The Civilisation Balance Sheet: Rethinking Societal Progress Through Assets, Liabilities and Externalised Costs

Abstract

The Civilisation Balance Sheet (CBS) is a conceptual approach to assessing societal progress through the relationship between assets, liabilities, benefits and externalised costs. This working paper argues that conventional measures of economic performance can inadequately represent activities that sustain human and social capability, while failing to make sufficiently visible the social, health and ecological costs transferred between organisations, populations, places and generations. It proposes a complementary balance-sheet logic in which care and other forms of social infrastructure can be recognised as productive assets; depletion and preventable harm can be identified as liabilities; and the distribution of benefits and costs is made explicit. The paper considers four central principles: recognition of care and unpaid care as productive infrastructure; identification of externalised social, health and ecological costs; distributional and intergenerational attribution; and limits on compensatory aggregation where gains in one domain might otherwise obscure serious or irreversible losses in another. CBS is proposed not as a replacement for GDP, national accounting, wellbeing dashboards or the Sustainable Development Goals, but as an organising architecture capable of connecting economic, human, social and ecological information to a common set of accountability questions: What assets are being created, maintained or depleted? What liabilities are being generated? Who receives the benefits? Who bears the costs? And which consequences are being transferred to other places or future generations? This paper presents the conceptual rationale for CBS. A separate developing framework addresses its potential operational structure and application.