ARCHIVE: Wellbeing and Sustainable Development
Background
Wellbeing has long been an implicit goal of Government policy, and recently it has been increasingly identified as an explicit aim in a wide range of policies at local, regional and national level. Work under the UK 2005 sustainable development strategy, Securing the Future, has bought together a range of policy makers and stakeholders to explore the role of an explicit wellbeing focus in policy making, and to develop national wellbeing indicators.
Securing the Future recognised that wellbeing is at the heart of sustainable development. It identified a need to ensure that wellbeing issues are being tackled consistently, in the right way. To address this, the strategy committed the government to get a better understanding of wellbeing by sponsoring cross-disciplinary work to bring together existing research and international experience and to explore how policies might change with an explicit wellbeing focus. Work to take this forward has been led by Defra in consultation with other Government departments and other stakeholders.
Independent research on wellbeing measures and influences that was commissioned by Defra has informed the development of national wellbeing indicators. These were published as part of the sustainable development indicator set on 31 July 2007on a consultative basis.
Updated: 27 July 2007