Wellbeing not Economy - Village Magazine

50May 2015

VEN the American economist, Simon Kuznets, who developed

‘Gross Domestic Product’ (GDP) as a ‘crude’ aggregate measure

of economic activity in a time of emergency during the s,

warned that it was never intended as a long-term approach to cap-

turing information on important dimensions of progress such as

welfare.

From Bhutan to Ecuador a new conversation is emerging with a

view to generating a more holistic picture of economic and social

progress. Moving ‘Beyond GDP’ summarises the macro-economic

dimension of these policy debates, while the language of wellbeing

has been taken up to sum up individual and societal aspirations.

Typical domains used to measure wellbeing include income,

employment, health, education, social connectedness, civic

engagement, environment, subjective wellbeing, transport and

culture.

For just over a year, the QUB School of Law and the Carnegie UK

Trust have been convening a high-level Roundtable to draw up rec-

ommendations on a framework to place wellbeing at the heart of

governance in Northern Ireland. Roundtable members were drawn

from the highest ranks of the civil service and from civil society,

academia, the private sector and the main political parties.

The Roundtable’s deliberations and recommendations address

four high-level themes:

• A new narrative for governance in Northern Ireland: a call on

the Northern Ireland Executive to join with civil society in identi-

fying a new narrative with a focus on societal wellbeing;

• An outcomes-focused wellbeing framework: A practical and

accessible outcomes-focused Wellbeing Framework for the North-

ern Ireland Executive’s future Programmes for Government.

• Citizen Engagement: Implicit in the Roundtable’s recommenda-

tions for a Wellbeing Framework is call for a transformation in the

quality of evidence-based policy deliberation within government

and in collaboration with other stakeholders, notably through

Local Government and Community Planning.

• New Ways of Working: The Roundtable’s recommendations are

draw inspiration from emerging initiatives on Open Government,

outcomes-based approaches (‘Inspiring Impact’) to policy design

and delivery, and the opportunities for participation opened up by

new technologies and social media.

The intellectual origins of the Roundtable can be traced back to

the inﬂuential Report of the Commission on the Measurement of

Economic Performance and Social Progress () co-chaired by

Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. The Report’s

ﬁndings – underscoring the limitations of our over-reliance on

aggregate measures of economic productivity such as GDP –

emerged just as similar lessons were entering the mainstream

media in the wake of the global economic/ﬁnancial crisis. The

‘Beyond GDP’ discourse also resonates with long-standing conver-

sations within the global environmental movement, stretching

back to the work of the Club of Rome on ‘limits to growth’.

In developing our thinking about wellbeing, we have been inﬂu-

enced by the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha

Nussbaum. For Sen development is ultimately associated with the

realisation of human freedoms. He is not only concerned with the

categorisation of individual functionings (e.g. literacy, health,

mobility, ability to reason) but with the decisive factors, notably

freedom and equality, that mediate an individual’s access to oppor-

tunities to complete an autonomous and valued life path.

Sen was among the ﬁrst to understand how the lives we

value are only loosely associated with access to commodi-

ties. At the root of the wellbeing agenda is a radical idea:

not all satisﬁers of human aspirations can be reduced to

an economic ‘algorithm’ or monetary value.

Sen and Nussbaum’s understanding of wellbeing also

has important political insights for post-conﬂict socie-

ties, including opportunities to link wellbeing to the

cultivation of conditions for democratic reasoning,

engagement and autonomy. The former PSNI Chief Con-

stable, Matt Baggott, drew attention to the links between wellbeing

and conﬂict in  when he identiﬁed a number of longer-term

issues that must be addressed for those communities who feel left

behind and where a deep sense of grievance is keenly felt. He

referred to high suicide rates, high rates of health inequality, and

low educational achievement. •

A roundtable is pushing a new narrative

for governance in Northern Ireland.

By John Woods and Peter Doran

Wellbeing not Economy

POLITICS Northern Ireland

Simon Hamilton MLA,

Minister for Finance

and Personnel,

took delivery of the

Roundtable’s report,

‘Towards a Wellbeing

Framework (2015)’

in March. Follow

the Roundtable on

Twitter@NIwellbeing