WE BE Global

WE BE Global is an expansion of WE BE: States of WEll-BEing and the Measurement of Healthy Lives, which received funding from the European University Institute’s Widening Europe Programme in 2025. It has grown into a global research project studying how wellbeing is defined, measured, and practised at transnational and local levels. Both WE BE and WE BE Global are led by the research area Knowledge, Governance, Transformations, under the Robert Schuman Centre’s Global Governance Programme.

The research continuing from WE BE includes a systematic review of academic literature on wellbeing, a dataset on the production and funding of transnational wellbeing indices, and a portfolio of context-grounded wellbeing case studies.

The systematic review investigates the disciplines and countries of authorship, and whether and how wellbeing is defined and measured.

The dataset analyses the contents of the indices and the geographies and political economy of the actors and contexts that seek to shape global narratives of wellbeing measurement through funding and producing global indices.

WE BE began with four core case studies of national understandings and governance of wellbeing. In WE BE Global this has expanded to include researchers from more than 20 countries across 5 continents developing country- or domain-specific analyses of wellbeing.

The case studies include:

  1. Terminologies used to denote wellbeing and affiliate concepts, including their nuances in practice, etymologies, understandings of individual/collective, and implicit contexts;
  2. The beliefs, practices, and tangible spaces or objects associated with wellbeing;
  3. The governance of wellbeing: formal/central entities responsible for measuring and/or promoting wellbeing; non-formal or community-based infrastructures; wellbeing as a priority or a means;
  4. The nature of actors measuring wellbeing and financing this work; the framing, definitions, indicators, and data used;
  5. Legal dimensions: wellbeing in the national constitution, case history, policies, and legislation.
  6. Wellbeing in public education, as well as informal knowledge about and for wellbeing outside of formal education.

The authors will collaborate to develop comparative and analytical work across contexts and domains.

We warmly invite researchers to join the WE BE Global network. Researchers receive our templates, guidance, and methodological resources as well as direct support from the coordinating team as needed to accompany their research process.

Please find the call for expressions of interest. Interested researchers are invited to write to the contacts indicated in the call, specifying the context or domain on which they would like to focus.

Research Team

The team of 30+ researchers includes, inter alia:

  • Azhar Hussain (University of Sharjah, UAE, and Roskilde University, Denmark; context expertise: UAE and Denmark)
  • Burcu Yakut-Cakar (Independent researcher and Research Associate at Development Analytics, Turkey; context expertise: Turkey)
  • Fabio Battaglia (University of Birmingham, UK; context expertise: Italy and Scotland)
  • Gaby Umbach (European University Insitute)
  • Gergely Stégner (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary; context expertise: Hungary)
  • Graciela Haydee Tonon (Universidad de Palermo, Argentina, Research Center in Social Sciences (CICS-UP); context expertise: Argentina)
  • Jakob Dirksen (University of Oxford, UK; context expertise: USA)
  • Jaromír Harmáček (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic; context expertise: Czech Republic and Slovakia)
  • Jenna Saud (University of Sharjah, UAE; context expertise: UAE)
  • Juan Jaime Loera Gonzalez (Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation of the Government of Mexico, Mexico; context expertise: Mexico)
  • Raffaele Ventura (European University Institute)
  • Ranjan Karmakar (Garhwal University, India; context expertise: India)
  • Ratan Sarkar (Tezpur University, India; context expertise: India)
  • Sarah Grattan (European University Institute, Italy; context expertise: Ireland)
  • Sofia Borushkina (European University Institute, Italy; context expertise: Armenia)
  • Søren Harnow Klausen (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark; context expertise: Denmark)

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