Where did the Wellbeing Framework idea come from?

In February 2008, following the global financial crash, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked economists Jean Paul Fitoussi, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz to consider the limitations of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and how national progress might otherwise be measured.

The resulting “Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi” Commission’s report of 2009 contained a series of recommendations, including:

“At a minimum, in order to measure sustainability, what we need are indicators that inform us about the change in the quantities of the different factors that matter for future well-being”.

The OECD subsequently developed the commission’s recommendations into a Framework for Measuring Well-Being and Progress.

Both the original recommendations by the Commission and the OECD framework have subsequently been used by various governments in nations around the world to inform and structure their own wellbeing frameworks.  Each of these seeks to identify and measure what is important to the population in a place and then inform policy designed to bring about changes that might improve those outcomes.

How did Carnegie UK first get involved?

The Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi report recommended a focus on “wellbeing” as the purpose of governments, which clearly aligned with Carnegie UK’s long-held wellbeing mission “to improve the wellbeing of the people”.

The report also recommended that:

“At the national level, Round Tables should be established, with the involvement of stakeholders, to identify and prioritise those indicators that carry the potential for a shared view of how social progress is happening and how it can be sustained over time.”

As early as 2009, and inspired by Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi, Carnegie UK partnered in hosting a conference in Dundee called “Measuring What Matters. This event, plus the specific recommendation about indicators and measurement, led to the establishment in 2010 of the Carnegie Round Table on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress in Scotland.  

The resulting report was published to coincide with the 2011 Scottish elections and made recommendations about how the National Performance Framework (NPF) should evolve. The two main recommendations were aimed at the Scottish Government, calling for it to:

• Engage with and be guided by the Stiglitz Report to create a new framework with new indicators.
• Work along with civil society to host a much wider debate about the aspirations of Scotland, the relevance of wellbeing as a goal and how we can develop better measures of wellbeing that resonate with the wider population.

This 2011 report set out some key findings about how government should work:

• Measure what matters.
• Connect that measurement to policy making across government.
• Improve accountability for performance against the outcomes framework.
• All the governments of the UK should learn from each other in applying the recommendations of the Stiglitz report.

Working with OECD

In 2016, Carnegie UK and OECD came together to produce Sharpening our Focus: Guidance on Wellbeing Frameworks for Cities and Regions

The introduction to the report states, “The OECD and Carnegie UK Trust share the aim of improving wellbeing through better governance. At the global level, the OECD has been at the forefront of the development of wellbeing frameworks to measure social progress through its Better Life index and How’s Life in Your Region? In the UK, Carnegie UK has actively supported UK jurisdictions to develop wellbeing frameworks to guide their policy making.”

Wellbeing and Devolution

In 2019, Jennifer Wallace, then Head of Policy at Carnegie UK, published “Wellbeing and Devolution” for Palgrave Macmillan, which examined the development of wellbeing approaches across the UK’s devolved jurisdictions. This comparative study argued that “wellbeing frameworks must be seen as attempts by devolved legislatures to provide broad measures of social progress and to hold themselves accountable for progress towards agreed social outcomes”.

A focus on metrics

From 2019, Carnegie UK looked more closely at the question of metrics – what should be measured as part of a wellbeing approach and how progress should be assessed and reported over time. This took the form of advocacy with ONS on their Dashboard of Wellbeing Measures and the development in 2021 of GDWe – an alternative measure of social progress which subsequently evolved into the Life in the UK index.

Revisiting the Wellbeing Roundtable model

In 2021, Carnegie UK and the North of Tyne Combined Authority brought together a Wellbeing Roundtable for the North of Tyne . Following this, in January 2021, the North of Tyne became the first Mayoral Combined Authority in the UK to formally adopt a wellbeing framework. In doing so, they committed to aligning future decision making with the goal of improving social, economic, environmental and democratic outcomes for everyone living in the region.  The story of this was published as The North of Tyne Combined Authority Inclusive Economy Board’s Wellbeing Framework for the North of Tyne.

At the same time, Carnegie UK and Northumbria University published The Wellbeing Roundtable approach: From measuring what matters to making change happen – guidance on how to construct and implement wellbeing frameworks.

Ongoing advocacy

In 2024-5, the Scottish Government consulted on the National Outcomes as a precursor to a broader reform of the whole NPF, and the Northern Ireland Executive developed a new Programme for Government which included a wellbeing framework.

In recent years, Carnegie UK has worked with the Scottish Government  and with Sarah Boyack MSP on proposals for wellbeing legislation in Scotland. This work has included making the case for appropriate accountability and scrutiny mechanisms of progress towards the National Outcomes, hosting learning visits from elsewhere in the UK, and advocating for better use of the National Performance Framework as Scotland’s wellbeing framework.

Carnegie UK continues to be a leading and influential advocate for the development and improvement of these frameworks as a way of embedding social, economic, environmental and democratic perspectives into policy making, prioritisation and resource-allocation. Measuring what matters and using the findings to guide decision making in government.

Want to find out more?

Our key contact for this programme is Sarah.