Lessons learnt from the use of prosperity indicators in policy making: Towards community-generated indicators

Abstract

Quantifying the actual impact of the proposed and implemented policies, with particular focus on citizens' prosperity, constitutes an important step towards holding policy makers and politicians in general accountable. However, concerns on the legitimacy of prosperity indicators that constitute the main tool towards quantifying and measuring prosperity pose difficulties on their exploitation for public debate. The paper at hand reviews developments, trends and concerns around the conceptualization and use of prosperity indicators in policy making, distilling key deductions and lessons learnt. It further presents the Policy Compass approach, which provides an observatory for experimentation with prosperity indicators with the view of influencing the policy-making process at the local and regional level.