Wellbeing Frameworks: Emerging Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities

Worldwide, a growing number of societal wellbeing frameworks are being developed and used to provide measures of progress that go beyond economic growth. The emergence of these frameworks highlights both the opportunities and challenges of reconceptualising social progress and its measurement around the concept of wellbeing. This chapter provides a brief history of the evolution of societal wellbeing frameworks and common challenges in their development, such as how best to determine what to include, how to integrate measures of wellbeing that are typically drawn from a diverse range of disciplines, and, increasingly, how to include both objective and subjective measures. It examines the key need for the ongoing development of an integrated science of wellbeing that can continue to build the validity, utility, and implementation of these frameworks.