Speaker: Sabina Alkire Director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. 

Since HDCA was launched in 2004, applications of well-being and multidimensional poverty have gained ground, including applications drawing from the Capability Approach. It has been a period of intense reflection, experimentation, hope, competition, and learning. In parallel, the data environment and availability of qualitative, quantitative, and participatory data has bounded forward, as has policy interest in topics central to the capability approach. This has truly been a fertile period. This talk reviews a few advances, then focuses on and calls for creative investment in some high priority gaps.

Presenter: Dr. Karen Scott, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Exeter University

The conceptualisation and measurement of wellbeing has become a significant policy concern over the last two decades. Many local, national, supranational and international governance bodies have engaged intensively in research to develop wellbeing indicators.  Slower, however, has been the transition to using these wellbeing indicators for policy development and implementation, with there being significant critique of how governance bodies have approached this agenda. In this webinar, Dr. Scott will cover the main critiques and challenges in using wellbeing indicators as policy instruments based on her interest in knowledge politics and epistemic justice. By drawing on her own research and experience of local and central government in the UK and New Zealand, she will argue for more democratic and context-based research, as well as systematic reviews of qualitative evidence on wellbeing, to inform policy.

This webinar features a panel discussion on developing multidimensional wellbeing measures in varied contexts and with diverse data sources. Panelists: Jaya Krishnakumar, Professor of Econometrics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland; Giulia Greco, Assistant Professor in Health Economics in the Department for Global Health and Development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; and Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, Professor of Economics and Head of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Pavia.

In this workshop for graduate students working with the capability approach or human development, Graciela Tonon (Universidad de Palermo and Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora, Argentina), makes a presentation and leads a discussion on writing for policy makers. Researchers and policy makers experience different situations in their daily work life and writing is one of the key actions to improve their relationship. 

Turning complex conceptual frameworks into operational applications imply a series of methodological decisions that are not free of challenges. The capability approach is far from an exception. This third webinar of the series on measuring multidimensional well-being reflects on some of these methodological challenges, in close connection with themes from previous webinars in the series. This webinar will host an open conversation with Dr. José Manuel Roche, an independent researcher and consultant in International Development.