If doubts prevail whether ‘the welfare state’ is a feasible option for Asian societies, and ‘populism’ – driven by the market-economy and intending to satisfy the needs of citizens at an artificial level only – is increasingly rejected as an un-sustainable solution, other alternatives will have to be explored.

Re-thinking the fundamentals of ‘property’ may lead the way to unlock new development paradigms. An enormous diversity of new movements of living alternatives has come up since the 1970’s. To mention only a few: the World Social Forum, ‘Cultural Creatives’, the Eco-villages and Transition-towns movement, social entrepreneurship, the Commons Movement.

At the dawn of UNCED 2012, twenty years after the groundbreaking conference in Rio de Janeiro, the School for Wellbeing proposes to create a modest but effective momentum – 25-27 August 2011 – to take stock of what is happening in the world of alternative development, in Asia, Southeast Asia and the Mekong region, in order to contribute to empowering and re-positioning Thai and Asian change agents in the global transformation movement.