Exploring Sweden, in search of equality

What do cycle touring, equality, film-making and wild camping have in common? At first glance, not very much. But from August 4th to September 16th, two young graduates are cycling across Sweden, filming their adventure and asking what it's like to live in a more equal society.

One is a graduate from Forum for the Future’s masters course in Leadership for sustainable development; the other a future solicitor. On the journey, we will be asking if there are things we can learn that can be applied to the UK's political and economic realities, and the ‘big society’.

These questions arose from reading a new book called The Spirit Level, which spells out in convincing and shocking detail the statistical relationship between a whole range of social ills (for example, crime, bad health, teenage pregnancies and lack of trust) and levels of income inequality within developed countries. The authors, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, argue that it is a lack of social democracy, not GDP, which appears to determine a countries ability to tackle the long-standing and fundamental social problems we face. The most unequal countries – the USA, UK, and Singapore – fare many times worse than the most equal: Sweden, Norway, Finland and Japan.

And so we have looked to Sweden: a country of low inequality and poverty, yet high economic growth, health, education, happiness and trust. We want to find out what it actually feels like to live in a more equal society. Are the prejudices many of us hold in the UK true? Are more equal societies boring, turgid, lacking in innovation and places in which it’s hard to be an individual or be ‘successful’? Most importantly, do the Swede’s already have the ‘big society’ many involved in sustainability might like to see? There’s a chance it conflicts with the big society plan the coalition government is calling for.

The exploration will take us over a thousand miles through the cities and lakes of Sweden, wild camping, staying with strangers, talking with both ordinary people and academics alike. We are recording our six week journey via video diary, photo-blog, interview and finally, documentary film.

At the 2010 graduation for Forum’s Master’s students, Ed Gillespie of Futerra Communications suggested we needed to ‘hijack the big society.’ I’m not sure anyone really knows how to do this yet. But I think it is the responsibility of those working in sustainability to use the arguments in The Spirit Level to push for a fairer society.

I hope by learning from the Swedish, we can spark a debate about what our own big society could actually look like in a way that puts us on a platform to tackle our linked social and environmental problems. Tune in at Exploring Equality's website and get involved in the debate.

Let’s get talking about the kind of society you want to live in.

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