In 2006, the Happy Planet Index named Vanuatu the happiest country on Earth — even as the United Nations continued to classify it among the world’s most impoverished Least Developed Countries. That contradiction helped launch the Melanesian Wellbeing Indicators (MWI) initiative in 2009, developing indicators within three new and locally-defined domains previously absent from official statistics: access to indigenous land and natural resources, traditional knowledge and practice, and community vitality. The MWI was among the first nationally-led efforts to move beyond GDP in measuring and reporting progress, and for years I viewed these indicators as measures of economic independence, of the health of the traditional economy, and of cultural relevance — incorporating Melanesian values into how we gauged the wellbeing of the population.

It was through my late friend Dr. Eleanor Sterling that I came to see these same indicators through a different lens. Beginning in 2016, she brought me into a newly formed Biocultural Indicators Working Group, where over several workshops I learned to see our MWIs not as separate social, cultural, and economic measures, but as evidence that wellbeing is inseparably linked to people’s relationships with their local environment — at least in Vanuatu. It is striking that this same period — as the working group built that comparative, global picture — was the period in which Vanuatu’s own government formally adopted several of these same MWIs into its National Sustainable Development Plan (2016–2030) Monitoring and Evaluation Framework. It was in that Working Group, alongside Eleanor, that I gained a new appreciation for our MWIs as biocultural indicators for the first time.

This presentation demonstrates that lesson, drawing on the 2012 Pilot Study and the 2019–2020 NSDP Baseline Survey to examine specific indicators — land access, traditional production skills, ceremonial participation, social reciprocity — through a biocultural lens. I argue this lens helps explain what the Happy Planet Index has measured for nearly two decades and why Vanuatu is once again #1 in the world: Vanuatu’s wellbeing is maintained by its population’s depth of integration with the local environment. This is presented in memory of Eleanor Sterling, who helped a generation of Pacific practitioners see their own work in broader context.