Sustainable Livelihoods and Integrative Improvement are both about changing the prevailing approaches to development - and about changing our minds and behaviour. According to author Graham Douglas, in order to do this we will have to learn to think, organise, and act differently.

The purpose of this article is to outline the core principles of Integrative Improvement (II) in comparison with current development approaches. This article describe key features of II and briefly comment on II in relation to the Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) approach of the United Kingdom Department for International Development.

Douglas describes core principles of II as including: a bottom-up approach involving everybody; an emphasis on connections and relationships because the current scientific understanding of our world tends to be self-organising with human beings whose minds are naturally integrative; improving the integrative and sustainable nature of the lives people already have in respect to their physical, social, and cultural environments; encouraging and facilitating integrative governance enabled by technology in all government, business and civil society organisations; indicators of national wellbeing to assess progress of II.

Douglas describes new Integrative Thinking (NEW IT) as a process of habitually and almost automatically making connections to create a whole new picture rather than habitually and almost automatically breaking down an old picture into its parts.

In respect to integrative governance, Douglas notes that in cases of networks of relationships the integrative capacity of individuals should "ensure enough stability to meet efficiently, effectively and competitively the needs and wants of end-consumers/citizens while remaining adaptable enough to self-organise to meet changes in those needs and wants."