Bridging the gap between wellbeing and evaluation: Lessons from IBEST, a French experience

While evaluators and advocates of alternative indicators both reflect on values and the collective construction of judgements, they do not talk much to each other. The ambition of this paper is to bridge this gap between evaluators and proponents of alternative indicators, by highlighting how an approach dedicated to the construction of alternative indicators can support evaluation practice. To do so, we draw on a participatory project conducted in Grenoble (France), that focused on the construction of indicators of sustainable wellbeing (IBEST). The project and its outputs have been used to support three evaluations over the past five years, which were each conducted with the aim of challenging policy objectives and evaluating interventions in terms of their contribution to the wellbeing of local people. Our results show that the work carried out within the framework of this type of project can feed into every stage of an evaluation. It is therefore in the interest of evaluators to integrate these alternative indicator approaches into evaluation. Moreover, this enrichment of evaluation could be useful in other places that have developed or wish to develop wellbeing indicators to support alternative policy making.