Multiple dimensions of wellbeing in practice

In 2005 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) placed the relationship between human wellbeing and ecosystems firmly at the centre of the agenda for academics and policy makers concerned with sustainable development for the following decades (MA, 2005). The decision to use the concept of human wellbeing was relatively novel and ambitious at the time. Four years later, that decision was decisively underlined by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance (Stiglitz et al., 2009), commissioned by the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy and chaired by Joe Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. This report made a comprehensive case that if we are to achieve sustainable and inclusive development in our societies, then it is necessary to reform our major systems of statistical data collection from being focused on measuring progress in terms of production and consumption, to measuring it in terms of human wellbeing. Since that report there has been an explosion of initiatives to conceptualise and measure human wellbeing, and to put it into practice in academia and policy (Bache and Reardon, 2016; Helliwell et al., 2017)