International Examples of a Wellbeing Approach in Practice

Over recent years a movement has been building among policymakers and governments around the world to begin to incorporate a wellbeing approach into policy making. This momentum has been building because many governments and policy makers have come to realise that the current and historic way of making, designing, and implementing policy is often not enabling progress on important social and ecological challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and social polarisation.

This report responds to the growing momentum within the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (IenW) in the Netherlands to incorporate wellbeing policies and aims to provide an overview of specific cases of implementation of a wellbeing approach and to reflect on lessons learned from these approaches to support the Ministry in its journey.

The report builds on comprehensive research on examples for wellbeing policies and analyses five selected case studies. We selected examples of wellbeing policies from Wales, Scotland, France, Portugal, and Canada. Each case presented has been analysed using the structure of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance’s (WEAll) Wellbeing Economy Policy Design Guide which has been used as a tool to reflect on the process, implementation, and impact of each of the policies assessed in the report.

Our analysis shows that a policy design process that facilitates support and buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders to the vision, a strategy and plan designed from this vision, selecting policies based on this vision and strategy, confronting and addressing trade-offs and tensions, as well as robust impact assessment all set the preconditions for resulting impact.