| Resumen: |
his project note examines how the measurement of human well-being might contribute to making development policy and practice more effective. A surge of interest in and initiatives to develop measures of human well-being as a yardstick of societal progress followed the publication of the Final Report of the ‘Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress’ in 2009 (The Stiglitz Commission: Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussie, 2009), with a large number of competing conceptualisations, methodologies and ideologies now underpinning the initiatives underway. This paper begins by reviewing the current state of the art in the measurement of well-being field and is organised around a discussion of approaches to each of the three tasks necessary to make the exploration of "what matters for people" relevant for policy and practice:
1. Identify systematically what is important to people for them to live their lives well, and to do so in a way that is universally comprehensible but is nevertheless sensitive to particular social, economic and cultural contexts;
2. Find ways of assessing how well people are doing in their achievements in respect of the things that they regard as important for them to live well;
3. Establish ways of understanding how the different things that are important for well-being relate to each other. This may involve understanding how they are prioritised and what trade-offs may exist between them. From the policy perspective this relates to the challenge of establishing weightings in respect to the different things that matter. |
