Tag: OECD

Wellbeing: increasingly a crucial public policy goal

SUII Director, Charlie Woods, discusses the continued attention being dedicated to conceptions of wellbeing in research, policy and practice.

SUII Director, Charlie Woods, discusses the continued attention being dedicated to conceptions of wellbeing in research, policy and practice.

It has been four years since our themed programme on wellbeing (summarised here), which looked at the insights from taking a wider wellbeing approach to public policy and practice. Over this period, there has been a steady increase in interest in promoting wellbeing as a policy objective. This note highlights a couple of recent examples.

Continue reading “Wellbeing: increasingly a crucial public policy goal”

Statistics, wellbeing and policy

In the week that we celebrated World Statistics Day it seems fitting to reflect back on what I learned recently at the OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy in Mexico. The forum was the fifth of its kind over the last decade that have focussed on the need for better measures and policies for societal progress. This year, the strapline, ‘Transforming Policy, Changing Lives’ signalled a move forward from simply measuring progress, to translating these measures into policy and practice.

The conference highlighted that much work has been done in recent years to develop robust indicators and collect data on wellbeing across different countries, and there was a strong sense that wellbeing is now part of a mainstream agenda, backed by evidence and data. This is coupled with a growing international acceptance of the need to move beyond GDP as the sole measure of progress. Continue reading “Statistics, wellbeing and policy”

Wellbeing: No laughing matter

SUII Director Charlie Woods sets out the aims and wider context of our wellbeing programme.

The term wellbeing can conjure up different images depending on your perspective. A consequence of this is that taking a wellbeing approach to assessing the progress of society can at first sight appear to some to be a bit ‘happy clappy’. However, it is a much more serious endeavour, with some well-established antecedents. As David Hume wrote:

“The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.”

In a similar vein in 1913 Andrew Carnegie gave his UK Trust the remit of the “improvement of the wellbeing of the masses of the people of Great Britain and Ireland”.

A broader wellbeing framework is being adopted by many countries and by the OECD as a whole through its ‘Better Life’ work. Such an approach attempts to take a more balanced look at understanding what influences the wellbeing of citizens and measuring progress. In some places subjective surveys of happiness or life satisfaction are used, although they usually only form part of the picture alongside more objective measures of social, environmental and economic progress.

Scotland is recognised as being one of the leading countries in developing a wellbeing approach through its National Performance Framework. The SUII programme of work was in part aimed at looking at how this could be further developed. One of the conclusions reached was the importance of more actively engaging people throughout the country in identifying what factors are most important in improving their lives and how best they should be measured and monitored. This offers the opportunity to build on the energy generated by the referendum campaign and help strengthen accountability and democracy in Scotland.