Measuring Social Progress: Is Scotland really innovative?

This post is by Jennifer Wallace, Policy Manager at the Carnegie UK Trust and author of  ‘Shifting the Dial: From Wellbeing Measures to Policy Practice’

Speaking at the OECD World Forum last year Professor Stiglitz used his platform to highlight three countries that were leading the way on measuring wellbeing: Canada, with its Canadian Index on Wellbeing; Bhutan with Gross National Happiness and Scotland.  While the first two are well known in the international debate on measuring wellbeing, Scotland Performs is not often referred to.  Mention wellbeing in a UK context and most people will automatically assume you are referring to the Office of National Statistics Measuring National Wellbeing programme.

So what is a small country, a devolved government within the United Kingdom, up to?  Why haven’t more people heard about it?  And why did Professor Stiglitz single it out? 

The Scottish experience of measuring wellbeing began in 2007.  A new minority government had been formed by the Scottish National Party and they were keen to find a different way of doing things.  They implemented a range of changes which became known as the ‘Scottish model of government’.  These included the removal of horizontal departments in central government and, at a vertical level, the freeing up of local government.  The links between sectors and layers of government were to be held together by a new National Performance Framework (NPF) focused on the outcomes that the Scottish Government wanted to achieve for the people of Scotland.  The NPF is headed up by a purpose statement (to focus government on ‘creating a more successful country, with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish, through increasing sustainable economic growth’), underpinned by 16 national outcomes and 50 national indicators.  The indicators include measures covering health, education, environment, income, housing, personal security and subjective wellbeing.  It is a whole-of-government framework and as such applies to all services and all layers of government. 

Originally the NPF was not referred to as a wellbeing measurement initiative.  It was seen as a performance management and accountability tool.  But the use of the word ‘flourishing’ in the Framework shows the link with the work of Professor Seligman in the USA.  By 2011, and following the Carnegie Roundtable on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, the Scottish Government (now re-elected with a majority) were clearly articulating the National Performance Framework and Scotland Performs (its public facing website) as a wellbeing initiative. 

This history explains why few people in the measuring wellbeing world appear to have heard about Scotland Performs but there are other reasons.  Unlike most of the international examples of good practice, the Scottish initiative did not directly engage members of the public in a conversation about what wellbeing is to them.  Similarly, alongside many international examples that we found in our earlier case studies for Shifting the Dial, the Scottish initiative struggles to find ways to communicate with the public about its findings.

What the Scottish approach does excel at though is its impact on policy development.  This is the area that wellbeing initiatives struggle most with.  In particular, the Scottish NPF has helped with two key areas of policy development:

·      Shifting to prevention: The wellbeing perspective has encouraged decision-makers to look for creative ways of improving wellbeing by focusing ‘up-stream’.  In Scotland the NPF has supported the development of initiatives such as the Early Years Collaborative, which focuses on improving early childhood services and initiatives such as the Violence Reduction Unit in Glasgow which seek to reduce the level of offending in high-risk groups. 

·       Joined up solutions: the National Performance Framework provides government with a holistic view of the impact of current policies.  This was followed by a renewed emphasis on finding joined up solutions and overcoming the dominant, silo-based way of working, for example through the integration of health and adult social care.  

These developments are still at an early stage and it is unclear the extent to which they amount to a whole-scale wellbeing approach to public policy. In the ‘black box’ of policy making it is also unclear the extent to which these policy changes were developed because of the NPF, supported by it, or merely just parallel initiatives.

Despite these caveats, we believe there is something interesting happening in Scotland.  We are working with Oxfam Scotland and Scottish Environment Link to encourage the Scottish Government to review the framework, bringing it more in line with international best practice on wellbeing measurement.  

With international agreement that we must measure what matters, the focus must now transfer to how to use this in a policy context.  Here, despite starting from a different place, Scotland may well be ahead of the game.

Environment Week in Review

Hi everyone and welcome to another Week in Review. This month we are focusing Environment so today’s WIR includes a look back at World Environment Day, UNEP’s new report on food waste and a World Bank article on global sustainability. This article will also introduce Wikichild’s upcoming online consultation, partnered by the World Health Organization and Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children, on how child well-being should be measured in view of future development frameworks such as the Post-2015 agenda.

World Environment Day is an annual event that is aimed at being the biggest and most widely celebrated global day for positive environmental action. This year’s celebration, hosted by Mongolia, had the theme of ‘Think. Eat. Save. Reduce your Footprint’.  According to UNEP’s Reducing Food Loss and Waste report, which was launched on W.E.D, an estimated one third, or 1.3 billion tonnes, of all food produced ends up in the garbage of farmers, transporters, retailers and consumers alike. Make sure you look out for more environment awareness days this month including Global Wind Day and World Ocean’s Day.

This week the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction welcomed the emphasis that the Post-2015 committee is putting on combatting climate change. The Head of UNISDR, Margareta Wahlström referenced the recently published Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk, which highlights the economic and social costs of disasters and the impact they can have on the global population, particularly the poor.

This Saturday The governments of the UK and Brazil, and the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) will co-host a high-level international meeting, Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science on 8 June in central London. The event will bring together business leaders, scientists, governments and civil society to make ambitious financial and political commitments in a bid to reach millions of pregnant women and infants with the right nutrition at the right time, and reduce cases of stunting and deaths from severe acute malnutrition. The whole day will be webcast live from 8.30am to 5.30pm on Saturday 8 June 2013 on this website.

This week the World Bank published the ANS indicator for more than 200 countries in the Little Green Data Book, the World Bank’s annual compilation of environment data. Click here to access highlights from the report.

The Living Planet Index is one of the longest-running measures of the trends in the state of global biodiversity and reflects changes in the health of the planet’s ecosystems by tracking trends in populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. Last year’s report provides a comprehensive overview of the cumulative pressure we’re putting on the planet, and the consequent decline in the health of the forests, rivers and oceans that make our lives possible.

Finally, between the 19^th of June and the 2^nd of July, Wikichild, HBSC and the W.H.O are running an online consultation on how child well-being should be measured in view of future development frameworks. The discussion will be launched at HBSC’s 30^th anniversary conference so make sure you tune in and add your comment to what should be a fascinating conversation! Follow #childwellbeing on Twitter for updates.  

We hope you have enjoyed this Week in Review and look forward to bringing you more Environment updates in the coming weeks.

Robbie Lawrence,

Wikichild Coordinator 

Measuring poverty below the averages

This is the fifth in a series of blogs from the ODI that debate how a post-2015 framework ought to measure poverty - find out more.

Among the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the halving of extreme poverty has been celebrated as the great success. The target of reducing the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day is expected to be reached globally, if not surpassed, by 2015. We cannot take this figure at face value though: this progress has not been evenly distributed, and China’s success boosts the average of overall global poverty reduction. But these discrepancies aside, it is reasonably accepted that income poverty is declining, at least to some degree, in all major regions of the world.

At the national level - the standard focal point for most measures of poverty - the picture is slightly less clear, but overall we tend to see a positive trend. The classic conception of nationally distributed poverty is distorted however by the fact that it is no longer concentrated in low-income countries, the class of countries conventionally singled out for high rates of impoverishment. A number of high-poverty countries have graduated to middle-income status, which means it is less easy to capture poverty by measures of average income or consumption.

The changing dynamics of inequality, both across and within countries (see Milanovic, 2012 for an overview), further complicates our view of poverty. Aggregate measures of poverty such as average consumption rates and poverty head-count statistics, while instructive of absolute poverty levels, fail to capture uneven distributions of income or uneven progress on non-income dimensions of poverty.

The distortions caused by aggregate measures of poverty have led us back to the drawing-board, asking: what exactly do we want to measure with poverty statistics? But a more important question is: what will we use these poverty statistics for? If intended as a tool for national policy-makers to make informed decisions about strategies to reduce poverty within their societies, then it makes sense to look beyond national averages towards poverty rates among particular groups and at different income levels.

Narrowing the lens of poverty measurement to the sub-national-level is challenging, not least because the data is often lacking to do so, but if we wish to address the barriers facing the remaining 50 per cent of the world’s poor who have not yet been raised out of extreme poverty, then this is where the measurement of poverty can be most effective.

There are three useful ways to look below the averages, two of which are reasonably straightforward and can be achieved with the statistics already at hand, and one of which will require more effort to measure given its context-specificity. These measures are presented here as complements to, rather than replacements for, existing aggregate measures of absolute poverty, since both types of measures are instructive for the setting of national and international priorities.

1. The share of the poorest quintile in national consumption. This measure can be found in the MDG framework already, though it has not been used. An extension of this would be to look further below the poorest quintile, to consider the bottom 10 per cent and 5 per cent’s share of national consumption. These measures capture two important elements of poverty.

• They draw out the distributional aspects of income at a national level, thereby highlighting inequalities in income shares held by different segments of the population. We might consider this a measure of relative poverty. Poverty and inequality are not mutually exclusive, and the added appeal of this simple measure is that it can be used to examine both.

• They allow for a disaggregation of the population into income groups relevant for policy-makersin their design of strategies to address the structures that keep people impoverished.

In a recent blog focusing on the inequality dimensions of these poverty measures, we drew upon the case of Brazil to show how aggregation can distort our view of poverty and inequality trends. Poverty and inequality have both declined over the past 20 years by most accounts, but the income share held by the bottom decile in Brazil has increased only marginally and from a very low point.

This perspective draws our attention to situations of poverty that are likely to persist amidst wider gains in income growth. The case of Brazil points to the need for retaining absolute measures of poverty, as these are still useful in explaining the country’s laudable achievements in overall poverty reduction over the past 20 years, but also the need to include measures accounting for the distribution of progress alongside them.

Disaggregated income distributions in Brazil 1981-2009

(Lenhardt & Shepherd, 2013)

2.  A comparison of the outcomes of these disaggregated income groups on indicators of human development such as education, health, hunger and employment. We have shown that recent gains in education access, another highly celebrated outcome of the MDGs, have not been evenly distributed within countries when comparing across different income levels. This research showed that the poorest women were indeed reporting more years of education in the 2000s than in the 1990s, but their progress lagged behind gains made by the median income group. Progress was also slower in indicators of early marriage, women’s empowerment and child mortality.

Tracking gains across the multiple dimensions of poverty among different income groups will allow policy-makers to ensure that the policies and programmes they have introduced to tackle these issues are indeed reaching the people in greatest need of them.

3. The horizontal dimensions of inequality which result in higher rates of impoverishment among particular segments of society including ethnic minorities, spatially disadvantaged communities and disempowered women. Marginalised groups, as identified within country contexts, could be disaggregated from national poverty statistics and their group averages on income and human-development outcomes compared to the national average or median for those indicators.

In combination with absolute measures, these three simple disaggregations would highlight those segments of a given society that are most disadvantaged and would allow policy-makers to track progress on poverty reduction among those more likely to face social, political and institutional barriers to broader poverty-reduction efforts.

Other contributions to our debate on measuing poverty come from Martin Ravallion on two goals for fighting poverty, Lant Pritchett on the case for a high global poverty line, Stephan Klasen's argument for internationally coordinated national poverty measurement and Sabina Alkire's proposal for a multidimensional poverty index post-2015.

Amanda Lendardt is Development Progress' new Research Officer. Her research focuseses include intersecting inequalities and discourses surrouding the inclusion of inequality on the post-2015 agenda.  Prior to joining ODI, she conducted research on smallholder farmer market access in Indonesia.

Financing our Future: Sustainable Development Financing Strategy

This blog by Amy Cutter, Stakeholder Forum is part of the Wikiprogress Environment series.

As discussions to develop a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) build momentum, attention is starting to shift towards not only what the world should try to achieve, but also how to go about it. This in large part means starting to think about where the money for the proposed transformative action is going to come from. 

Finance is one of the most frequently cited barriers to the implementation of sustainable development, and the need for significant mobilisation of resources to support countries in their efforts to promote sustainable development, including the achievement of SDGs, was acknowledged in the Rio+20 Outcome Document (para. 254). 

This sentiment was reiterated at a high-level meeting convened at the end of last month by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), where governments and other stakeholders exchanged views on financing sustainable development in the context of the outcomes ofRio+20, and ECOSOC President Néstor Osorio highlighted the need for an effective strategy for raising finance from a variety of sources in the follow-up to the conference.

In recognition of this need, Member States at Rio+20 agreed to establish an intergovernmental committee of experts to evaluate and propose options for effective financing for sustainable development. 

The Permanent Representatives of Kazakhstan and Norway have been appointed to facilitate the process of establishing the Expert Committee on a Sustainable Development Financing Strategy, which will comprise of 30 experts nominated by regional groups (with equitable geographical representation), and will assess financing needs, consider the effectiveness, consistency and synergies of existing instruments and frameworks, and evaluate additional initiatives, before proposing options to facilitate the mobilisation of resources and their effective use in 2014.

The committee has a huge task ahead of it. Estimates of the additional investment needed to fund sustainable development in developing countries are as high as $1 trillion per year for the coming decades; and then there are the politics to consider, of course.

In order to be successful, the committee will need to utilise and build upon the commitments and expertise that have been developed through previous experience financing development and the environment, including the Monterrey Consensus, Doha Declaration, Busan Partnership, and efforts to raise finance for climate change. There will also be a need to respond to changes in the global financial system and the development aid landscape by innovating new solutions and mechanisms to leverage resources.

Financing for development has changed significantly since the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were underpinned by a model based largely on domestic resource mobilisation and official development assistance (ODA). For instance, there has been rapid growth in new forms of development finance, including South-South cooperation, philanthropy and climate finance.

It is therefore vital that the process of developing a sustainable development finance strategy is open and inclusive of a wide range of actors, including non-Development Assistance Committee donors, NGOs, philanthropic organisations, private sector, and other stakeholders, all of which will be instrumental to the mobilisation and delivery of funds.

The co-facilitators have now begun the process of recruiting experts to the panel. In March they invited the Chairs of the regional groups to nominate experts by 31^st March 2013 and circulated an indicative list of possible expertise to be included in the panel – including ODA and aid efficiency, domestic resource mobilisation/tax, climate financing, asset management, and innovative financing – to aid the groups in their decision-making.

Despite a commitment in the Rio+20 Outcome Document to establish the process in “open and broad consultation with relevant international and regional financial institutions and other relevant stakeholders” (para. 255), stakeholders don’t appear to have been included in the process so far. This could be, however, partially due to the fact that the group, and the process, has not yet been fully constituted and designed. Furthermore, it is up to individual countries to select their own experts.

However, it is also worth noting that, although non-exhaustive, the contribution of NGOs and philanthropy in financing sustainable development is notably absent from the indicative list of experts.

Over the next few months it will be important to follow this process closely and ensure that stakeholders are not stonewalled, as has been seen in the climate finance talks. As with the negotiations to design a set of SDGs, ensuring the process to develop a strategy to finance sustainable development is inclusive, transparent and draws upon broad multi-stakeholder input and expertise will be vital if we are to successfully finance the future we want. 

Amy Cutter, Project Officer, Stakeholder Forum