World Happiness Report 2013
that will be encountered and how they can be overcome. The final section covers some of the remaining technical barriers that need to be resolved to help policy analysts apply well-being techniques routinely. Global Examples Bhutan is the best known example where the government has adopted the objective of maximizing its Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. This is a very broad measure with 124 different components. It is very much an indicator of the “colors and texture”10 of people’s lives. The GNH Index acts as a measure of progress and by looking at those components that drag down overall GNH, it shows where policy changes are most needed. These changes can be implemented at the individual, community or country level. Many countries are following Bhutan’s lead. Under Bhutan’s leadership, there is now a connected international network, supported by a series of international GNH conferences,11 to measure and build happiness in local organizations and communities in countries at all stages of economic development. These activities have been important in several countries, but are perhaps most widespread in Brazil, where GNH, or Felicidade Interna Bruta (FIB) in Portuguese, has inspired a variety of surveys and activities designed to improve lives. These typically involve community-level investigations using FIB surveys, combined with actions as diverse as cleaning up polluted waterways, building biodigesters for waste management,12 and training fencers drawn from favelas. The actions are locally inspired and directed, but connected by the FIB movement to parallel activities throughout the country. Thus in Brazil, GNH starts with indicators, but the questionnaire is simply the launching pad to generate a high level of citizen participation in collective discussions and concerted action, by means of both “topdown” official government policy, and “bottomup” social mobilization.
At the national level in New Zealand, the Government is engaged in a Quality of Life Project to look at well-being in urban environments and investigate how to use well-being measures more systematically in policy analysis. The UN has for some time measured a much broader set of development indicators, and it and the EU are now going further in measuring the sustainability of that progress. South Africa has published development indicators since 2007 covering 10 broad areas measuring progress in overcoming some of the legacy problems from apartheid. But the most systematic work is being carried out by the OECD and is explained in detail in Chapter 7 of this report. That Chapter describes the OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being and also documents progress already underway within a number of national statistical offices. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is now regularly collecting data on wellbeing in terms of happiness, life satisfaction and anxiety. The results have created interest, for example, in the question of how happiness and life satisfaction vary with age. The spatial variations in the answers have also spurred intense debates about why some areas are so much better places to live than others. There are also plenty of examples at the subcountry level. In the US, the Jacksonville Community indicators have been collected for the last 28 years. Inspired by the GNH examples, city-level groups in the United States and Canada have run GNH-type happiness questionnaires to inform and motivate local collaborative actions to improve communities. In Australia, the Tasmania Together project is a good example, and in the UK, there are numerous examples at the Local Authority level.13 The community level studies emphasize the building of social capital, covering issues like trust, relationships and cohesion, which have a profound effect on well-being.14 They are having a significant impact on local policy makers as they seek to understand what makes for great places to live and how they can improve the quality of lives of their constituents.
102