Governments can steer with wellbeing at the core (but nobody said it was easy)

Across very different countries and ideologies, something keeps happening. Governments are voted in on promises of change, only to find themselves confined within the machinery of a state not built for what they promised. Even when economic growth is delivered, citizens’ anxieties go unaddressed because growth does not reliably produce what people are actually asking for: security, dignity, a sense that their society is organised around their actual needs. The struggle is most vividly depicted in the (un)ability of governments to deliver a care transition — a shift as profound as green and digital transitions.

For decades, GDP became not just a measure but an orientation: what gets measured gets built, what does not get measured does not get funded. But GDP was never designed to measure wellbeing. Reclaiming governance means adopting a different organising principle. Governments can and should steer with human and planetary wellbeing as the central objective of policy, actively guiding rather than being subordinated to economic strategy. That reorientation asks harder questions: How can we reorient policy toward long-term societal wellbeing without being derailed by the pressures of short-term gains, immediate crises, or nostalgia for an imagined past when all was well? How to make sure states have the capacity to deliver a life of dignity for their citizens? 

The social contract is under pressure regardless, and no economic policy tool in itself has a convincing answer to that. Centring government around foundational wellbeing needs is urgent, but it also requires reimagining the machinery, the culture, and the ways of working. It also requires knowing what to let go of.

The wellbeing agenda has a rhythm that outlasts the moment

In 2019, Finland held the EU Council Presidency and placed the wellbeing economy at the centre of European policy debate. That same year, New Zealand launched its first Wellbeing Budget. Across the WEGo network, Iceland, Wales, and Scotland were each building their own versions. Demos Helsinki proposed the wellbeing economy as a potential new guiding framework for governance. The Finnish government embedded the approach in its programme, publishing a National Action Plan for the Economy of Wellbeing in 2023. In December 2024, the Institute of Health and Welfare Finland published a model for steering government through strategy, budgets, and information. 

The agenda has always moved in cycles. The architecture built during the favourable years, imperfectly sustained but still standing, does not disappear when the political climate changes. What changes is the form the argument has to take.

The work does not end — it takes a different shape

It is easy to fall into the trap of viewing governance as an impersonal process where ideals go to die. But governance is a continuous negotiation between actual people: their values, their mandates, and the pressures bearing down on them from fiscal constraints, electoral cycles, and the next crisis. Though hardly visible, there is a great deal done in public service every day.

When political momentum shifts, the wellbeing agenda does not vanish. It finds new form inside whatever frameworks the moment produces, where the core commitments of wellbeing governance can be reinterpreted and advanced, even when the language, e.g. wording, phrases, concepts, is different. Instead of asking whether the agenda is currently in favour, it is more useful to think about: What does its next form look like, and who helps shape it?

Much like phronesis in ancient Greek philosophy, where wisdom is inseparable from practice, the knowledge that matters here is accumulated through negotiation, through losing ground and regaining it, through learning which levers move in which conditions. That knowledge lives in public servants — people who carry experience across shifts in the political climate and understand what it takes to move things. That experience is not wasted when momentum slips.

Wellbeing does not stay at the core on its own. It is kept there through choices made every day, in a thousand small ways, by people who understand that change happens in interventions big and small, across different places and different times.

Sometimes, needles move.