IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijhdev/v3y2016i2p108-124.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Reasons to be cautious about 'well-being' in economic development (and elsewhere)

Author

Listed:
  • Matt Jenkins

Abstract

'Well-being' is currently in vogue in policy-making circles in the Global North as a way of reconceptualising 'development'. This paper argues that its appearances are misleading. While the normative force of 'well-being' is accepted, what is being offered is a technocratic and reductionist programme which collapses 'well-being' into the statistical relation of a closed set of metrics. It is argued that 'well-being' as defined is a chaotic conception; not a concrete object but an evaluative state, and so such programmes necessarily fail to measure it. Further, it is argued that 'well-being' is already considered within economic development policy and that previous development initiatives would not have changed had well-being frameworks existed alongside them. It is suggested from this that 'well-being' merely provides a new way of describing economic development policy, without altering its fundamental logic or its inherent power relations.

Suggested Citation

  • Matt Jenkins, 2016. "Reasons to be cautious about 'well-being' in economic development (and elsewhere)," International Journal of Happiness and Development, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 3(2), pages 108-124.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijhdev:v:3:y:2016:i:2:p:108-124
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=79592
    Download Restriction: Open Access
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Renz, Timon, 2021. "Development policy based on happiness? A review of concepts, ideas and pitfalls," FZG Discussion Papers 75, University of Freiburg, Research Center for Generational Contracts (FZG).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijhdev:v:3:y:2016:i:2:p:108-124. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=395 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.