Measuring Well-Being Beyond GDP

On April 21, 2026, Yuliya Chorna, a PhD candidate in social anthropology at York University and Dahdaleh Global Health Graduate Scholar, attended the tenth session of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development (RFSD) for the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. The event was open to the public, and Yuliya, who was in Geneva during March-April 2026 as a visiting researcher at the Brocher Fondation, joined the event to follow the discourse on sustainable development goals (SDGs) and health to inform her dissertation research. 

At the event, high-level representatives and delegations delivered national statements on achieved progress and challenges in the implementation of the SDGs, followed by reports from civil society and youth organisations [2]. 

With less than five years remaining until the end date of the 2030 Agenda [1], there was a sense of urgency about the SDGs “not being on track,” and being in need of a “wake-up call,” in order to uphold the “commitment to delivery”. The language dominating these proceedings with its emphasis on progress, growth, initiative, public–private partnerships, aligns with a broader neoliberal notion of development.  The ubiquity of such terms as “innovation,” “modernization,” “transformation,” “resilience,” “entrepreneurship,” “leverage,” “scale up”, “security,” “accountability,” “private funding,” “social cohesion,” “equitable access,” “partnerships,” “community participation,” and “civil society” signal both preferred modes of SDGs implementation and their aspired outcomes. 

At the same time, the Forum’s attention to the “Beyond GDP” agenda stimulated discussion on what counts as progress and how else development might be framed. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), used as an economic indicator of societal progress, has been for a while recognized as an insufficient measure outside the economic domain that influences well-being, such as people’s health, safety, and happiness [3]. While measuring well-being beyond GDP already exists with numerous frameworks covering health, education, inequality, environmental quality, and subjective well-being, the key challenge remains in the fragmentation of such metrics and the lack of scale [2]. Moreover, Jansen et al. (2024) note that many of the alternative metrics remain institutionally rooted in GDPs [3]. 

The forum’s discussion reinforced that “Beyond GDP” is not merely a technical exercise of defining alternative metrics, but a political process to shape policy priorities, funding allocation, public discourse, and decision-making [2]. Despite the path to more comprehensive metrics remains challenging, ongoing dialogues on measuring well-being beyond GDP continue to gain attention. 

Bibliography: 

1.     United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. n.d. “Regional Forum on Sustainable Development 2026.” Accessed May 2, 2026. https://regionalforum.unece.org/events/regional-forum-sustainable-development-2026

2.     United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. 2026. Report of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development for the Economic Commission for Europe Region on Its Tenth Session (Draft version). ECE/RFSD/2026/2. 

3.     Jansen, L., et al. 2024. “Beyond GDP: A Review and Conceptual Framework for Measuring Sustainable and Inclusive Wellbeing” The Lancet Planetary Health 8 (9): e695-e705. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00147-5

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