Wellbeing: Global Policies and Perspectives

Figures

Figure 1.1. Child and youth wellbeing indicators Aotearoa New Zealand.

Figure 1.2. Statistics New Zealand wellbeing indicators.

Figure 8.1. Five factors important for a good life.

Figure 8.2. Frequency of worry about how much money family has.

Figure 8.3. Young people’s satisfaction with job opportunities in the city.

Figure 8.4. The extent to which young people receive and provide help and support.

Figure 8.5. The extent to which young people spend time with family and friends.

Figure 8.6. Young people’s sense of self and collective efficacy.

Figure 12.1. Planetary Mauri model – mauri mate.

Figure 12.2. Planetary Mauri Model – mauri ora.

Figure 12.3. Mauri Ora – planetary and local wellbeing.

Tables

Table 3.1. Comparative populations of Aotearoa New Zealand and Republic of Ireland

Table 4.1. Summary of digital wellbeing resources and challenges for each scenario

Table 5.1. Wānanga topics eliciting current understandings of SEL and SEW from teachers

Table 5.2. Wānanga topics eliciting current understandings of SEL and SEW from whānau

Acknowledgements

As editors, we acknowledge the support of research participants, contributing authors, colleagues and whānau [extended family] in the conceptualization and manifestation of this collection: our own wellbeing is sustained through these relationships.

We gratefully acknowledge Alan Roddick, literary executor for the estate of poet Charles Brasch, for permission to reproduce the poem Word by Night as a compelling epigraph for this collection.

We wish to acknowledge financial support offered by the University of Canterbury Child Well-being Research Institute in support of the production of this manuscript, and Tina Menzies for her careful administration of that support.

Finally, our thanks to the team at Peter Lang and, particularly, Lucy Melville, Global Publishing Director, for her interest in, and support for, this project.

Introduction

In 2018, the Third International Conference on Wellbeing and Public Policy was held in Wellington, the capital city of Aotearoa New Zealand.¹ According to Weijers and Morrison (2018: 3), over 400 delegates left Wellington after the three-day conference with ‘great expectations’ as to the question of whether New Zealand could be a ‘leading light for the wellbeing approach’. The rationale for these great expectations was ‘a government placing wellbeing front and centre of its policy agenda’. Weijers and Morrison suggest that ‘none left more impressed than the keynote speakers invited from Europe and the United States […] where progress on wellbeing and public policy seemed to them sluggish by comparison’ (2018: 3). The authors note that a ‘striking feature of the conference was the apparent presence of a shared vision of a wellbeing approach to public policy’; the conference was engaged with by a cross-section of government representatives, academics and community actors. This diverse gathering was described as ‘momentous because the wellbeing approach is an important departure from the policymaking status quo’ (2018: 3, emphasis added).

This departure related to the question of how wellbeing can be measured, and whose measures are used. As a number of the chapters in this collection illustrate, the idea of a ‘wellbeing approach’ reflected continued dissatisfaction with both the use of measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) and the notion that if income and resultant wealth is growing, then wellbeing too will grow. Yet, in the pluralist, complex world in which we ←1 | 2→now live, many commentators argue that GDP addresses only a fraction of what matters to humans, much of which is not measured by any kind of economic transaction. As Chapter One surveys, economic indicators fail to consider quality of life domains such as health, education, equality of opportunity, or the state of the environment. In moving beyond the use of GDP there is, however, no consensus of what wellbeing is and how to measure it. Nonetheless, proponents of the wellbeing approach do ‘agree that the ultimate goal of policy should be to improve wellbeing for all citizens’ (Weijers and Morrison 2018: 3, emphasis added). For Weijers and Morrison, the successful implementation and sustenance of a wellbeing approach such as that set by the government of Aotearoa New Zealand must address three challenges: measurement, representation and engagement. In moving towards a consensus of the measurement and conceptualization of wellbeing, representation becomes critical: how do all citizens gain a voice in policy decisions concerning their wellbeing? While delegates may have left the 2018 conference in Wellington with great expectations of our ability to be a leading light for the wellbeing approach, there is certainly far more that could be, that must be, done.

Despite this increase in the prevalence of wellbeing as a policy concern, Sointu’s (2005) work demonstrates how conceptualizations and experiences of wellbeing ‘are produced in and through wider social perceptions and practices’. What wellbeing means and how we might achieve it ‘depends’; it is an idea that ‘evolves […] in the service of the people, communities and societies it speaks about and describes’ (Trebeck 2021: xv). For Atkinson et al. (2020: 1917), wellbeing examines ‘the complex relationships between interior life, self or relational selves and the external environment’. As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, it depends on where and how we listen and speak, the concepts at our disposal, the humans and non-humans with whom we engage, and the focus of their, and our, aspirations. Many of the chapters in this collection listen and speak from Aotearoa New Zealand. New Zealand has become, over recent decades, of interest to policymakers on the global stage. This interest has a number of sources. In education, one driver is our status as a small, independent nation state with a commitment to biculturalism formalized in Te Tiriti o Waitangi [the Treaty of Waitangi]. Over the past two years, Aotearoa has gained an ←2 | 3→international profile for the social response of the New Zealand people, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, to the 2019 mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques. More recently, and currently, the COVID-19 global pandemic has generated further interest in New Zealand’s way of ‘doing things’. Particularly relevant for our interests in this collection, in 2019 New Zealand went on to declare and introduce a wellbeing approach to public policy (Grimes 2021). For the New Zealand Government in 2019, wellbeing was present ‘when people are able to lead fulfilling lives with purpose, balance and meaning to them’ (Robertson 2019: 3). Having governed in coalition with New Zealand First since October 2017,² in their first term Jacinda Ardern’s Labour-led government articulated this approach in the Wellbeing Budget (Robertson 2019: 3)

This approach represents a significant departure from the status

quo. Budgets have traditionally focused on a limited set of economic

data. Success has been declared on the basis of a narrow range of

indicators, like GDP growth. But New Zealanders have questioned

that claim of success when they have seen other things that we

hold dear – child wellbeing, a warm, dry home, or being able to swim in our rivers and lakes – getting steadily worse. The old ways have left too many people behind. It is time to change.

This positioning of wellbeing of New Zealanders at the heart of all the government does is unsurprising to those who live in or are closely engaged with Aotearoa, given the shameful wellbeing statistics that have plagued this privileged country. The Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy implemented by the Ardern government has a vision of New Zealand as ‘the best place in the world for children and young people’. In early comparative child wellbeing measures published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2009, New Zealand ranked twenty-first on material wellbeing, fourteenth on housing and environment, thirteenth on educational wellbeing, twenty-ninth on health and safety and twenty-fourth on risk behaviours. While some ←3 | 4→New Zealanders enjoy wellbeing, others do not. By comparison, Norway ranked first on material wellbeing and housing and environment, Finland ranked first on educational wellbeing, the Slovak Republic ranked first on health and safety, and Sweden ranked first on risk behaviours.

In the broader and more recent OECD Better Life Initiative of 2018 (<https://www.oecd.org>), New Zealand continued to show inequalities in income and wealth, work and job quality, life expectancy for men, knowledge and skills, environmental quality, subjective wellbeing, work-life balance, social connections and civic engagement. These measures illustrate the complexity within the notion of wellbeing as that which makes life worthwhile, both within and beyond Aotearoa. Thus, if wellbeing concerns people’s abilities to live the kinds of lives they have reason to value, there is a need to engage with fundamental questions concerning diverse perspectives – policy and personal – on the kinds of lives people have reason to value and the radical implications of this for policy and practice. As Atkinson (2021) warns, the integration of wellbeing discourse into policy has not, thus far, reanimated the radical policy possibilities of wellbeing. Adopting a local-to-global structure, this collection aims to open the space for engagement with fundamental questions and the potential, or not, for radical possibilities.