Knowledge: Wellbeing in global public policy

This chapter considers the ways in which particular knowledge about behaviour and happiness acts as a surface through which social change can be facilitated. It outlines how particular insights from behavioural economics, neuroscience, and psychology have influenced global public policies promoting the measurement of subjective wellbeing, and examines some of the assumptions about habits, practices, agency, subjectivity, and culture which underpin these insights. It charts for the first time the emergence of ‘behavioural happiness’ – the promotion of subjective wellbeing through behavioural insights and policy design – as an object of public policy intervention. It compares this with an activist movement for a wellbeing-based economy. The chapter explores the ramifications of basing the policy goals of behavioural happiness on specific forms of knowledge which are from the behavioural, economic, and neurobiological sciences. In offering a contextual account of how behavioural happiness is made as an object of knowledge and governance, the chapter argues that in the sphere of wellbeing public policies, social research could focus more on the intersection between surface and substantive social change, and between individual and collective approaches to wellbeing.