School of Public Policy researchers call for greater emphasis on people’s lived experiences in measuring progress toward UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Progress toward global development goals doesn’t necessarily translate into improvements in subjective well-being, according to new research from the School of Public Policy. The findings challenge conventional measures of development success and suggest that improvements in areas such as poverty reduction, health care and education may not fully capture how people evaluate changes in their own lives.
In the newly-released Nature Sustainability paper “The SDGs need a subjective well-being reality check,” Postdoctoral Research Associate Mel George, Professor Anand Patwardhan and doctoral student Camille Wejnert-Depue examine whether progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) translates into improvements in people’s reported well-being.
The 17 SDGs, adopted in 2015, provide a global framework for addressing challenges such as poverty, inequality, climate change and access to essential services by 2030. The researchers analyzed development indicators alongside national life evaluation scores from the World Happiness Report, examining data from 42 countries between 2014 and 2024.
While countries with stronger development outcomes often report higher levels of life-evaluation, the researchers found that the connection largely disappeared when examining year-to-year changes within individual countries. The pattern was consistent across countries with different income levels, including Kenya, Bangladesh, Sweden and Japan, said George.
Of more than 16,000 comparisons between development indicators and year-to-year changes in life-evaluation, only nine showed statistically significant associations after accounting for multiple comparisons.
The findings raise questions about how governments and international organizations measure development success. Although traditional development indicators capture important improvements in living conditions, they may not fully reflect how people experience those changes in their daily lives.
“The SDGs still matter, but progress on development indicators should not be mistaken for evidence that people feel their lives are improving,” said George. “If improving lives is the goal, then post-2030 frameworks should pay more attention to subjective well-being.”
