Introductory description

Wellbeing public policy is an emerging governance paradigm for the 21st century. It brings together many threads, among them: the desire to go beyond growth when understanding human progress, the need to go beyond 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. These later weeks explore how to coproduce wellbeing policy with citizens, how to reform commissioning and evaluation in public management to foster wellbeing, indigenous perspectives on wellbeing and social organisation, and how to think about wellbeing public policy as a system-change initiative requiring tools and ideas from complex systems theory.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

The course opens with a review of calls for wellbeing public policy from different angles - economics, sustainability, psychology, and public management. We seek to understand the motivation for a transition to a new policy paradigm and how different communities - practitioners, activists, scholars - conceptualise this paradigm. We then go into detail on how 'wellbeing' can be defined, drawing on perspectives on philosophy, psychology, development studies, geography, and economics. In the final part of the course, we explore how these different perspectives on wellbeing can be operationalised in policy, and what the potential and pitfalls of this are. We explore especially the tensions and complementarities between technocratic, top-down approaches and and more democratic, bottom-up methods.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Apply difficult abstract theories of wellbeing and policymaking to complex practical problems in contemporary governance.
• Under the administrative, ethical, political-economic, and humanistic reasons why wellbeing public policy is (arguably) desirable as a new paradigm for public policy.
• Understand how contemporary commissioning and evaluation practices in policy foster or thwart wellbeing outcomes, and what complex advocacy coalitions and efforts will be required to achieve reform.
• Apply interdisciplinary perspectives from complexity science, policy studies, statistics, and economics to understand how policy systems can be modelled, analysed, and reformed.

Indicative reading list

Reading lists can be found in Talis

Interdisciplinary

This course draws on ideas and methods from economics, public policy, psychology, philosophy, and political science.

International

Case studies in wellbeing public policy explored in this course come from several countries, including Bhutan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates.

Subject specific skills

• Knowledge of wellbeing theories and wellbeing science
• Knowledge of wellbeing frameworks in public policy and public management
• A conceptual understanding of life satisfaction-based cost-effectiveness analysis
• A conceptual understanding of how coproduction can be used in wellbeing public policy

Transferable skills

• System change evaluation
• Impact evaluation
• Coproduction and participatory governance in public policy