Governments today face multidimensional challenges and demands: protecting against climate change, reducing poverty and inequality, providing quality jobs in a sustainable and resilient economy, improving health outcomes, and enhancing democratic participation. Building economies that truly deliver wellbeing for all, now and in the future, requires sophisticated policy tools and a holistic way of measuring progress. Metrics that capture multidimensional wellbeing outcomes, and models that handle complexity, trade-offs, feedback loops and long-term impacts, can support this policy process.
In this context, MERGE aims to connect science and policy to develop indicators and models that can support sustainable and inclusive wellbeing policy processes within multilevel governance. This report covers the European Union (EU) and United Nations (UN) policy engagement work carried out under the policy section of the MERGE project, and summarises the insights, challenges, limitations and learnings gathered across both levels.
At EU level, ZOE Institute for Future-fit Economies, together with the European Policy Centre and Demos Helsinki, ran 11 workshops and science-policy dialogues between February 2025 and February 2026, under Chatham House rules, with European Commission officials across a dozen Directorates-General, the European Parliament, the Committee of the Regions, the European Economic and Social Committee, Member States’ Permanent Representations and independent experts, informed by continuous monitoring of the EU institutional agenda and targeted desk research.
At UN level, the consortium engaged directly with the High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP and the team behind the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, through written submissions, expert consultations and bilateral exchanges between 2024 and 2026.
As the EU-level engagement in particular was shaped by varied attendance and by discussions that at times gravitated toward immediate concerns, the report’s findings reflect a restricted window of engagement, shaped by who was able and willing to participate, rather than a comprehensive view of policy positions across the EU institutions.
Key insights
- Embedding metrics depends as much on political timing and framing as on technical design. Across both levels, the constraint is rarely a lack of frameworks. Instead, it is how to operationalise them within existing governance.
- At EU level, the 2024–2029 institutions’ focus on competitiveness, decarbonisation, security and defence narrowed the space for long-term, futures-oriented reflection, shaping which topics could gain traction and how openly policymakers were willing to discuss them.
- The EU-level challenge is uptake and consistency, not invention. Showcasing concrete examples, such as wellbeing budgeting, and linking metrics to citizens’ everyday concerns did more to build political legitimacy than any new indicator on its own.
- At UN level, the High-Level Expert Group’s framework converges around wellbeing, inclusion and equity, and sustainability as its central, interconnected pillars, building on a lineage running through the Brundtland and Stiglitz reports, and is explicitly linked to intergenerational fairness through the Pact for the Future.
- The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth took a different route to a related goal, treating care economies as a central bridge to wellbeing and insisting that a shared vision does not require the same policies everywhere, offering separate guidance for the Global South and Global North.
EU-level engagement
Across the six priority themes, MERGE’s workshops kept returning to the same pattern: existing EU instruments already offer concrete channels through which Sustainable and Inclusive Wellbeing (SIW) metrics could be embedded. In the EU Budget, these are performance-based budgeting and the do-no-significant-harm (DNSH) principle. In the European Pillar of Social Rights, it is the Social Scoreboard. In the Clean Industrial Deal and European Green Deal, it is their respective monitoring frameworks. In the European Semester, it is the Country Specific Recommendations.
Turning these openings into practice, however, proved harder than identifying them. The Social Scoreboard, for example, suffers from outdated indicators, irregular updates and coverage gaps in areas such as housing exclusion and job quality; participants concluded that a fairer Scoreboard requires political will, investment in new data sources, methodological transparency, and a shift toward more contextual and disaggregated metrics. On competitiveness, participants pointed to the Circular Economy Act and the Quality Jobs Roadmap as concrete entry points, proposing that resource productivity be adopted as a measure of competitiveness, and that employment indicators be broadened to capture job security, fair wages, mental health, and informal or unpaid labour such as care work.
Beneath these practical entry points lies an institutional limitation: embedding SIW metrics requires a broader paradigm change, extending beyond data and indicators to incentives, institutions, communication practices and political culture. As one science-policy dialogue put it, policymakers emphasised that they do not need more data, but rather actionable insights that connect with political priorities.
The use of concrete examples and evidence provided meaningful openings in these conversations. Case studies of wellbeing budgeting, drawing on Ireland’s whole-of-year budgetary process and OECD evidence, made the concept tangible for policymakers and improved engagement. A MERGE survey found that over 80% of European citizens support including beyond-GDP measures in national progress assessments, and 72% agree the economy should prioritise the health and wellbeing of people and nature over profit alone, suggesting that public appetite is not the constraint. The European Pillar of Social Rights review and the Multiannual Financial Framework’s post-2027 performance framework were identified as the most promising windows for moving from experimental use toward more systematic integration.
UN-level engagement
At UN level, MERGE engaged directly with two processes shaping the post-2030 agenda: the High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on Beyond GDP, appointed in May 2025 to identify indicators for societal progress, and the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, led by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier De Schutter, and presented in Geneva in April 2026.
The HLEG’s own framework, published in its 2026 report “Counting What Counts”, identifies wellbeing, inclusion and equity, and sustainability as its central and interconnected pillars, building on a lineage running through the Brundtland and Stiglitz reports. MERGE consortium members contributed technical recommendations to the HLEG on reducing the number of indicators in a dashboard, aggregating dashboards into indices, measuring SIW efficiency, and global geospatial mapping. Separately, individual MERGE consortium members were also invited to provide specific input on concrete aspects of the HLEG’s work.
The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth took a different route to a related goal. MERGE consortium members were invited to draft policy profiles on multi-dimensional wellbeing indicators and on a global accounting system for sustainable and inclusive wellbeing. The process behind the Roadmap brought together UN agencies, academics, unions, and practitioners working across debt, health, and gender, and its recommendations made it clear that a shared vision for a better future does not require the same policies everywhere, offering guidance calibrated separately for the Global South and Global North.
While the mandate of the Special Rapporteur has since ended, the work will continue through the New Economies for Eradicating Poverty community of practice. The HLEG’s recommendations, meanwhile, are expected to feed into a separate inter-governmental process that will determine how far they are taken up. The actual impact of both processes remains unknown at the time of writing, but both aim to shape the discussions around the framework that will replace the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Conclusion
The discussions across MERGE’s engagement activities confirm that the sustainable and inclusive wellbeing approach at EU level, and the Beyond GDP approach at UN level, have clear potential to support more coherent, holistic and future-oriented policymaking. Existing instruments and processes already offer concrete entry points for mainstreaming this agenda, from the EU Budget’s performance framework to the UN’s Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth.
Realising that potential, however, requires a deeper shift in policy paradigms, institutions and practices. Persistent data gaps, fragmented governance, and limited political and institutional buy-in constrain systematic uptake at EU level, while a weakened multilateral landscape and uncertainty over the post-2030 process pose risks of misalignment at UN level. Advancing MERGE’s vision of sustainable and inclusive wellbeing therefore emerges as a gradual, iterative and contested process — one that depends on continued science-policy dialogue, practical demonstrations of added value linked to citizens’ everyday concerns, and sustained efforts to open up institutional space for long-term, futures-oriented perspectives.
For a deeper level of insights, challenges, limitations and learnings MERGE has gathered throughout its science-policy engagement work, read the report below:
Authors: Laura Danilaviciute, Magali Brosio, Rachèle Chevallier (ZOE Institute for Future-fit Economies)
