Seen and heard: Working with citizens to set their own wellbeing metrics

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What are your priorities in life? Do you treasure time at home with family? Is safety and security paramount? Is positive mental health number one? Do public sector investment decisions accurately reflect those priorities, concerns, hopes and dreams?

An experiment in Skultuna, part of the city of Västerås in Sweden, sought to examine people’s priorities through a citizen engagement project. It was carried out in partnership between community engagement non-profit Dark Matter Labs and Samhällskontraktet, a partnership between Mälardalen University, Västerås and the municipality of Eskilstuna, which acted as the ‘community anchor’. The premise for the experiment was to build on the ‘beyond GDP’ movement, which seeks to examine metrics for people’s wellbeing, alongside more traditional economic measures, to determine the strength of a local or national economy and society.

Numerous nations have attempted to build on this concept (see boxout, below), but all of these projects took a ‘top down’ approach. In Sweden, the research team wanted to use civil ...