Charter for People’s Measures of Societal Success
The HPI makes it clear that we need to rethink how we measure national success. The countries that are normally considered as models of economic success – either in terms of their high GDP’s or their impressive GDP growth rates – typically don’t stack up so well when evaluated in terms of what really matters – achieving good lives with a minimal environmental impact.
But the HPI is not the end of the conversation.
The HPI aims for simplicity, combining three indicators into a single index, but of course we know that our societies and environments are more complex. The HPI includes what we think is important, but we don’t claim to represent our own countries, let alone the global population.
That’s why we launched the Charter for People’s Measures of Societal Success in 2024. The Charter is a call to set up deliberative mini-publics, e.g. citizens’ assemblies, to define measures of societal success. It specifies four key requirements:
- Genuine, deliberative and transparent citizen involvement from a large and representative sample of the population, such as through a citizen’s assembly or other deep participation processes.
- A co-produced framework that integrates citizen’s opinions with scientific expertise.
- A small number of headline indicators (we anticipate between three and six) which reflect society’s priorities and are memorable to a large audience.
- An understanding of the distinction between goals (e.g. people’s wellbeing) and means (e.g. a stable economy), and an approach that recognises that our natural environment sets finite constraints on our activities.
The Charter was signed by several organisations (see below). But more importantly, since then, we brought it to life in spring 2026, with the world’s first deliberative mini-public to go beyond GDP in Kerava, Finland. The report about the process will be published in August 2026, for now you can read about it in this blog. We are already planning a second process in Recife, Brazil.
Ultimately, we also want to conduct this process at a national level. If you, as a citizen, agree that citizens should be involved in the conversation about how to define societal success, then please sign the charter. Your support is crucial for us to convince funders and political actors that this approach is popular and feasible.
