Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies

The Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies (CBS), known from its founding in 1999 until 2012 as the Centre for Bhutan Studies, is an autonomous research institution based in Thimphu. It is the principal body responsible for administering Bhutan's Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index, for developing the GNH Policy Screening Tool used in national planning, and for producing scholarly work on Bhutanese history, religion, language and contemporary society. The Centre is headed by Dasho Karma Ura, who has served as its president since its foundation.^[1]

CBS is at once a research institute, a state-facing policy adviser and the public custodian of Bhutan's most visible international export — the GNH concept. That dual role has shaped how the Centre is perceived both inside and outside the country. Within Bhutan it is widely respected as the leading scholarly publisher on Bhutanese studies and the convener of the international GNH conferences. Internationally it is the body most often quoted when Bhutan's alternative development model is discussed. Critics have argued that the Centre's closeness to the Royal Government and its role in branding GNH make it an imperfect arbiter of the philosophy's effectiveness — a tension explored at length in the BhutanWiki article on happiness washing.

History and mandate

The Centre was established in 1999 by royal command as the Centre for Bhutan Studies, with a mandate to conduct research on Bhutan's history, religion, art, politics and contemporary development. Its founding coincided with a period in which Bhutan was beginning to open itself cautiously to international scholarship while remaining wary of the loss of cultural distinctiveness. Karma Ura, a Rhodes Scholar and senior civil servant, was appointed founding director.^[1]

Through the 2000s the Centre's remit expanded from general Bhutanese studies into the operationalisation of Gross National Happiness. In 2008 it administered Bhutan's first nationwide GNH pilot survey, followed by full surveys in 2010, 2015 and 2022. In 2012 it was formally renamed the Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies to reflect the GNH focus, and was reconstituted under a board chaired by the Prime Minister with representation from the royal family, civil service and academia.^[2]

The GNH Index and the Alkire-Foster method

The Centre's best-known output is the GNH Index — a composite measure of wellbeing structured around nine domains (psychological wellbeing, health, education, time use, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards) and 33 indicators. The index is built using the Alkire-Foster method developed by Sabina Alkire and James Foster at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), and was adapted for Bhutanese conditions in a multi-year collaboration between OPHI and the Centre.^[3]

The index classifies respondents as "deeply happy", "extensively happy", "narrowly happy" or "unhappy", based on the number of indicators on which they meet a defined sufficiency threshold. Results are published at the national level and disaggregated by gender, dzongkhag, rural/urban residence, occupation and educational attainment. The Centre has published full GNH survey reports for 2010, 2015 and 2022, each running to several hundred pages. The 2022 survey, conducted during the post-pandemic period, showed a modest increase in the overall GNH score over 2015 while also documenting sharp declines in several living-standards indicators and growing gender disparities.^[2]

Methodological details, known limitations and critiques of the survey instrument are covered in the dedicated BhutanWiki article on GNH Survey Methodology and Limitations.

The GNH Policy Screening Tool

Beyond measurement, the Centre developed the GNH Policy Screening Tool, a checklist instrument through which draft Royal Government policies are evaluated against the nine GNH domains before approval by the Cabinet or presentation to parliament. In theory, a policy that scores poorly against one or more GNH domains is meant to be revised or withheld. In practice the tool has been applied inconsistently, and its effectiveness has been debated by Bhutanese commentators and academic observers. The Centre has acknowledged that a screening tool can shape policy deliberation but cannot by itself ensure implementation.

International GNH conferences

The Centre convened the first International Conference on Gross National Happiness in Thimphu in 2004, bringing together Bhutanese officials, international development economists and figures associated with alternative economics such as Manfred Max-Neef and Herman Daly. Subsequent conferences were hosted in Nova Scotia (2005), Bangkok (2007), Bhutan (2008) and Brazil (2009), among other venues. The conferences were instrumental in carrying the GNH framework into wider circles of development economics and psychology and in building the intellectual coalition that eventually led to United Nations General Assembly resolution 65/309 in 2011, which recognised happiness as a "fundamental human goal" and acknowledged Bhutan's contribution.^[4]

Publications and scholarship

The Centre publishes the peer-reviewed Journal of Bhutan Studies, a biannual open-access journal covering Bhutanese history, religion, language, economy and society. The journal has published work by both Bhutanese and international scholars including Michael Hutt, Françoise Pommaret, John Ardussi and Karma Phuntsho. Back issues are freely available on the Centre's website.^[1]

The Centre has also published monographs on specific topics including the history of the Wangchuck dynasty, traditional Bhutanese music, the economics of hydropower, and the ethnographic documentation of festivals and monasteries. Karma Ura's own books, including The Hero with a Thousand Eyes and Deities and Environment, have been issued through the Centre's press.

Relationship with the Royal Government

CBS is a Royal Government body and not an independent think tank. Its board is chaired by the Prime Minister, its funding comes largely from the state, and its research agenda is shaped in consultation with the Cabinet Secretariat and the Gross National Happiness Commission (now subsumed into the Cabinet Secretariat's planning wing). This closeness has given the Centre privileged access to primary data and senior policymakers, but also constrains the kinds of conclusions it can publicly draw. On politically sensitive subjects — notably the 1990s expulsion of the Lhotshampa population, press freedom, and political prisoners — the Centre's published work has generally reflected official framings or has avoided the subjects altogether. Critical treatments of these topics have come from outside the Centre, including from exile Bhutanese scholars and from independent journalists such as Tenzing Lamsang at The Bhutanese.

Criticism and defence

The Centre has faced three recurring criticisms from external observers. First, that its dual role as measurer and promoter of GNH creates an inherent conflict of interest. Second, that its surveys treat the 1990s-era Lhotshampa expulsion and the subsequent refugee population as lying outside the frame of Bhutanese wellbeing rather than as a constitutive failure of the GNH project. Third, that the GNH Policy Screening Tool, while conceptually interesting, has not been shown to meaningfully alter policy outputs on the most contested issues. These critiques are discussed in the BhutanWiki articles on criticism of Gross National Happiness, GNH and the Lhotshampa exclusion and happiness washing.

Defenders of the Centre argue that it has produced the most sustained scholarship on Bhutanese society available anywhere, that the GNH Index is one of the few national wellbeing measures in the world to use a rigorous multidimensional methodology rather than opinion polling, and that the Centre's publications have opened Bhutanese materials to international scholarship in a period when the country remained otherwise difficult to access. Karma Ura has repeatedly emphasised that the GNH framework was never intended as a claim that all Bhutanese are happy, but as an organising philosophy for public policy — a distinction that he argues is often lost in international coverage.^[2]

See also

• Gross National Happiness
• Karma Ura
• GNH Survey Methodology and Limitations
• GNH Policy Screening Tool
• Criticism of Gross National Happiness
• Happiness Washing: Bhutan's Brand vs Reality
• GNH and the Lhotshampa Exclusion
• Bhutan's International Image and Nation Branding
• Karma Phuntsho
• Françoise Pommaret
• Michael Hutt
• John Ardussi

References

1. Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies — Official Website
2. Gross National Happiness — Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies
3. The Alkire-Foster Method — Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative
4. UN General Assembly Resolution 65/309: Happiness — Towards a Holistic Approach to Development (2011) — UN Digital Library
5. Happiness and Well-Being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm — UN High-Level Meeting (2 April 2012)
6. Kuensel — Bhutan's national newspaper