The week in review

Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review - a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal

On progress

Interview on Channel 4 News with Lord Richard Layard (Channel 4 News 02.11.2011)

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Richard Layard, one of the founding members of Action for Happiness and key thinker in the progress movement, talks about why governments need to focus on increasing general well-being, not GDP.

See more and contribute to the article on comprehensive indicators

On the G20

G20 meeting: Key data for each country (Guardian 02.11.2011)

The G20 make up 80% of the world’s GDP. The Guardian Data Blog has created a diagram of world financial power breaking down population, GDP per capita, unemployment rates and human development indicators for each of the G20 economies.

See more and help us update recent news items in the Wikiprogress Community Portal

On the global gender gap

UAE leads Arab World in Gender Equality: WEF (Emirates 03.11.2011)

The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report 2011 shows that the UAE has improved on gender equality performance significantly over the last year and continues to lead the Arab world on the Global Gender Gap Index. However the MENA region is lagging with just 59 per cent of the gender gap closed and the lowest average of all regional score.

See more and contribute to the Wikigender article on the global gender gap

On 7 billion and child well-being

Of Kissing, the less the better (OECD Insights 31.10.2011)

As the world’s population reached 7 billion on Monday, OECD blogger Patrick Love looks at what population growth means for child well-being, as many of the leading international reports show that there has never been a worse time to be a child.

See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on population growth

On the environment 

Amazonas 2030 - Indicators for the Climate Crisis (IPS 02.11.2011)

Sixty per cent of the Colombian Amazon is forested area with varying degrees of protection. Amazonas 2030 Index shows the role that the natural environment and indigenous communities play on economic, social and institutional dimensions of development.

See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on Colombia

In the spotlight: Launch of the 2011 Human Development Report

That’s all from us this week. We hope you tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.

Yours in progress,

Philippa Lysaght

A Better Future for All

This post first appeared on Wikiprogress partner, UNDP's  Let's Talk Human Development

In June 2012 world leaders will gather in Rio de Janeiro to seek a new consensus on global actions to safeguard the future of the planet and the right of future generations everywhere to live healthy and fulfilling lives. This is the great development challenge of the 21st century.

The 2011 Human Development Report offers important new contributions to the global dialogue on this challenge, showing how sustainability is inextricably linked to basic questions of equity—that is, of fairness and social justice and of greater access to a better quality of life. Sustainability is not exclusively or even primarily an environmental issue, as this Report so persuasively argues. It is fundamentally about how we choose to live our lives, with an awareness that everything we do has consequences for the 7 billion of us here today, as well as for the billions more who will follow, for centuries to come.

Understanding the links between environmental sustainability and equity is critical if we are to expand human freedoms for current and future generations. The remarkable progress in human development over recent decades, which the global Human Development Reports have documented, cannot continue without bold global steps to reduce both environmental risks and inequality. This Report identifies pathways for people, local communities, countries and the international community to promote environmental sustainability and equity in mutually reinforcing ways.

In the 176 countries and territories where the United Nations Development Programme is working every day, many disadvantaged people carry a double burden of deprivation. They are more vulnerable to the wider effects of environmental degradation, because of more severe stresses and fewer coping tools. They must also deal with threats to their immediate environment from indoor air pollution, dirty water and unimproved sanitation. Forecasts suggest that continuing failure to reduce the grave environmental risks and deepening social inequalities threatens to slow decades of sustained progress by the world’s poor majority— and even to reverse the global convergence in human development.

Major disparities in power shape these patterns. New analysis shows how power imbalances and gender inequalities at the national level are linked to reduced access to clean water and improved sanitation, land degradation and deaths due to indoor and outdoor air pollution, amplifying the effects associated with income disparities. Gender inequalities also interact with environmental outcomes and make them worse. At the global level governance arrangements often weaken the voices of developing countries and exclude marginalized groups.

Yet there are alternatives to inequality and unsustainability. Growth driven by fossil fuel consumption is not a prerequisite for a better life in broader human development terms. Investments that improve equity—in access, for example, to renewable energy, water and sanitation, and reproductive healthcare—could advance both sustainability and human development. Stronger accountability and democratic processes, in part through support for an active civil society and media, can also improve outcomes. Successful approaches rely on community management, inclusive institutions that pay particular attention to disadvantaged groups, and cross-cutting approaches that coordinate budgets and mechanisms across government agencies and development partners.

Beyond the Millennium Development Goals, the world needs a post-2015 development framework that reflects equity and sustainability; Rio+20 stands out as a key opportunity to reach a shared understanding of how to move forward. This Report shows that approaches that integrate equity into policies and programmes and that empower people to bring about change in the legal and political arenas hold enormous promise. Growing country experiences around the world have demonstrated the potential of these approaches to generate and capture positive synergies.

The financing needed for development—including for environmental and social protection—will have to be many times greater than current official development assistance. Today’s spending on low-carbon energy sources, for example, is only 1.6 percent of even the lowest estimate of need, while spending on climate change adaptation and mitigation is around 11 percent of estimated need. Hope rests on new climate finance. While market mechanisms and private funding will be vital, they must be supported and leveraged by proactive public investment. Closing the financing gap requires innovative thinking, which this Report provides.

Beyond raising new sources of funds to address pressing environmental threats equitably, the Report advocates reforms that promote equity and voice. Financing flows need to be channelled towards the critical challenges of unsustainability and inequity—and not exacerbate existing disparities.

Providing opportunities and choices for all is the central goal of human development. We have a collective responsibility towards the least privileged among us today and in the future around the world—and a moral imperative to ensure that the present is not the enemy of the future. This Report can help us see the way forward.

By Helen Clark

Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

The week in review

Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review, a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal

On progress and in the Spotlight

Discussion continues about improving traditional assessments of economic progress. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talked about the new means of measuring progress, well-being and sustainability during a recent visit to the OECD

On 7 Billion

The World at 7 Billion (TIME News Portal 26.10.2011)

World population is set to reach a population of 7 billion on Monday; the world’s youth (ages 10 to 24) makes up 1.8 billion of that. A new focus has been drawn on taking actions now for a sustainable and prosperous future.

See more, and contribute to the Wikiprogress article, on population

On inequality

Mixed story in India’s Human Development report (Global Post 25.10.2011)

The HDR finds that India has recorded 21 percent growth in human development indicators of health, education and income, but faltering progress on hunger and malnutrition.

See more, and contribute to the Wikiprogress article, on India

On gender equality

Report release: ‘Because I am a Girl: So, what about boys?’ 

Plan International released ‘Because I am a Girl: So, what about boys?’ the fifth in a series of annual reports on the rights of girls from early childhood to early adulthood. The report shows gender issues are also about boys and men, which is an issue that needs to be better understood to have a greater impact.

See more, and contribute to the Wikigender article, on Plan International

On #Occupy Wall Street

What should Wall Street do? (The Economist 29.10.2011)

An article by the Economist calls on the finance industry in the United States to form a stronger response to the Occupy Wall Street movement that has swept across the country and is spreading across the world.

See more, and contribute to the Wikiprogress article, on progress in the United States

That’s all from us this week- we hope you tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us @Wikiprogress or post it on our Facebook page.

Yours in progress,

Philippa Lysaght

How's Life?

By Romina Boarini

How’s Life? This is the (seemingly) simple question that the OECD put at the centre of its recent work on measuring well-being, launched on October 12 during the conference marking the two years of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi’s report (see also recent Angela’s post). How’s life talks of what people value most in their lives, what they can do, what they are and what they would like to be. Those who associate the OECD with economic forecasts and free market policies may find surprising that the OECD takes the well-being business so seriously, especially in hard economic times. But since the Organisation is seeking to inspire Better Policies for Better Lives, assessing how life is going and how it can be improved is just as fundamental as looking at financial markets and public debt.

As you readers of Wikiprogress all know, the OECD has been long involved in the quest for better measures of well-being and progress. But this is the first time that the OECD puts together many comparable indicators of well-being in OECD and a few emerging countries. How’s Life analyses well-being through eleven dimensions of people’s lives (income, jobs, housing, health, work and life balance, education, social connections, civic engagement, environment, personal security and subjective well-being), presenting a large amount of evidence on these areas. It also looks at the quality of existing well-being measures and proposes a few avenues for taking the statistical and research agenda on well-being forward.

The main findings from How’s Life are:

Well-being is much more than money. This is where we started from but this is also where we arrived at the end of the journey. How’s Life shows that economic measures are not enough to capture the complexity and the beauty of life, but also the struggle that life represents for many. Income is important for well-being, but there are other aspects, for instance social ties, opportunities and freedoms, that count even more.

Understanding well-being has a lot to do with inequalities. We already knew that averages are not enough for assessing economic well-being because income inequality is large in many countries. What we did not know, and How’s Life tells us, is that there are also many inequalities in health, education, civic engagement, social ties and environment. Many of these inequalities are driven by low-income and low-education, suggesting that nurturing children from early years can greatly make their adult life better.

Well-being is both objective and subjective. There are components of well-being that are essentially objective: having a decent housing and being healthy for instance. But there are also very important subjective aspects to take into account: for instance whether people like their jobs, whether they feel insecure in the neighboourhood where they live, etc. How’s Life shows that there are sometimes gaps between objective life circumstances and how people feel about them: for instance there are 10 insecure people per every victim of crime in the population. Gaps do not indicate that some indicators are more reliable than others. They just indicate that these various indicators are capturing different aspects of personal security and that it is important for policy makers to address criminality and concerns of crime at the same time.

How’s Life finds that well-being is not only individualistic, i.e. depending on what people have and do for themselves. It is also very much about spending time with others, helping others, building a community and feeling part of a large social network that can help in case of need. For instance life satisfaction goes up significantly when volunteering or when enjoying strong social ties.

Finally, How’s Life shows that no country excels in all dimensions (and this is also why it is important to look at all facets of people’s lives rather than at one headline number). There are however countries that tend to do very well in many of the dimensions considered, for instance Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries. Why is that? Two factors seem to matter: inequalities and the key role that well-being plays in the overall political strategy of these countries. Indeed, inequalities tend to be lower in the top-performing countries, especially among the Nordics, suggesting that a more equal distribution of opportunities and outcomes is also beneficial for average well-being. Secondly, many of the well-performing countries have adopted a broad well-being framework for designing their policies (see for instance Australia Treasury’s well-being framework and Norway’s sustainable development strategy). Their strategy is paying off.

What’s next? The second edition of How’s Life is planned for May 2013. In the meantime we will update the Better Life Index, the other big pillar of the OECD Better Life Initiative. We are also running various research projects to get better measures and understanding of well-being, together with many other international organisations and researchers worldwide. You can learn more about in our web site.

The Real Story on Wellbeing: A Canadian Example

There are times in history when destabilizing world events turn into defining moments for change and innovation. We may be at the forefront of one of those defining moments.

Following the Great Depression and World War II – global events that destabilized entire nations – a consensus emerged. The world needed a good dose of peace and prosperity. Governments set out to pursue those objectives, and to determine ways of measuring progress. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) became the standard way to assess economic prosperity. Since then nations have come to rely on GDP as a primary indicator of how a country is prospering, but as robust a tool as it is, GDP only tells us about the state of the economy. It provides no understanding of the health of a population, the vibrancy of a democracy, the growing inequality within and between countries, or the quality of life for a country’s people.

Today we again find ourselves in uncertain times. The 2008 global recession and the years of economic and social turmoil that have ensued, have brought us to the point where average people are joining demonstrations around the world, occupying banking districts around the world. Their common cry: What about the rest of us? They bring into sharp relief GDP’s limitations as a measure of wellbeing. A new consensus is emerging – we want a fairer world. Again we find ourselves in need of a new way to measure how our country is faring and now we have the way to do it.

A decade ago, some of Canada’s leading thinkers answered the call to create a composite index that could do what GDP was never designed to do. The result is the launch of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW). Drawing from a deep well of data the CIW uses 64 separate headline indicators within eight interconnected domains central to the lives of Canadians: Community Vitality, Democratic Engagement, Education, Environment, Healthy Populations, Leisure and Culture, Living Standards, and Time Use. We can now use these indicators to monitor each domain over time, starting with the base year of 1994.

Since 1994, we now know Canada’s wellbeing has seen an overall improvement of 11 per cent, which pales in comparison to the 31 per cent growth in the country’s GDP over the same time frame. The CIW shows us what GDP cannot, it shows us what the average citizen has understood intuitively: Canadians are not reaping all of the benefits of economic growth. Quality of life has actually gone down in areas such as the environment, leisure and culture, and time use, with only modest gains in health. And even in areas where growth has been strong, research shows that it was the top 20% of Canadians that received the lion’s share of rising income and wealth during the boom years, while the gap down to the bottom 20% grew even larger. That’s the Canadian reality.

Unlike GDP, designed only to measure the output of countries goods and services, the CIW allows us to dig deeper, providing a more complete picture of which aspects of wellbeing improved and which got worse. By providing an accurate snapshot of how the country is faring over time, the CIW gives Canadian governments the tools needed to better understand the impact of their policy and program decisions, and gives citizens, what they need to hold governments accountable – to ensure quality of life grows along with GDP.

We find ourselves in uncertain times. Governments around the world face push back from citizens who say they’re no longer willing to bear the brunt of actions and decisions they perceive to be taken by the elite few. Fortunately we have choices about how we want the future to look. It is hoped that the CIW will help advance the cause to find better ways to measure societal progress that respond to the global call for greater fairness.

By: The Honourable Roy Romanow, Chair of the Advisory Board, and The Honourable Monique Bégin, Deputy Chair, of the Advisory Board for Wikiprogress Correspondents, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing.

For complete Canadian Index of Wellbeing findings or enjoy our short video and infographic: www.ciw.ca

October 2011 Editor's Choice

Welcome to the latest selection of progress and well-being related articles from Dafydd Thomas of our Correspondents, the Wellbeing Wales Network.

Autumn in the UK is, amongst other things, the time that the party political faithful gather to look back at their achievements and plan future campaigns. An indication of wellbeing’s impact on the political agenda is clear when both the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats want to look at the role of ‘flourishing’ and ‘wellbeing’ in informing public policies. If political advances are being made, then UNICEF UK’s report on child wellbeing makes for some very sober reading on the scale of what’s needed to move from political progress to actual change.

Three years ago, Britain was at the bottom of a league table of 21 industrialised countries on child wellbeing. UNICEF UK wanted to understand why this was the case and commissioned a scoping study to review the data on poverty, family relationships and health in order to consider which factors appeared to account for the between-country differences in child wellbeing.

What the report was able to conclude in comparing Britain, Sweden and Spain was one universal constant. Irrespective of culture, values or country, a child’s happiness is dependent on having time with family and friends and having plenty to do outdoors. Unfortunately the details of the report of these international comparisons paint a very bleak picture of the state of British family life, what we value as a nation and how it all feels for children growing up in this country.

Different reports in different papers had the following comments:
• Income inequalities have a ‘grave’ impact on families and parents;
• British, probably English, children are ‘the most tested children in Europe,’ which adds its own considerable pressures;
• Advertising for material goods aimed at children creates family tensions and unnecessary consumerism;
• Parents are working too hard, are too stressed and have no time for children;
• then salve their guilt buying the latest must have toys or accessories thinking that this makes their children happy.

In the midst of this disheartening situation, Kate Pickett in the Guardian feels there are some ‘grounds for optimism.’ Namely the universal, positive relationship between a child’s happiness, fulfilment and time spent with family and friends. If that’s what’s needed then policies that promote flourishing communities, happy people or child wellbeing could start by focusing on ways to help families find more time to spend together.

Finally an article in the Observer muddies the waters as the cause and effect of food on mood. Indeed, many are quoted as saying that one affects the other and visa versa.

Swedish psychiatrist, Ursula Werneke is quoted as saying “meals give you a chance to stop and take a break from the stress of the day.” Since Ursula and here fellow citizens seem to know a thing or two about their own and children’s wellbeing, that advice sounds worth taking.