will describe some of the key issues and measuring and investing in wellbeing with particular attention to the intersection of resilience and wellbeing and community level actions. So Anita is Vice President and Director of the RAND Social and Economic Well-being and a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation. That division manages RAND Centre to advance racial inequality and policy, as well as wellbeing research.

She leads studies on civic wellbeing and community planning, disaster response and resilience, public health emergency preparedness, health and health equity, child and health development and effects of military deployment on families. Throughout her career, Dr Chandra has engaged government and non-governmental partners to consider cross-sector solutions for improving community wellbeing and to build more robust systems implementation and evaluation capacity. This work has taken many forms, including engaging with federal and local government agencies in the United States and globally. Dr Chandra has also partnered with community organisations to conduct broad scale health and environmental needs assessments to examine the integration of health and humane service systems and to determine how to integrate equity and address the needs of historically marginalised populations in human service systems.

These projects have occurred in partnership with business, foundations and other community organisations. Dr Chandra earned her PhD in population and family health sciences from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States. So absolutely, Dr Chandra, we're honoured to have you with us. And it sounds like you've got a really interesting array of experiences across government, community, and academia to share with us today. So we'll invite you to enter questions into the chat. I think we'll take questions at the end. I'll sort of intermediate them. I'll read what's come through the chat, synthesise it and put it to Dr Chandra and we'll have a bit of a discussion at the end. And with that, Anita, I'll hand over to you.

Anita Chandra (00:03:52):

Great. Thank you so much for that gracious introduction. And thank you all for the honour of this invitation to share a little bit more of some of the work that I and others have done both in the space of resilience and wellbeing. I'm going to just take control of the slides and hopefully this will work just fine. So I, as Dom shared at the outset with this introduction, I wanted to kind of bridge to its sometimes parallel fields, the field of resilience and the field of wellbeing. And I noted certainly in the work that you're doing on the Living Standards Framework, the connection of resilience in that larger framework, and congratulations on the upcoming release of the report. Some of what I'm going to share today, I think is, in many ways, affirming of some of the evolutions that I observed and certainly I'm learning as we go. And I look forward to your questions on the current wellbeing work in New Zealand.

But also trying to raise some issues that are emerging or potentially connecting concepts as your work pushes forward. So today I thought I would talk a little bit about these kind of interconnections of resilience and wellbeing, some insights coming from the resilience field that have implications for wellbeing and vice versa. I am going to kit some critical concepts like equitable or integrative resilience, community allostatic load, some of the work that's happened in wellbeing narrative, and then some thoughts on valuation and measurement, all the kind of peak interest to connect some dots and potentially inspire some of the discussion today, and I hope after today as well.

Now, some of this thinking comes from a work that I've done in both of those areas. And then a book chapter that was part of an Oxford Press book a few years ago, that started to connect issues of resilience movements, sustainability movements, and what wellbeing as a movement could learn from what we've understood in resilience and sustainability. So I'm happy to share more. And throughout the presentation, I provide a few links. Most of them are easily downloadable from the RAND website.

So as my sort of thesis for today's conversation, as much as we've been talking about at times, the connection of wellbeing and resilience, in fact, and in practise in many ways, the synergies of those two conversations have not been fully leveraged yet. So I spent a lot of time working with communities, helping them to develop everything from disaster response plans, to developing whole of community resilience plans. And in some places, as separately working on community or civic wellbeing action. And at times it's as if those communities aren't as connected as they could be. So I thought today I would kind of organise the conversation in four parts, one to talk a lot, a little bit about where resilience as a field has gone and where the kind of the intersections with a new frame on wellbeing might exist.

And certainly, there's more work to be done in action and measurement. The issue of tracking the conditions and the dynamism of wellbeing and resilience in the context of not just place, but place and history over time, some work that we've done on the sort of issue of narrative and how do we think about new forms of data, and then to close with some thoughts about emerging areas in the space of measurement and valuation that has implications for continued sophistication methodologically, but also in practical terms in application. So I will sort of work through these kind of four themes. And in some cases, I will say that there is a very kind of American lens on some of this work. And in other cases, a lot of the work that has informed the resilience frameworks that I and others have developed as well as some of the wellbeing work certainly comes from non-US insights and really comes from global case studies and work globally.

So as you sort of thread those two pieces together, I want to be conscious of the need to always culturally and politically contextualise some of this work in terms of translation and application. So let me start with this issue of kind of where the resilience field has gone and what that means for wellbeing. So as you know, and there are many definitions of resilience, but we talk about it as the ability to withstand, recover from and adapt to a range of shocks and stresses. And this has been a kind of a clear framework that has shaped whole of nation's disaster responses, but also within community planning and certainly every country around the world has faced some version of their own form of both acute disasters, but long term stresses. And as disasters become more common as we deal with the long term effects of climate change and the slow moving kind of elements of disaster, we've been thinking a lot about this issue of multiple and overlapping disasters.

And it has provided us a frame as many of you know to understand not only the sort of way that we measure resilience over time, but also the way that we intersect the issues of infrastructure resilience and the true length of human recovery and understanding ultimately how to measure social infrastructure, social fabric and topics that I'll get to in a minute around trauma and psychic loss. So we, through the original kind of resilience prism understood this as the ecosystem in which we're all navigating today. And certainly, one of the hallmarks of resilience thinking has been that it's not just about shoring up "resilience capabilities at the individual level" but it is about shoring up those community resilience ties, and the community is not resilient based on the sum of resilient individuals, but really it has to be built on the strength of organisational networks, organization-to-individual connections, organization-to-family connections and vice versa.

How we think about the kind of network analysis of resilience has been important for how we build plans and policies. Now, at RAND, what we've done, and this has translated ultimately to some of our wellbeing work, which I'll get to in a minute, is we took kind of these national and global insights and lessons about resilience and we distilled it in many ways into these eight levers of resilience. And the reason why we did that is because the concepts of resilience, in some cases like the concepts of wellbeing, can be practically difficult, conceptually messy and hard to translate and apply. What we've spent a lot of time doing in the organisation is working alongside communities at the neighbourhood, but also community or whole of city or whole of regional level to try and work on different elements of how to shore up the resilience capacity and capability of communities.

This is not to say that people will be immune to disasters or immune to acute shocks and stresses, but rather that building these capacities and capabilities can shorten the time of recovery, can reduce the negative impacts, excuse me, on particularly historically underrepresented and underserved populations and really makes these kinds of levers of resilience quite practical. For example, and I won't go into too much detail, but you can kind of find these toolkits and resources on the RAND website. We sort of work communities through these kind of national resilience plans and make them actually useful at the local level. So understanding how communities that are historically underrepresented in plans are not engaged, understanding, not just where acute emergencies have existed, but understanding long term challenges, which gets to more of the social, political and civic infrastructure over time.

For example, we look at kind of organisational connection and coordination, and we've actually developed a tabletop exercise to help people assess and measure how these partnerships might react in the context of an acute shock or stressor, how those networks are robust enough in terms of long term recovery and sense of community restoration. I share this knowing that this is a very sort of applied way of thinking about resilience, but it has provided us not only insights about how to work at the community level, but it's also provided us insights about things that have been missing in the measurement of resilience and by definitions and broader aspects of civic and community wellbeing.

And also, what has been missing in terms of the framework of resilience in the first place. We spent a lot of time kind of thinking through what is in this framework and what is not in this framework, the kind of ways that we've been approaching resilience for years as a country, but also globally. This is a little bit of an eye chart, but I think you're going to get the slides after today. And essentially what has happened is that there's been a move to this idea of integrative resilience. And I offer this because the similar pathway of kind of an integrative wellbeing is certainly there and certainly emerging in the work that you're doing, but also at some level nascent in how we're thinking about things like measurement and systems analysis and the like.

What were the criticisms of all the stuff that I just presented in terms of how we thought about community resilience? One was that it didn't account for that sort of intra diversity that we know matters, not just in terms of resource distribution, which I know your report is going to talk about soon, but also this issue of power and access. Community resilience, as it was initially conceived, didn't necessarily think about civil society infrastructure in a way that was thoughtful. What happened in some countries, particularly in the United States is that a lot of things rolled downhill in terms of responsibility on local actors with less kind of shared collaboration about how to respond. And then there were a kind of a series of discrete interventions that weren't tied together.

What integrative resilience has offered us and I offer this as a frame, as we think about integrative wellbeing, is that it does try and take the dynamism of intra community dynamics. It brings a much more alignment and systems analysis way of thinking, which also requires then to think about systems of variables that suggest something about the resilience of whole systems or whole community systems rather than the resilience of an organisation or an individual. And, of course, has much more of an equity appreciation and a trans-disciplinarity that has been lost.

The other thing that integrative resilience has done, and I saw this in some of the materials that some of your colleagues shared with me was a deeper understanding of the dimensions of equity. Obviously, equity to not be confused with equality, but even in equity, to understand these three dimensions, which some of you may be familiar with. The procedural, the contextual and the distributional, and we've used procedural contextual and distributional equity pretty successfully in environmental sustainability work, but it hadn't necessarily been brought into the resilience and particularly into the wellbeing domain. Now there are questions in terms of how do you both measure and act on not just a kind of grab all aggregate of equitable wellbeing or integrative wellbeing, but how are you actually measuring things like the fair access to services that promote wellbeing?

In the work that I've led, we talk about wellbeing amenities, things that don't detract, but promote wellbeing. Well, what are the historical conditions? What are the structural conditions for those amenities? And then, of course, how are those amenities distributed and particularly to deal with systemic and structural inequities? In the United States we’re having kind of a new conversation, certainly about our history with race, but this is a conversation that certainly is happening across country, as you know. It forces us to be far more nuanced and sophisticated about the framework for resilience and ultimately a framework for wellbeing. If you argue, resilience is a critical and necessary condition on the pathway to wellbeing. And it argues for a way of thinking about equity centeredness, and again, this kind of cross systems thinking that to date has actually been fairly immature in the broader kind of resilience and wellbeing literature, although that's growing. And certainly the work that you're doing is advancing that.

Now, I want to offer another concept and I'm going to sort of pull all these concepts together at the end. In addition to this idea of integrative resilience and how do you kind of distil resilience into these levers that you can build capacity and capability is the notion of what we call community allostatic load. And the reason for this came from the resilience conversation, which was principally led by this argument of how do we first understand and contextualise community stress, not in a static way, but as a dynamic over time, that accumulates. And what does that mean for overall wellbeing? And the reason for this move to this community allostatic load frame as a necessary also part of the wellbeing conversation was that we were trying to understand, at least initially in the United States, why some communities were able to not necessarily endure the stress, but handle certain kinds of flashpoint and emerge in events in ways that other communities were not.

And for us in the United States, it actually was kicked off, not by a natural disaster, although we studied that as well. It was actually kicked off by strife in police-community relations in the United States, which has been a critical issue, but not exclusive to the United States. We tried to understand if we could measure that level of allostatic load, is this a concept? Would it help decision makers and stakeholders characterise not only the stress that communities endure, but the wellbeing of that community in a much more dynamic and historical and contextualised way of thinking. We ended up essentially doing a series of side by side case studies, matching up communities that had experienced similar stresses, but had responded differently. And then we did the sort of retrospective prospective analysis with many forms of data.

We also pulled in many literatures to say, is it possible to actually capture the tipping points or the cumulative stress in a community? So many of you are probably familiar with the concept of individual allostatic load. So this is a biophysical concept about how the human body maintains stability and response to stress and can be measured in biomarkers. So this is one of the many sort of genetic and biomarker kind of elements that we talk about in terms of how people respond to different pharmaceuticals in populations in the United States, it's often been a marker of the stress on Black communities in the United States. This has been very much an individual concept around acute stress. And we asked our question, is there a community version of this? Just like we made a community resilience counterpart to individual resilience, is there a community counterpart?

And we pulled from the community resilience literature. We looked at factors that we know mitigate or promote effective disaster recovery. Those levers that I talked about on the prior slides like issues of social cohesion, like the organisational network robustness, like the ability to move resources and communication. And we said, how does that capacity relate to a community's allostatic load? We also looked at something that's often not explored, but is very a critical, at least in the work that I and others have done, which is this issue of community trauma or collective trauma. And certainly we know that historical experiences can divine future policy choices, but we have not yet necessarily embedded trauma and psychic loss into how we think about the life course projections of a community. And sort of the relational aspect of how we think about the wellbeing of a community does also depend on how trauma is interpreted, processed and discussed. We asked that question, how do we think about trauma as part of that allostatic load?

We also brought in, of course, community wellbeing as a construct, and one that you're all very familiar with bringing in what we know as critical domains of wellbeing. And certainly there are many different frameworks out there, but the experience of community and economic vitality and place, and that the assets held at the community level can shape the ability to thrive and flourish. The question is how does the investment model in community wellbeing account for stress accumulation, counter whether a community can handle stress accumulation, what are those kinds of variables? We brought a lot of this literature together. We talked to a wide variety of stakeholders, and we did this comparative case study analysis using the scenarios of a natural disaster, of economic downturn of police-community relations, and the strain that is related to that. So we tried to marry, how do we understand acute shocks and what that means for a cumulative stress in a community, but also what does it mean when you have degrading stresses over time in a community, like the stress of community violence or economic strain.

And we also identified several other themes, and I'll just build these out that have been critical to this conversation of how do we even value wellbeing in a community if we don't think about cumulative stress and respond shared with us that there were many pieces that had been missing in many ways, from what they saw as health and wellbeing frameworks in their community, how politicians talked about wellbeing, how politicians talked about quality of life or any other synonym. And it really boiled down to these other kind of themes, the stress narratives, as I mentioned, the marginalisation in inequity and how that's captured. And then to the extent to which we measure the capacity and a theme that's come up in our resilience work, the response reliability of civil society institutions. And I can get into that a little bit more if people are interested, has to be a critical part of how we think about wellbeing, ultimately.

So, again, this is a bit of an eye chart, but there is a brief and a report and a lot of other materials that go along with this. But ultimately, we developed this measure and this framework of community allostatic load, which was sort of the initial steps. This work is by no means complete, but essentially started to centre some of these foundational issues at the bottom, which is kind of the issue of civil processes and organisation or not, the historical context of things like people, place and opportunity, and also marry the intersection of acute shocks and chronic stressors that are constantly happening in every community I would venture to say in the world. And how do we think about the dynamism of the acute shocks and chronic stresses together?

From our analysis, we identified a set of factors that either alleviate some of that cumulative stress or exacerbate some of that community stress, were the reasons why some communities were able to coherent and respond to negative events and some were challenged. But the bottom line is that as we did this work on community allostatic load it centred what had been missing in some of our resilience and in our wellbeing work that we had not paid as close enough attention to both in terms of measurement, but also in terms of how we talked about these concepts and how we acted on these concepts, particularly at the community level. But this has had some resonance also in kind of national and federal conversations. Another way to think about it, just to make it super simple is essentially this idea of overload, right? As you imagine that communities are in this overlapping ecosystem, as I mentioned at the outset of overlapping disasters of various shapes and stripes, how do we think about it, is this compounding effect?

What tips communities over or under that overload are features that we can build in terms of capability building? How do we think about systemic changes and what does that look like? What does it mean to have stronger systems and interconnections among systems? And here, I don't just mean government systems, I mean that fabric with civil society, how do we think about leaders, not who are resilient personally, although that's important, but leaders who have an orientation to resilience-based thinking, which means that they understand not just assets and stresses, but they understand equity and integrative resilience. And we have some papers on this concept and that we are using measures that actually capture this issue of overlapping stress.

What we determined, and the report has a series of measures at the back, I won't go into detail, is essentially when we look at some of these issues of wellbeing, framing that we do with communities, we're not getting at some of the things here on the screen. And because we're not getting at some of the things on the screen around stress and the intersection of government and civil society and the history and the structure and the systems, then we're not getting a full appreciation of the sort of, not just the sociocultural, but the political economy elements of wellbeing, and as such, we can't actually create fulsome policy. This kind of work is another way of thinking about some of these emerging concepts, integrative resilience, as I mentioned, community allostatic load that have been in some ways short-shifted in the conversation around resilience and wellbeing, but are coming to the fore in greater force today as these two fields start to connect and hopefully synergize a little bit going forward.

Now, let me just turn a little bit to kind of two other pieces of this. And I know I'm lobbing up a lot of different elements, but because resilience has unpacked and revealed a lot of this conversation and wellbeing conversation has unpacked and revealed a lot of the conversation, it merits sort of putting all these concepts on the table. So we've talked a little bit about the need to think about kind of integrative wellbeing and what that means in terms of equity, centeredness, and transdisciplinarity and systems analysis. We've talked about the importance of cumulative stress and historical measures of wellbeing, à la understanding community allostatic load.

I wanted to share a little bit about some work that we've done both locally and globally around wellbeing indices, and community engagement and wellbeing narratives. Now, the importance of this is not to share another framework of wellbeing. You are very much a leader in a lot of these areas, but to talk a little bit about some of the thinking that has happened at the local level, as we've worked with communities, both in the U.S. and in other countries. So as you know, we're kind of in a new data ecosystem where we're trying to understand new forms of data, social data, social media data, you just in time data, pulse data, administrative data survey data, all the types of data you can imagine, but it's also coming at a time where not only are people having access to that information, but having kind of data ecosystems without kind of meaningful narrative and community engagement work leaves communities wanting.

And it's in that ecosystem that we built a project in Santa Monica, in Southern California, in Los Angeles County, for those who've been to Southern California in the United States, called The Wellbeing Project. Now this was a project funded by the Bloomberg Philanthropies, which started in the U.S., but ultimately funded projects in Europe and in Latin America and South America. And the goal of the project was to actually change city government, do something transformational in city government. Many of the projects that were suggested as part of a very competitive process were at the time, and this was back in 2012, 2013, when we started were about changing how the government approaches recycling or how the government approaches contracts and procurement processes, which are challenging in a lot of countries, but particularly in the United States.

And the City of Santa Monica in California said, "Hey, let's actually look at what the purpose of a city is. And today a city should not just be about filling potholes or making sure that people get their permits completed, although important, but a city should be about creating the conditions to promote wellbeing. How do we create the amenities to promote wellbeing? How do we invest in human potential and the like? RAND worked with the City of Santa Monica to win this award and essentially to advance a wellbeing frame for the City of Santa Monica. Now, the reason why this is important is that Santa Monica ultimately found a way to blend a lot of different concepts under one. And I know Dom at the outset mentioned kind of the intersection with what we know about sustainability. Santa Monica is considered one of the leaders nationally, potentially globally in green economy and sustainability. But one of the criticisms that had occurred at the start of our project was that sustainability work at the time, and certainly that sustainability and green movements have evolved, lost a little bit in terms of person centeredness, sociocultural context.

We worked with a city and a team of experts and the New Economics Foundation in the UK and other colleagues around the world to build out a wellbeing framework that would work for city government. So essentially it took a lot of the great dimensions that you have in your framework, the Canadian wellbeing index, what other experts have shared, but also made it somewhat manageable for city government. And the idea essentially was that we would create the framework in the City of Santa Monica, but then we would share it so that people didn't have to recreate the wheel in other cities. They would change the data points, but the dimensions or the sub dimensions would hold. It was an agile framework that could be used to understand wellbeing. The interesting thing was that as much as there was interest in measurement and creating an index, the project was really about community engagement and narrative work from the outset.

Not only did we sort of blend a lot of different types of data including resident insights and social data and I see in your new Wellbeing Report that you're going to have a lot of those component pieces, but essentially the idea at the outset was that this would frame up everything. So taking a page from the work that you've done in New Zealand, how do we think about it as the frame for the budget? How do we think about it as the frame for every kind of city planning and investment, and how do we think about it as connected to every other kind of initiative that happened in the community? There was a real focus at the outset of thinking through sort of the social movement and the narrative of wellbeing and not simply the measures of wellbeing. As we think about kind of the wellbeing kind of framework going forward, it became really critical that we spent as much time if not more on that kind of social engagement.

One of the things that we did in the city, but has been transferred and translated to other cities, is that we worked with communities to address the data ecosystem. Now you have a large Wellbeing Report that's coming out, which is tremendous and really exciting. But as you know, when you get to the local level, there's a lot going on in terms of people's ability to wrap their head around multiple indicators, measures the data ecosystem. Santa Monica was no different. They were just capturing lots of, lots of information. It was the height of the open data movement, where everybody just said, let's throw a bunch of data and open data portals. And what they were left with was things that they necessarily couldn't act on. So we developed tools and approaches to actually deal with the data culture and the data ecosystem talking about what really is going to give signal value on wellbeing and what are the indicators that are sort of nice to have, but really don't say anything demonstrable about systems, about stresses, about structures, about history, all the things that I just talked about in the prior sections.

We spent a lot of time, which I know you're been doing in New Zealand to think about local allies, to shape a wellbeing narrative conversation. We tied it to the creative arts community. There's some interesting videos if anybody's ever interested in that, we made it very tactile. And to this day, Santa Monica is doing micro grants to have people embrace the sort of wellbeing constructs in very manageable and tangible and hyper localised ways. We also took in new kinds of information. So it was a very live framework, the framework, the dimensions, and the sub-dimensions were set, as I said, but data and indicators might shift over time. And we thought that was a much more realistic way to how not only city government works and thinks, but how communities work and think.

And then essentially, try to think about what it meant to create a local wellbeing action culture. And I spent a lot of time thinking about mindset and narrative and what shapes how people think about health and wellbeing. So we brought a lot of that thinking into sort of the cultural shifts that happened in Santa Monica. And the reason why I wanted to bring up the narrative piece, because this is a third area conceptually, which is not getting perhaps as much global research attention as it should. And I wanted to just mention one more thing. We've been working on this kind of issue of wellbeing narratives with our colleagues at an organisation called Metropolitan Group. We actually engaged with some of your colleagues here in New Zealand to develop the first report. And one of the challenges that many of you know in the wellbeing conversation, which I know you're attentive to, is that the academic and policy maker community has, and has been working in parallel to a lot of grassroots organisations.

The work that I list here and then another one out in two months really tries to unpack the mobilising features of narrative. How do you move social change? What's the language of narrative? What are the frames of narrative and how do you start to knit together these two kind of constituencies to stop working in parallel from each other. And again, as I sort of mentioned in the prior two sections, these are kind of concepts and areas that are emerging. People are starting to talk about them, but has not yet been part of the kind of research and data science of it all as much as it could be.

All right. Lastly, I just wanted to cover a couple of quick concepts and I know I'm running short on time. So there is emergent work in areas of measurement and valuation that I wanted to share with each of you, because some of this might be useful in the context of wellbeing measurement, I hope, but also kind of these concepts of valuation and measurement. And I know I'm speaking to some economists, so I won't go too deep on this, but to just kind of give a frame for where some interesting work might be useful as we go forward. So a few years ago, we worked with The Rockefeller Foundation to look at how we could think about the benefits that emerge from "resilience based projects." The Rockefeller Foundation was funding a lot of projects around the world in communities that were trying to first address disaster risk reduction resilience. But ultimately if you kind of looked under the covers or looked under the hood was really kind of a wellbeing project. And again, two communities resilience and wellbeing, not necessarily coming together.

We took kind of the resilience lens that many have been talking about for years, and this is not a new concept today, but was a few years ago and started to say, "Okay, well, Rockefeller, are you trying to figure out how to think about investment strategies and grassroots organisations and international development projects." And not just think about the mitigating of the risk from the shock or stressor hardening infrastructure, addressing sea level rise, and things like that, but also think about the co-benefits that can accrue that are economic, environmental or social. A very simple equation was created around the resilience dividend that there were these co-benefits that can accrue from these kinds of investments, not a surprising concept that should be captured in the concept of the resilience dividend.

The reason why I'm sharing this is because parallel conversations have been happening in both the kind of market and non-market valuation of wellbeing. So for the resilience dividend work, we took a lot from the kind of the valuation of ecosystem services work that many of you are probably familiar with, right? The value of a park is not just the value ecologically in the sort of strictest environmental sense, but all the social benefits that accrue. Well, the question is, is some of this work in resilience dividend useful if we start thinking about the valuation of wellbeing? And do we have frameworks that people can get on board with nationally and globally?

So we created this framework called the Resilience Dividend Valuation Model. And instead of just looking at it through a resilience lens, looked at it through sort of a wellbeing optimization lens. Now I do footnote here that since this work, the sort of term capitals has evolved and want to recognise that. And I know that in your work, some of the use of capitals around social capital have evolved, but the concepts of multidimensionality still hold. And the idea being kind of using a, sort of a good stock and flow argument and economic theory that as we're thinking about building those kinds of capitals and infrastructure investments, like levy systems, that we can accrue other kinds of human or social capability benefits, right? Quite simply this. And that, ultimately that we're not just trying to optimise on resilience, we're really trying to optimise as a path to wellbeing.

And the idea being essentially that if we weren't going to have a project that has co-benefits, then we're not going to realise all of those combined values. And this is just merely a framework that I wanted to share with you. There are case studies in the report that I linked to on the prior slide, there's actually a tool of how to kind of apply this. And it's not as much to talk about it in the context of resilience, but as we broaden and widen the aperture on wellbeing, how is this useful? One of the things that it lifted up for us, which again, is a theme of today's presentation, is that capturing some of these measures of second and higher order causal effects is challenging. Capturing things that get to the social infrastructure can be challenging, but is doable like the changes in social capital, like community security and how that's defined.

And as we're doing this kinds of measurement, again, we have to use the integrative resilience model. And we have to think about the historical context of community allostatic load. This pushes us from an investment and a measurement perspective, dually, that should be a way of thinking about how we're thinking about as we call wellbeing amenities. You might use a different term in the work that you're doing. The bottom line, though, I will say is that one of the things that we've also not captured in the work that we do in both resilience and in wellbeing, which is why both fields are struggling is not only figuring out a way to capture co-benefits comprehensively in terms of what we're putting into communities, how we're investing in communities, how we're partnering with communities, but we've not really thought about, again, the dynamism in our measurement.

How people will react to certain investments. What's the uptake of those investments? What are the substitution of those investments? If something is hit by an acute shock or stressor, again, conceptually a little bit thorny, but an important framework in terms of how we think about measurement. And I'll conclude with just one more kind of thing to think about, which is another way of thinking about measurement. So a lot of our wellbeing measurement, and one of the things that we struggled with the wellbeing project in Santa Monica was that we were dealing with a lot of lagging indicators in the work that we were doing. We weren't going as upstream as we wanted to, not just in terms of leading indicators, but to get at all those kinds of levers of resilience, those capabilities of wellbeing. And for those who take a much more longitudinal approach to wellbeing, we were missing something.

So I've talked about kind of historical and structural approaches to wellbeing, which are critical equity centred approaches to wellbeing. The other thing to think about with wellbeing is the developmental approach to wellbeing. And certainly those who work in child and family services kind of know what I'm I'm talking about. We've started this work, conceptually, there's a piece out now, an article that I can point people to, it's in press shortly, but myself and several colleagues who are child development folks essentially said, "Hey, there's all this great work about wellbeing." My colleague has built something called All Children Thrive, which is essentially a community wellbeing framework with a child-centred orientation. But one of the concerns was that every kind of wellbeing framework and measurement frame out there really wasn't taking into account the changing epidemiology of child health and development.

How are children responding to not only physical changes in our environment like climate change, but social and emotional stresses, and that a lot of the wellbeing frameworks weren't actually looking at the deeper drivers of inequities. We decided to create something called the Gross Domestic Potential or the GDP2, which is essentially going upstream to understand the capability set of the youngest cohort. And here we started in the U.S., but there are sort of parallels to work that are happening in other countries. And essentially it looks at this intersection of what makes not only individuals, but individuals situated in communities thrive and flourish. So as much as we've talked about community wellbeing, as some set of capacities and capabilities to thrive and flourish, how do we sort of situate individuals and households and families in that context that understands issues like agency, which is certainly about procedural equity, how do we look at potential and access to opportunity?

We essentially came up with these capabilities that one could measure that do speak to a much more child-centric way of thinking about wellbeing, but upstream investments that communities can make in terms of how they're thinking about the necessary capabilities and investments that are required in order to take a much more longitudinal and developmental approach to wellbeing. The first phase of this project is done. You can see constructs like resilience being embedded in this framework, but also issues of connection and social cohesion. But I wanted to share this before I wrap up, because again, there are these principles of developmentalism that are also missing concepts in current resilience and wellbeing thinking.

So just to kind of wrap up, there are sort of four themes that I just wanted to briefly touch on for you today. Both that I think are affirming of the great work that you've been doing here on your framework and your wellbeing report, but also places that need to go up a level in terms of the quality of the scholarship, the practice realities and the applications. So one is, how do we think about the integrative elements of resilience and wellbeing that is still poorly done? How do we think about this issue of cumulative stress and how much is that missing from our measurement of wellbeing historically?

Second, how do we think about capturing the actions on wellbeing and the narrative around wellbeing? Now, some of that just might not be in measurement frameworks like the Living Standards Framework, but how you push go on these frameworks is very much rooted in the science of social mobilisation and narrative and how we fleshed out the frameworks and the science around that. And then finally, there are some missing elements that are starting to emerge, like in your framework, certainly capability, which is there, but this issue of how we're capturing co-benefits and human potential, which I would argue has come from a lot of the resilience and developmental psychology and that kind of thinking, but has the potential to modernise the conversation of wellbeing going forward. So with that, I will conclude, and I think we're going to have some questions and discussion. Thank you.

Dominick Stephens (00:49:44):

Kia ora for that, Anita, thank you very much for your presentation. Illuminating and incredibly wide ranging. So we've got a real theme of engagement with communities, but you've ranged across a very wide range of aspects of engaging with community. I'll just invite participants and the virtual audience to submit questions for Anita in the chat, which I will sort of collate and intermediate. So you don't need to worry too much about sort of reading the chat as we go, but welcome to if you wish. And I can see, we already have a question from Tim Ng so, "Hi, Anita, great to see you online and thanks for such a stimulating-

Anita Chandra (00:50:33):

Hey, Tim.

Dominick Stephens (00:50:33):

... presentation. So when we're embracing the necessity of systems thinking in complexity, funders and policy makers often want to know how will I know if your project has made a difference? Do you have any thoughts or examples on how evaluation practice can accommodate benefits and costs that are not expected to accrue in an easily observable RCT style linear fashion? Many thanks." Can you just remind me what RCT is?

Anita Chandra (00:51:00):

Randomised Control Trial, I assume.

Dominick Stephens (00:51:02):

There you go. Yep. Brilliant.

Anita Chandra (00:51:04):

So Tim, thank you for your question and always lovely to be with you and others. So one of the things that we've done in the resilience space, which I think is important as we sort of break out of the mold of different methodologies is we've used various approaches to evaluating response and recovery such as desktop tabletop exercises, such like scenarios and simulations, we've stress tested kind of questions and network analysis. And the reason why we use these approaches is that we want to understand in the resilience work initially how the levers of resilience are actually playing out. So we've said we're going to spend some time investing in these levers of resilience, helping to build up the capabilities in a particular community. And some of that is not yet observable, not just because disasters are infrequent, but because we're trying to stress test a lot of things at once.

We've found things like the serious gaming, which of course, RAND has been a leader in many ways, but tabletops and scenarios and other kind of simulations to stress test how the network is going to respond. So, for example, we have sat around a table with communities and initially was a quality improvement activity that we did over time, but it became an evaluation tool because we could pre-post where they were in terms of their improvements in terms of response. The question is how are we kind of capturing those kinds of system variables? It requires kinds of different evaluation approaches, different kinds of tools like that.

And even in, I would say, surveys and administrative data, to what extent are we capturing the ability of an institution to reconstitute, the ability of a policy to be agile to stress? Those are the kinds of system variables that do require a different kind of analysis of systems and policy documents, but are critical to trying to get at those institutional variables. So that's how we've done it. Some of these areas are more nascent than others, but it's not going to come through traditional methods. Thanks for the question.

Dominick Stephens (00:53:27):

Brilliant. Okay. Next question. "In your work, how have you linked the environment to community wellbeing, both in system thinking models... sorry, just moved away on me... both in system thinking models as well as in measures and indicators?"

Anita Chandra (00:53:44):

So one of the things that we've tried to unpack is sort of the physical realities of environment and the sociocultural elements of environment, and trying to understand sort of the dynamics of how people interact with place by using measures, particularly in the Santa Monica work that tried to capture how people were interacting with their environment and not just sort of their green environment, but their environment at all levels. That's where we used actually other forms of social and social media data to understand both qualitatively and quantitatively, to some extent what that was looking like in terms of their insights and experiences. The other thing, as I sort of mentioned is that we tried to bring the environmental sustainability world together with the wellbeing world, right? All these worlds are trying to come together, resilience, wellbeing, and sustainability.

And they had been working in parallel and trying to understand the sort of human centeredness of sustainability was also critical. So there were a lot of environmental variables in Santa Monica around kind of air and water quality all the sort of natural environment, but not a lot about the sort of the human experience in that environment. And we tried to bring those together so it can be challenging, but I'm seeing an evolution in those two movements in a way that I haven't seen before, because it can be quite challenging.

Santa Monica's a place and understandably where there were sort of legal actions on behalf of the sort, the sanctity of the natural environment over people. And that's a very loaded debate that I won't go into today, but we had to sort of bring those communities together and trying to create dual benefit measures is often the way that I think about it. What's a measure that can get you both in the same so that we can get to parsimony, but still kind of satisfy multiple constituents at once?

Dominick Stephens (00:55:54):

Brilliant. So we've got a question, a couple of questions about social cohesion or social capital, as you mentioned, we've sort of calling it social cohesion, but it's a concept of capital, same concept, really.

Anita Chandra (00:56:08):

Yes.

Dominick Stephens (00:56:10):

But, "Could you talk a little more about how the use or non-use of the concept of social capital has evolved over time in the U.S. context, seems like the conversation has moved on from the Bowling Alone days?"

Anita Chandra (00:56:24):

I appreciate that question. So I think there are a couple dimensions that are informing and influencing the social capital conversation, and it really, in many ways parallels the points I was making about narrative and grassroots organisations. So one of the challenges with the framing of social capital that has been for all intents and purposes, a fairly Eurocentric way of thinking about social capital. There has been pushback on those concepts, and I know we're not alone in the U.S. because there has been sort of an individualistic and a non relational way of thinking about social capital, as much as it's about social it is still very I centred and that's very American, I understand that. But I think that there are kind of social ecologies. There are relational narratives around wellbeing that are forcing a different conversation about what constitutes social capital that has moved it, whether it's indigenous populations in the U.S. or communities of colour in the U.S.

The second thing that has been a pushback is perhaps some contrary views that have emerged in research. And I don't mean to create controversy here, but there is work that has emerged in the U.S. about the resilience of populations of colour who've been historically marginalised and people sort of look at that as a sort of an indicator of social cohesion that communities of colour will sort of organise and they'll withstand any kind of stress or shock, but that undermines a very long and difficult structural legacy of inequity. What has been propagated in recent years is, and these are big concepts. So I don't mean to throw a bunch of concepts today at you, but so this idea that people sort of reposition their sense of resilience in response to the conditions that they understand won't change in their community, some call it hermeneutical injustice, right?

So that you're not actually "able to respond and recover" you've basically put up with a set of conditions that have been imposed and you have sort of maybe show on surveys that you have a lot of hope and optimism, but you actually are just hope and optimism in the context of your reality. In the U.S. context, this is particularly salient if you've been following our politics, which I imagine you have. So as we talked about the deaths of despair over the last five or six years, and people said, "Why are we having these drastic impacts on the white American population in terms of life expectancy?" There has been a counter argument to talk about, there was a cultural expectation amongst our European American community, that there was possibility and potential. And that's sort of the context of some of our sociologists in their writing.

For communities of colour that potential may or may not have been there given longstanding structural inequities. So it's a response to a reality. The social capital argument has been contextualised in that. And that's why this issue of community allostatic load is so critical. Finally, one of the things that at least in the U.S., that communities of colour will say, and I'm using a very broad brush here for communities of colour but forgive me and for the sake of argument is that we don't get credited with the kinds of social institutions that get credited in polls about social capital. So formal institutions like the Rotary Club, if that's a thing, or organisations that are considered more established civic organisations give people credit around social capital. Smaller grassroots organising gets less credit as social capital in historic terms. People are trying to understand how do we leverage the spirit of mobilisation and organising and advocacy as part of social capital? So that's also part of the conversation. I hope that helps.

Dominick Stephens (01:00:47):

Brilliant. Thank you. More on sort of social cohesion or capital. "We're just wondering, could you talk a little bit more about the role of social cohesion or capital in resilience and what role local or central government could play?"

Anita Chandra (01:01:09):

So we know that doing this comparative case study analysis work for years across disaster context globally. And, of course, my colleagues like Daniel Aldrich and others who you're probably familiar with have been studying this for years. Regardless of what we think about the operationalizing of social capital setting that aside, we know that these variables matter when you rack and stack community side by side, those communities that are able to marshal resources, reconstitute social networks, connect across government and civil society, create neighbour to neighbour connection are able to mitigate some of the most negative impacts of disaster. What we spend a lot of time doing, which is why those resilience levers are there, the levers of resilience is we spend a lot of time working with local government and civil society organisations together to actually think about where are their investment strategies that will create a sense of social cohesion.

Does that mean that you are upstream investing in nonprofit or civil society organisations in pre-disaster times? And what does that look like? How are civil society organisations brought to the table in terms of local government conversations? What are the networks that lift up the voice of those who are historically underrepresented? What are the vehicles and mechanisms of all of that? And not just what are the sort of opportunities for it, but how is it actually institutionalised fundamentally? So in the U.S. we have things which I imagine you have versions of citizen accountability boards and community action groups and the like, but the challenge is, is that when you sometimes dig under it, citizen councils that kind of thing, some of them have teeth and some of them don't have teeth. As we think about social capital and cohesion, looking at those kinds of investments, through the lens of what is both has an accountability mechanism to it?

So if you're going to invest in it, what's the sort of response to that investment? How are you continuing to sort of make good on those investments? But also what's the sustainability mechanism? Too often, at least in the work that I've done in Europe and the U.S. and in Canada, but also in parts of Asia, there are these very surgical kinds of investments and sense of community or social cohesion, but not a social infrastructure that would support it over the long term. So the question is we talk a lot at RAND about rebuilding the civic infrastructure under this work that we've done for years called Truth Decay, which is the diminishing role of facts and analysis and discourse. And what is the civic infrastructure that's going to hold the investments in social cohesion or social capital, however you want to sort of frame it is critical.

And then how is that held at the individual level? And then how is that held at the organisational level and how are you tying those networks together? So that, again, using sort of systems analysis and network theory, you want a lot of loose ties in a network, right? For those of your network analysts, you want what we call kind of loose ties so that you have kind of response reliability when things go down, when bad things happen. What you're trying to do is retrofit and basically create that network structure fundamentally. I would think about social cohesion as an infrastructure investment, fundamentally, however you are conceptualising infrastructure in New Zealand.

Dominick Stephens (01:05:06):

Brilliant. Now we've got a question here with three thumbs up. I think it goes right to the heart of your whole talk actually. So, "Most resilience budget proposals seem to stress robustness and system redundancy, but we see less on system adaptability, which recent experience suggests can be more important." So this is something that actually the Secretary of the Treasury is often talking about that countries with the most, I don't know, biggest stock of masks didn't necessarily do the best after COVID. It was the countries with the most resilient or adaptable, sorry, the most adaptability to the new environment that did best. "Have you seen developments of new decision making rules and heuristics using the data you've been pointing to that seek to more deliberatively, better emphasise the development of adaptive capacity?"

Anita Chandra (01:06:02):

Yeah, it's growing. I appreciate that question. So a couple of things, and I'll point you, if I didn't in the slides to some of these additional reports and articles. So we actually worked with communities in the U.S. as part of support to those communities to actually work on two levels over the last several years. One, is to develop kind of what we would call resilience systems, essentially working on adaptive capacity. So not just how you can replace, which would be the redundancy model, but understanding what your ability to reformulate, take in new information and pull in new actors into the deliberations, right? That's all part of adaptive capacity. In resilience and disaster resilience, of course, we talk about, I guess, it's Black Swan and now it's something quite generic, like Pigeon you have to sort of combine the Black Swan incidents, which are quite rare and the generic stresses incidents and how do you kind of meld those.

But even with the best planning, you're not going to predict everything. So all you can hope for is that you've got the systems that have the optimal flexibility that can draw in new information and change quickly and can build arrangements and agreements that adapt to new circumstances, whatever that means in sort of your policy, regulatory and budget framework, and actually measuring that. The other thing that's important to measure is and you spoke, Dom, of course, about the redundancy and the sort of interoperability, which has been a hallmark of resilience for years, but rather than just the interoperability look at the spaces between sectors and systems and how quickly can the spaces between sectors and systems be braided together for response and recovery. What can be leveraged for dual or co-benefits that issue of co-benefits, that's where you're going to get to adaptability because you're in emergent times. So those are the kinds of variables to look at.

The other thing is that we also worked on a resilience oriented workforce, and there's a paper I'm more than happy to share afterwards that we wrote just sort of the features of a resilience oriented work force. And I know you do this more than we do in the U.S., which is a lot of cross training. So in the U.S. there's actually is not as much seconding from one department to another. There's not as much government entity go work in a civil society organisation and vice versa. But if you're creating a resilience oriented workforce, you need people with capacities, not just to do the inter government thing, but actually who can kind of spend time with private sector, can spend time with civil society and understand and work seamlessly across. So you're essentially creating boundary spanners in your civil service and you're thinking about the capacities and capabilities of the workforce against a backdrop of those things.

So as I sort of mentioned that gross domestic potential measure, we're starting young with that, but actually those capabilities are exactly what we envision that not everybody is a big leader, but everybody has to have sort of some leadership traits in the new economy and the new ecosystem of agility. So how do you think about that in your current civil service, for lack of a better way to frame it, that's actually something to also work on and then measure that. I don't know, to what extent you measure that in your, in your workforce. So I wouldn't give that short shift either.

Dominick Stephens (01:10:10):

Thank you. I do. One of the things we were talking about, the differences between small and big countries before the presentation started. And I do think that interoperability of the workforce is something that comes naturally in a small country. So we, people in careers in New Zealand move across sectors and firms and parts of government very regularly because each sector firm part of government is smaller and you have to. So I think that does naturally create nimbleness in small countries. Maybe we lack deep, deep expertise in some things, but a broader range of experience and nimbleness is an advantage. If you don't mind, I'll actually ask a question and that's, I was really interested in the model for calculating dividends, sort of the co-benefits concept and that co-benefits, if you're thinking about a project or a societal change that might build resilience, naturally calculating co-benefits is going to affect the... it should be part of the cost-benefit analysis and should be some of what you're thinking about.

But really at a Treasury it's where the rubber really hits the road when trade-offs get tough when there's co-costs. So if you build a sea wall, you're going to release a whole lot of CO2 with the associated cement, you're going to affect access to the beach, probably, you're certainly going to affect the natural environment possibly to its detriment. But the benefit will be that you protect a community perhaps from rising sea levels. So I would be really interested to hear you talk about co-costs and how we think through trade-offs between resilience and allocative efficiency, be that at a sort of a physical example, like a sea wall, or you were mentioning a, sort of a social example of interoperability and whether there are examples like that actually come at costs, and we need to think about trade-offs between resilience and efficiency and how we measure and think through those in this sort of unmeasurable world of wellbeing.

Anita Chandra (01:12:25):

I guess, the question is, and it's a good one, right? Nothing is simple and there's always trade-offs, is as you're making kind of maybe shorter term or midterm investments for kind of response and efficiency, the question is how much you're sort of either taking points off of kind of a longer term resilience dividend or how much it is. It could potentially be sort of mitigated down the road, right? So things that are, there's a part that's adapting, right, to a particular kind of disaster or stress or aspect of sea level rise. If we were talking about a levy or a sea wall that may not be a bad idea, the question is to what extent does that box out other kinds of systemic changes that are needed?

If it's a path, if there's sort of a path dependency created, or at least it's viewed as an intermediate step, then I would argue that there is some value for the response and the efficiency, but if it's sort of taking you away from a broader kind of resilient system paradigm in a way that is unrecoverable because of the choice that's being made, or it's harder to get back on track, then I think that's a more challenging investment fundamentally. So in the U.S., of course, we have made a lot of interesting climate responses and disaster responses based on the immediate economic realities of not wanting to take on diversification of the economy. And there's very real realities of that because people need to eat and they need to be employed.

But the question is, what is the framing of the investment that gives you an off ramp to start to move to sort of the ideals of that resilient system versus, again, closing you out. In New Orleans and Louisiana in the United States after hurricane Katrina and after everything else that's happened in that region of the world, it makes no sense, of course, as wonderful as New Orleans is and it's one of my favourite cities is built on something that doesn't make sense to be built on because it is sinking. But there are choices that the government has made that I think have created economic diversification, but it still had short term benefits from the economic investment for restaurant workers or construction workers or the like. And I think there's a way to... It's not going to be clean or easy, but that's how I've often thought about the co-cost, but there are choices that I've observed at least in the U.S. government that have essentially closed off resilience based thinking for the sake of efficiency and that has ultimately cost us in the long term.

So I would think about these kinds of path dependency models and sort of the short term kind of adaptation, the long term resilience, right? Resilience is a constant investment over time. It has many phases and context. And if you could make an argument that, that short term investment for efficiency speaks to a larger resilience based systems orientation, then I think there's a validity there, but there are plenty of decisions. And I'll just talk about my own country. There are plenty of decisions that have no sort of resilience frame whatsoever for the sake of "trade-offs." And I think that's a... I might argue that's a false choice. So that's the way I think about it.

Dominick Stephens (01:16:13):

Well, thank you that leads really very nicely to the Pravin’s question. So, "What are your tips for measuring resilience and seeing if this is improved over time, how can we approach the situation when initial data for comparison is limited?"

Anita Chandra (01:16:29):

So what we actually do, and that's one of the reasons we distilled and there's another report I'm happy to share with you, why we distilled the eight levers of resilience. Because we actually measure in those eight levers of resilience and we have measures that speak to that. And the reason why is because I've worked on both national strategies on resilience and pandemic response and a bunch of things and was concerned that a lot of it was not very operational for communities. And so the translation of all the resilient science into those eight levers was also an attempt to not just help communities build those capabilities, but actually build measurement in those spaces.

What we also do is try and use multiple forms of data collection to capture. So what we are measuring, because resilience is a latent construct for any kind of measurement nerds out there, right? So what we are measuring is essentially these variables of capabilities and capacities. So all we're ever really measuring in a lot of cases with resilience, particularly pre-disaster or pre-event or pre-shock or perturbation or whatever language you want to use in the sort of the physics of resilience, you're measuring the capacities in the capabilities. There are things that we do to try and measure that using both kind of what I would call administrative data, looking at how the systems and policies are created and then using these kind of real time things that I referenced with Tim earlier, like exercises and stress testing.

Now that's a little bit more intensive for a national government to do, but it's not as intensive, it's very realistic actually for a community to do. So those are the ways that we capture it. But, again, when you look at as sort of a late variable, then you're really looking at these dimensions of resilience that speak to proxies of the resilience. And here I take from the literature, actually from developmental psychology, which in many ways was one of the early movers on resilience. Resilience in children is a latent construct, but you measure the capabilities and the capacities related to resilience. So that's how we do it.

Dominick Stephens (01:18:51):

Brilliant. Okay. Ramona is concerned about how far these frameworks look into the future and how this lack of long term planning and decision making impacts on the options for intergenerational communities through policy and incentives. So how do we ensure the decisions and plans of New Zealand policy, better business cases go deep and further. If we start with and build from the intergenerational lens, e.g. te ao Māori: I'm the land, the land is me, could we design and implement the impact of human potential and environmental management longer and deeper?

Anita Chandra (01:19:29):

I really appreciate this question. And certainly, there's the reality of how communities live and exist as sort of live organisms, for lack of better way to frame it. And then there's the way that government and it's different across countries, but there's a common thread to government in terms of short policy windows in short decision making. One of the reasons we pushed that community allostatic load work was to actually look at not just the negatives of intergenerational trauma, but understanding the, sort of the dynamism and the intergenerationality of experiences that were not kind of captured in wellbeing measurement to date or understanding where communities are starting. And then in reverse, what investment in policy choices will be much more dynamic and deal with the complexities of intergenerationalism or the complexities as you rightly note of land itself, self and land.

It does require a pretty significant mindset shift because first you have to acknowledge that there is an overtime nature to wellbeing that has to be measured. I think people understand overtime wellbeing, but it's not actually a lot captured in lot of wellbeing measurement. Second, you have to understand sort of cumulative process of the human experience, which is often not part of wellbeing measurement, which gets to the sociology of it, the developmentalism of it, the ecology of it. That's a piece of it. And third, just like this last question from Dom, about resiliency in efficiency. And I take the point, I would also argue that we're often put into false trade-offs about this question of short term policy, because we have political cycles, government cycles, PM cycles. I get it. As a result, we don't actually think in a kind of a holistic and a systemic way as sort of moving the pieces along.

So I would just caution, I would just say, Hey, these are truisms in terms of intergenerationality and cumulative nature of wellbeing. How does the work now accept that as opposed to trying integrate the other way? And I realise that's easier said than done. And that's where the narrative work and the other non-measurement work also has to come to play. But we have this issue in the U.S. as well, which is, well, this is just sort of too difficult, or this is where the grassroots organisations in the U.S. have said, "Well, we can't really measure wellbeing in the way that you're talking. So it's too difficult. So let's stop it." And that's not what anybody's saying here today, but I would just encourage saying how good has this approach really gotten us, in the U.S. it's not gotten us very far. Let's just be honest. It's requiring kind of a framework shift first.

Dominick Stephens (01:22:54):

Brilliant, thank you. Now we'll make this the last question. Tim is really interested in the Santa Monica example, but it's sort of going a little bit deeper with the question. So I'll just read it out.

Anita Chandra (01:23:06):

Sure.

Dominick Stephens (01:23:07):

"You spoke about moving the system of actors from one state to another, better state, but how did you decide where to start engaging within the system? Another way of putting it is how can the highest potential points of leverage be identified and adapted as the process rolls? Also, the model seems a bit predicated on a system uniformly wanting to change, great if that's the case, but how do your approaches deal with the systems or subsystems tendency to resist change?"

Anita Chandra (01:23:38):

Yes. So in Santa Monica, it's definitely not been an easy story and there have been ebbs and flows of great zeal about wellbeing and then backslides. And one of the things that has been important is that the work moved into kind of a civil society frame, moved outside of government after a while to try and re-energise the social movement and narrative around wellbeing. But your point, Tim, about the entry point is really well taken. Santa Monica, obviously, was the city government wanting to pursue this, but I've also worked with communities where the entry point is a civil society organisation. I've worked with communities where the entry point is a community philanthropy, and it does change a little bit of the, sort of the priorities and the nature of the conversation. The task, of course, is how to create language that connects all of these constituencies, but also uniquely speaks to those constituencies in a way that is meaningful.

And I think I used the word tactile earlier, but tactile is exceptionally important. And the work that we're doing now, some of these grassroots organisations and the narrative work is very suggestive of the fact that the language of wellbeing, not that people were saying get rid of wellbeing. There were sub-messages within that spoke to academics and policy makers, but didn't speak to grassroots organisations. This is a, I take it very much as a waves of social movement kind of approach where you backslide and you reconstitute and you find different ways to seed and embed. So for a few years, resilience was the thing. Then there was a major backlash to resilience because the argument was that it was blaming the victim and that government was absolving itself of any kind of responsibility.

And that happened because certain actors started to take on resilience in a way that it wasn't intended. The movement now to integrative resilience or equitable resilience is a response to that backlash, essentially. So I think you also have to figure out what are the phases, what are the cultural phases of wellbeing and how are you finding the leader entry organisation that makes sense for that phase of the conversation? And again, that's easier said than done, but getting to the earlier points about taking the long view, we have to also take the long view in terms of these broad concepts and how they're socialised, integrated and adopted. But I know this is true in other places, I certainly have experienced backlash, both to the resilience work and to the wellbeing work in ways that have changed the strategy fundamentally.

Dominick Stephens (01:26:56):

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Anita. This has been a-

Anita Chandra (01:27:00):

Thank you, it's a pleasure.

Dominick Stephens (01:27:00):

... really interesting. And as I say, very wide-ranging conversation and thanks very much to those who have attended and particularly those who asked questions to sort of illuminate and bring out some of those key points. So we shall sort of take this away and consider it with interest. So thanks again, everyone. I'll close the meeting here with a very brief karakia and wish you all the best for your day. [speaking in te reo Māori] Piki te Ora. Piki te Wairua. Piki te kaha. Mauri ora ē