Can the EU Move ‘Beyond GDP’?

Since 2007, the European Union has devoted significant time and energy to the production and dissemination of new statistics designed to monitor social and environmental trends of various types. These initiatives have often been presented as part of a broader ‘beyond GDP agenda’, which challenges the centrality of economic growth, as measured by GDP, to governance and ideology, in and beyond Europe. Drawing on interviews with staff from across EU institutions involved, this article examines the fortunes of these initiatives with regard to ongoing debates about the extent to which a ‘social Europe’ is achievable. We show that the Beyond GDP agenda faces formidable constraints. The basic structure of EU treaties and competencies and an underlying bias towards technocratic policy‐making loom large in the view of those tasked with developing and implementing statistical reform, making the basic aims of the agenda difficult to achieve. Relative successes, such as the inclusion of social and environmental indicators within the European Semester policy cycle, are shown to have been equally subject to these constraints.