This proposal aims to direct public spending towards urgent, necessary, and democratically determined needs by instituting collective decision-making over budgetary allocations. Government budgeting processes tend to be reactive, short-term, siloed and technocratic. Rather than acting as levers for collectively determining public investment, they often lack direct input from the communities most affected by budget decisions, and their competitive nature tends to hinder cross-governmental collaboration in responding to challenges. In response, wellbeing budgeting ensures that budgetary decision-making looks beyond the routine focus on a narrow set of economic indicators (e.g.: GDP, unemployment, and inflation), and are instead guided by the use of wellbeing metrics and frameworks that are attentive to concerns of equity, ecological sustainability, etc. Wellbeing budgeting can go hand in hand with participatory budgeting, which aims to make the budgeting process more democratic by directly involving people and communities in making concrete decisions about the public spending affecting their lives. Over the last decade, a growing number of governments have adopted or piloted wellbeing budget approaches, including in Bhutan; Aotearoa, New Zealand; Canada; Iceland; Italy; Ireland; and several state governments in Australia. Participatory budgeting too has been implemented in a large number of municipalities globally, and has had a track record of improving governance by successfully directing resources towards urgent community priorities, redistributing public funds to low-income communities, and improving governments’ ability to generate tax revenue. Together, these budgeting innovations can fundamentally change how resources are allocated by setting comprehensive wellbeing evidence as the basis for determining budget priorities, assessing budget proposals against their impact on social and environmental wellbeing goals, strengthening budget collaboration between government departments for improved policy coherence, and giving people a voice in budget decisions that affect their lives as the basis for more equitable outcomes, increased trust and stronger civic engagement.
