Wellbeing per Capita | Bonneville Franco - Wellbeing Consulting

Wellbeing per Capita in Portugal

At a worldwide level, governments are risking going beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure their countries' progress. The adoption of new metrics, defined from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and national indicators of wellbeing, shifts the focus from the "means" to the "ends", that is, from economic growth to collective wellbeing.

The starting point is assumed that economic thinking has determined not only how we measure progress, but also governmental structures, social power dynamics and cultural narratives. The bottom line is this: it is critical to develop a wellbeing economy whose policies have the community and the future of the planet at their centre.

It is with this objective that Engaging Happiness and Global Media Group (DN, JN e TSF) have established a partnership to launch in 2022 a nationwide project aiming:

1. The development of a vision and wellbeing framework that reflects Portugal's values, goals and contexts
2. The design of a Wellbeing Economy strategy that identifies the most important areas of economic life for our wellbeing and, consequently, draw up a plan to promote them
3. Evaluation and selection of Wellbeing Economy policies, according to their alignment with wellbeing values and goals
4. The implementation of Wellbeing Economy policies, empowering communities to take the lead in this transformation
5. The evaluation of the political impacts on wellbeing for the learning and adaptation of a new model
6. Portugal's membership of WEGO, created for countries to mutually support each other in building economies that give priority to the wellbeing of their people and the planet

We are aware that we have to change the way we understand and build the health and prosperity of society, looking beyond economic growth to collective wellbeing and environmental sustainability.

Governments and other institutions around the world need to embrace new ways of thinking and actively engage in widespread systems innovation in order to make real progress towards a healthier and more prosperous world.

Yet most continue to frame their work within traditional economic models, without recognising the damage they are doing to society and the planet. This framing often manifests itself in downstream measures, such as: treating respiratory diseases exacerbated by air pollution, rather than investing in public transport; rebuilding after floods caused by climate change, rather than divesting from fossil fuels and investing in clean energy; or focusing on health interventions related to poor diet, rather than improving agricultural supply chains and encouraging consumer demand for healthy food. While efforts to mitigate the effects of larger problems are vitally important, they do not address their root causes and interconnections.

Instead, we need an economic system that takes a preventative approach to social and environmental challenges to ensure that the kinds of related and follow-on problems mentioned above do not occur in the first place or are far less severe. That is what we will be discussing from 2022 onwards in Portugal.