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Putting wellbeing at the heart of decision-making part 2

  • Adam Lang, Carnegie UK
  • 19 June 2025
  • 7 minute read

Part Two: What we’re learning about what this means

At Carnegie UK our overarching strategic aim is to put wellbeing at the heart of decision-making.

We believe that well made public policy, focussed on ensuring people have what they need to live well now and in the future, can make a real difference to people’s lives.

That might all sound nice on paper, but what does it mean in practice? In this second in a three-part series of blogs, I will be exploring this in a bit more detail and setting out some practical examples of what this can look like, informed by our current work.

Probably the first and most important point to make in this context is that the world of wellbeing public policy is a vibrant and international field of both study and practice. As such, it is ever changing and evolving. So, this is not intended to be a definitive description of what putting wellbeing at the heart of decision-making looks like. Indeed, an essential aspect of effective wellbeing approaches to governance is that they should always be context specific and relevant to local needs. As much of what underpins wellbeing approaches to governance is about ideology and methodology as it is about practical tools.

However, I want to highlight four practical aspects of wellbeing public policy approaches that are aligned to our current 2025 workplan at Carnegie UK. We think that these are a good place to start for any government looking to adopt longer-term, outcome focussed approaches to public policy making that improves people’s lives:

  • Start with understanding how people are living and measure what matters: What gets measured gets done. Any effort to embed wellbeing approaches to decision-making must begin with measuring what matters and objectively understanding the story of how people are living in a place. When policy makers better understand how things are right now, they can then focus their vision and agenda for the future on where intervention is most needed. Governments around the world have adopted a variety of approaches to this kind of wellbeing measurement. At Carnegie UK we are most interested in measuring what we call our “collective wellbeing”, as opposed to what is often referred to as “subjective” or individual wellbeing. This is because we believe that knowing as much as possible about all aspects of how we are living now is necessary to help identify the policy interventions that can have the biggest impact on people’s lives at scale. That’s why we have committed to running and publishing our Life in the UK Index as a measure of the UK’s collective wellbeing, through until 2030. This will provide both a regular, independent monitor of how we are living, as well as insight on how this (or isn’t) is changing over time. We hope this index will inform governments and inspire them to adopt similar models to better measure what matters to people.

 

  • Develop and embed a wellbeing framework based on a vision and outcomes: Once you have a sense of how people are living today, you then need a vision and plan for how to focus resources to make things better. This is where wellbeing frameworks come in. A wellbeing framework is a tool for decision making based on a clear and coherent vision of what better collective wellbeing looks like, underpinned by locally relevant outcomes and indicators. Such frameworks are an essential way of connecting what governments measure to how they allocate resources, as well as how they are held accountable for progress. At Carnegie UK we have worked extensively with governments and partners across the UK and Ireland and internationally to support the development and adoption of wellbeing frameworks. Most recently this has included working with the North of Tyne in England to develop their local wellbeing framework, influencing the Scottish Government’s review of its National Performance Framework, and engagement with the Northern Ireland Executive on its new wellbeing dashboard. There is no one size fits all approach to these frameworks as they must be context specific and relevant to local need, but there are numerous domestic and international examples of similar approaches that have been done well and can act as inspiration in bringing coherence and focus to delivering shared outcomes.

 

  • Ensure there is voice and choice for people in decision-making: A core aspect of improving our collective wellbeing is ensuring people have voice and choice over the decisions that affect them. Indeed, the vision and outcomes of any wellbeing framework should reflect what matters to the people living in a place. Wellbeing cannot be ‘done to’ people, it must be done by and with them. Conversations, interactions and deliberation between diverse communities, sectors and professions must be enabled and encouraged in order to inform policy. As such, it is essential that governments listen to and learn from the experiences and perspectives of citizens and stakeholders to develop policies and programmes that are responsive to their needs. This has never been more urgent than in the face of today’s crisis of trust in democracy across the UK. Deliberative and participatory democratic processes can play an important role in improving our democratic wellbeing. That’s why our Engaging Democracy programme is working to help expose more decisionmakers to these processes and build support for embedding them into legislatures across the UK.

 

  • Build wellbeing into how governments work, including budget processes: Implementing a wellbeing approach to government requires significant changes to culture and practice throughout existing systems. It is a fundamental shift towards longer-term outcomes underpinned by transparency, subsidiarity and engagement. One of the important and most challenging aspects of this agenda relates to financial decision-making as it requires a significant shift from the current dominant models of prioritising and evaluating public expenditure against shorter-term returns on investment. In contrast, wellbeing approaches to budgeting are about directing spend and investment to those areas that have the greatest impact on longer-term shared outcomes. This can include investing in preventative measures to help address the root causes of wellbeing challenges or in enabling infrastructure that cuts across multiple policy domains. While governments in the UK have had limited success in embedding wellbeing approaches to public finances, other governments around the world have been bolder and more ambitious. This is something that our Financing the Future programme is seeking to explore to see what the UK can learn from the successes and limitations of these international efforts.

These examples are anchored in the things that we at Carnegie UK are currently working on and are a good place to start for any government that wants to know where to begin in putting wellbeing approaches at the heart of decision-making. There are of course many other areas of importance in this space that are worthy of examination such as auditing practices, institutionalising long-term policy design and workforce upskilling. It is also important that for any efforts to be successful they must also be underpinned by an evolution in both culture and mindset in terms of how governments seek to identify shared problems and work across portfolios to deliver outcomes.

So, if these things represent some of the “what” involved in putting wellbeing at the heart of decision-making, the next important question is how we make it happen. This is what I will be looking at in the final part of this series – it turns out that while it probably isn’t rocket science, the science of rockets might be relevant.