by Dr Angelique Wildschut, u’GOOD co-principal investigator, HSRC Research Director, and thematic lead: livelihoods
For too long, the dominant ways we have understood wellbeing have focused on individualised metrics, looking at what individuals own, how they feel, or how well they function. For many young people growing up in the Global South, that picture misses the most important part of their lives: the web of relationships, environments, structures, institutions and their interdependencies that shape what is possible for them every day.
Relational wellbeing offers a different starting point
Drawing on more than 20 years of scholarship on wellbeing in the Global South as articulated by White & Jha (2020), relational wellbeing as an approach asserts that wellbeing is more than subjective happiness or merely based on the ownership of material assets. It emerges through the inter-relations of personal, societal and environmental structures and processes (White & Jha, 2023) and thus comprises three interlinked dimensions: material (having enough), relational (being with), and subjective (feeling good). This brings to the fore the importance of incorporating an understanding of how life is lived as a series of shared interactions, connections and strategies that take place in multiple domains and at interlinking levels – the personal, societal and environmental. None of these stand alone. Each is shaped by the others, and by the wider context a young person inhabits.
This matters because it shifts how we ask questions, what we measure and how we measure. If wellbeing is located in an understanding of personhood as inherently relational and co-constructed, this of course requires methodologies and practices that can reflect and “access” that relationality and co-constructedness (Wildschut et al, 2024). A similar point can be made for the emancipatory objectives of associated methodologies. These emerge from and align with a tradition of scholarship that understands the purpose of research and intervention as a tool towards achieving social justice (Swartz & Nyamnjoh, 2018). Promoting wellbeing is thus recognised as requiring intervention well beyond individual behaviour and psychology; it means engaging with families, peer groups, schools, workplaces, digital spaces, policy systems and ecological and social conditions as part of the same picture.
u’GOOD is a multi-year programme focused on young people and relational wellbeing in urban and peri-urban contexts in the Global South. It is a partnership between Fondation Botnar (Switzerland), the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the Human Sciences Research Council, and Flow Communications. Over 90% of the world’s young people live in the Global South (Ghai et al, 2022; Orri et al, 2022), yet much of the dominant scholarship on youth wellbeing has been generated elsewhere, in conditions of higher resource availability and very different social realities.
That gap matters. Young people in the South often face adversity that is deeper and more pervasive, with fewer buffers and protections, alongside extraordinary creativity in how they navigate it (Cooper et al, 2021). Research that only describes their challenges, without engaging with how they themselves respond, leaves the picture incomplete (Swartz, 2021).
u’GOOD is structured around four thematic areas where these dynamics are most acute for young people: livelihoods, mental health, digitalisation and climate change. Across these areas, the programme funds and supports research projects that interrogate the relational approach in practice, generate evidence for policy, and build a community of scholars working from Southern contexts (NRF & HSRC, 2023).
Our ambition is concrete. Through u’GOOD, we aim to:
- Entrench relational wellbeing as a vibrant theory and methodology for understanding and advancing youth wellbeing across the Global South and beyond.
- Amplify, to policy-makers and those involved in supporting young people, both the challenges they face and the relational strategies they employ to address them.
- Expand the community of stakeholders engaged in or using relational approaches in their work with young people (NRF & HSRC, 2023).
So how will this work change the world?
Honestly, no single research programme transforms the world by itself. What u’GOOD can do is help shift where the conversation begins. By centring young people as collaborators rather than subjects, working across disciplines and across the South, and holding open the question of what wellbeing actually means in different contexts, the programme contributes to what Swartz and colleagues describe as “epistepraxis”, a realignment of theory, practice and politics towards a more just world for young people in the Global South (Swartz, 2021,; Cooper et al, 2021).
Within increasingly shifting and complex contexts that characterise the realities of young people, such an approach can offer powerful opportunities to access and illustrate the complexity of youth wellbeing. Such approaches become important in recognition of the ways young people navigate the world as they seek livelihoods, contend with assaults on their mental health, experience the impact of climate change and the confluence of many of these factors with increasing digitalisation.
If we get this right, the way we fund and design work with young people will look different. Policies will pay more attention to the relational conditions that make wellbeing possible. Research will be conducted with young people rather than on them. And the knowledge produced from Southern contexts will hold its own weight in global debates, contributing to a more complete picture of what it means to flourish, anywhere.
That is the work we are doing. That is why it matters.
Bibliography
Cooper, A., Swartz, S., & Ramphalile, M. (2021). Youth in the Global South. Cited in National Research Foundation (2023).
Ghai, S., Magis-Weinberg, L., Stoilova, M., Livingstone, S., & Orben, A. (2022). Social media and adolescent well-being in the Global South. Current Opinion in Psychology, 46, Article 101318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101318
National Research Foundation and Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa (2023). Young People and Relational Wellbeing Research Programme Framework. Prepared and submitted to Fondation Botnar in support of the programme proposal. August 2023.
Orri, M., Ahun, M. N., Naicker, S., Besharati, S., & Richter, L. M. (2022). Childhood factors associated with suicidal ideation among South African youth: A 28-year longitudinal study of the Birth to Twenty Plus cohort. PLoS Medicine, 19(3), Article e1003946. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003946
Swartz, S. (2021). A southern charter for a global youth studies to benefit the world. In S. Swartz, A. Cooper, C. Batan, & L. Kropff Causa (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Global South Youth Studies (pp. 607-621). Oxford University Press.
Swartz, S., & Nyamnjoh, A. (2018). Research as freedom: Using a continuum of interactive, participatory and emancipatory methods for addressing youth marginality. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 74(3), Article a5063. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v74i3.5063
White, S. C., & Jha, S. (2020). Therapeutic culture and relational wellbeing. In D. Nehring, O. J. Madsen, D. Kerrigan, E. Cabanas & C. Mills (Eds)., The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures (pp. 203–214). Routledge.
White, S. C., & Jha, S. (2023). Exploring the relational in relational wellbeing. Social Sciences, 12(11), Article 600. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12110600
Wildschut, A., Groenewald, C., Swartz, S., McBride, S. and Chetty, K. (2024) The value of relational wellbeing theory for youth studies research in the Global South: A purposive review of evidence. HSRC evidence review. HSRC Press: Cape Town.
Wildschut, A., Ntsepe, Y., Abrahams, H., Groenewald, C. & Swartz, S. (2026 forthcoming) What distinct opportunities could relational wellbeing as framework offer to advance wellbeing research? A purposive review of evidence. Frontiers in Psychology: Positive Psychology Section.
For more information about the u’GOOD research programme and relational wellbeing, visit ugoodresearch.org
