This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The analysis of the paradox of evaluating and measuring the wellbeing of societies, especially the non-monetary aspects of human life, could not be more salient: to centrally define and measure ‘wellbeing’ detached from national contexts risks aggregating and reducing national traditions and specificities, making them ‘invisible’, while global events continue to underline the impact of ‘not feeling seen’.
States of WEll-BEing and the Measurement of Healthy Lives research project takes these insights from the FEMETRICS lab and analyses common features and differences in national wellbeing traditions, policies, and practices in the group of Visegrád countries (i.e. Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia), which, over time, engaged in coordinating their policies more closely within the EU, potentially inspiring ideational “convergence of paradigms and ideas of good practice” also related to wellbeing. WE BE’s main objective is to understand whether, against the backdrop of this closer coordination and of national traditions, common or distinct wellbeing concepts emerged and how national translations relate to globally framed paradigms of wellbeing.
Research on wellbeing metrics support this analytical focus, highlighting the territoriality and subjectivity of wellbeing: each community may weight index dimensions differently; surveys obtain territorial insight but prescribe, through the examples in the question, the definition of provisions such as cultural facilities or ‘public spaces’; national comparisons tabulate policies but not the underlying community and history. More granular measures of territorial wellbeing therefore call for case studies of the histories, meanings, and practices involved in wellbeing, for the contexts themselves, and for others to learn from.
WE BE responds to this call and sustains the collaboration between EUI FEMETRICS research project researchers by focussing on:
1) mappings of transboundary conceptual commonalities and political economy factors underpinning global wellbeing metrics;
2) a portfolio of case studies on the translation of these concepts into national policies and practices in wellbeing in Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.
The project team works in close cooperation with the Knowledge, Governance, Transformations Research Area of the Global Governance Programme at the EUI's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.