(Version française disponible ici.)

Earlier this summer, we were in Estevan, Sask., for a conference on rural innovation that started us thinking about what it means for a community to be resilient, how it can capture new opportunities and what needs to happen for innovation to thrive.

Estevan, one of 10 communities profiled by the IRPP’s Community Transformations Project, has made it clear the city wants to play a bigger role in shaping its own economic future and building a resilient local economy. But what does that mean in practice?

What does it mean to be resilient?

Gross domestic product (GDP) — the value of everything a country creates and sells — is one of the predominant metrics used when discussing the economy’s health. And yet, Simon Kuznets, who pioneered the development of GDP, explicitly warned against using it as a metric for how society is doing.

In many ways, the world is now materially much better off than it’s ever been. But even though improvements in modern living standards trend with an increase in global GDP, this measure doesn’t tell us things such as how many people still die of infectious diseases or whether water is drinkable.

So, we agree with Kuznets and take him one step further. Moving beyond GDP means re-orienting how we assign value to the foundational systems and conditions underpinning an economy. It means recognizing the value of living healthy, connected lives. And it means viewing and measuring the well-being of a community as a foundational asset that has economic value.

The economic benefits of investing in well-being

Without community well-being, sustainable long-term economic growth becomes much more difficult. Studies show that when community quality of life is low, governments pay substantially more for policing,........

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