The Case for Wellbeing as the Goal of Government and Constraints on Policy-making

Abstract

Abstract The first chapter is targeted at readers who are interested in the general push to include subjective wellbeing in governments’ policy-making institutions. It discusses the origin of the idea that governments should care about wellbeing; how wellbeing is already incorporated in many policy evaluations and appraisals; how a wellbeing-oriented bureaucracy fits in with the democratic process; and how the realities of policy-making often limit the use of formal wellbeing analyses and give rise to the importance of general knowledge about wellbeing amongst all decision-makers. To begin with, the chapter gives a quick synopsis of the basic vision at the heart of this book: what ‘more wellbeing’ would mean for policy-making and what steps would need to be taken to realize it. It is this basic vision which will unfold in the different chapters that follow and which forms the book’s basic motivation. The chapter ends with a quick overview of the institutional trajectory yet to be undertaken to have wellbeing policy embedded in the government machinery.