Wellbeing public policy is an emerging governance paradigm for the 21^st century. It brings together many threads, among them: the desire to go beyond growth when understanding human progress, an acknowledge of the shortcomings of the neoliberal emphasis on efficiency in public management, the yearning to restore community and identity in advanced nations, and the urgency of sustainability in the face of ecological crisis.

 

This course explores what wellbeing public policy is, how it could be brought about, and what its implications would be. The course begins conceptually with an overview of wellbeing theories and how scholars perceive wellbeing public policy. It then turns to more applied topics drawing on case studies from contemporary wellbeing policymaking communities, especially the UK, Bhutan, New Zealand, and development with indigenous communities. These later weeks explore how to coproduce wellbeing policy with citizens, how to reform commissioning and evaluation in public management to foster wellbeing, and how to think about wellbeing public policy as a system-change initiative requiring tools and ideas from complex systems theory.

 

By the end of the course, students will:

• Appreciate economic, political, policy, and philosophical perspectives on wellbeing as a governance paradigm
• Have a sophisticated, interdisciplinary understanding of how a wellbeing focus would transform policymaking in OECD nations.
• Be able to identify and prosecute opportunities for such transformation in their future work