There has been growing interest in wellbeing within international development. This paper addresses the lack of clarity on how to translate interest in wellbeing within international developing into practice at programme and project level. It reviews a number of different approaches and proposes a new conceptual framework that builds on their strengths. It reflects on how the approach may be put to use in development research, monitoring and evaluation based on experiences in Zambia.
Rather than aim to present a comprehensive review of the academic literature, the paper reviews five approaches which seek to integrate the concept of wellbeing into practice, especially in a developing country context (new economics forum, Oxfam, Robert Chambers, PADHI and WeD).
Based on the assessment of approaches, the paper finds a number of points of consensus.
Wellbeing:
- Needs to be assessed across a number of different domains, not just a single indicator in order to reflect its subjective and objective dimensions
- Has a moral quality – it concerns what people value and hold to be good
- Is a process, not a state of being
- Requires an enabling environment in order to be achieved
- Orientates towards positive-sum, yet how it is defined, whose wellbeing is counted and how wellbeing is achieved are, ultimately, political questions.
It draws on these to suggest a wellbeing assessment tool designed for use with individuals at the project design stage, and then periodically through the project cycle for monitoring purposes
It reflects on the positive and negative implications of variability, attribution, additionality, and subjectivity when applying a wellbeing approach to project and programme work, before asking the paper asks: is wellbeing too subjective? It concludes that such a wellbeing approach may be key to a serve as a means to achieve rights, rather than the other way around.
