Project summary

Carnegie UK’s Governing for Wellbeing programme builds on our longstanding work on wellbeing frameworks at local, regional and national level across the UK and Ireland.

This programme asks how these frameworks, and wider wellbeing governance models, can move from measurement and narrative to have practical influence over priorities, policy choices, public spending and ways of working.

What is a wellbeing framework?

A wellbeing framework helps government work towards improving people’s lives in a systematic way. It does so by re-orientating public policy away from focusing solely on managing siloed activities and short-term outputs, towards a broader approach which takes a long-term view and builds population wellbeing over time.

1. Establishing a shared, explicit vision of societal success. The vision clarifies what government is ultimately for, providing a unifying reference point across political cycles, portfolios and functions of government, and legitimising long-term decision-making.
2. Defining long-term population outcomes. These outcomes describe what success looks like for people, communities and the environment. This broadens accountability from individual programmes to include population-level change, and from short-term delivery to stewardship for the long term.
3. Embedding an indicator set. Indicators track whether outcomes are improving or worsening over time, making progress and trade-offs visible and contestable. They are best understood not as performance targets, but as data points to support decision making and an assessment of collective national progress, in a context where no single body controls what happens.
4. Rewiring ways of working across government. This means aligning decisions, budgets and accountabilities with long-term outcomes as well as shorter-term goals. These ways of working are the enabling conditions that turn a wellbeing framework from aspiration into practice.

A wellbeing framework helps decision makers connect day-to-day choices with a long-term vision of progress. Governing for Wellbeing focuses on how these frameworks can shape the choices governments make in practice, including how priorities are set, how resources are allocated, how policy trade-offs are handled and how public bodies are held to account.

Why this matters

Carnegie UK has long argued that measuring what matters is central to social progress. Following the Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi Commission and the OECD’s work on measuring wellbeing and progress, governments around the world have developed frameworks that seek to describe what people, communities and places need in order to live well. These frameworks can help broaden our understanding of progress beyond GDP, including across social, economic, environmental and democratic outcomes.

But measurement alone is not enough. The next challenge is to ensure wellbeing frameworks and governance models shape the decisions that matter most. Our Governing for Wellbeing programme explores how these approaches can become part of the practical machinery of government: informing trade-offs, strengthening accountability, supporting long-term thinking and helping policy makers take a more joined-up view of the outcomes that matter to people.

What we are doing

Through this programme, Carnegie UK will gather evidence on how wellbeing governance models are designed, adopted and implemented. We will examine examples from the UK, Ireland and internationally, with a focus on the conditions that help governments connect wellbeing measures to policy, budgeting, delivery and accountability.

We will work with experts, practitioners and decision makers to test our learning, develop practical framing, and build the case for putting wellbeing at the heart of government. The work will focus on how wellbeing governance can help decision makers use evidence about people’s lives to set clearer priorities, navigate difficult choices and improve collective wellbeing over the long term.

What we hope to achieve

We want decision makers to have a clearer understanding of the practical value of wellbeing governance, and of the steps needed to make these models more influential in practice. We will produce evidence, insight and recommendations that help governments move from measuring what matters to using that evidence to design, test and strengthen long-term approaches to decision making.

Our ambition is to support governments to making decisions that are guided by what matters most to people, communities and future generations.