Measuring What Matters
Did you know? Each year we dedicate our time and expertise to research and advocacy that benefits regional communities.
It’s part of our social impact commitment, and you can read more about this in our impact report.
Recently we made a submission to the Australian Government, providing feedback on the emerging policy themes for Measuring What Matters.
Our submission
At Anna Dixon Consulting, we have been using an adapted version of the OECD Framework for Measuring Well-being and Progress. We have used this on projects such as economic development strategies and drought resilience in a regional Western Australian setting.
Through this work, we have found many measures lack relevance at a localised level, and feel this will be a particular challenge in the many small regional towns and local governments in the WA Wheatbelt region. Measures need to be tested for relevance in a regional setting and able to be scaled to work at finer scales.
Two issues we highlighted as important to wellbeing in our submission are inequality, and the natural environment.
We see that measures of inequality such as wealth disparity and income disparity will be particularly important in all WA regions. Because of this we would like to see a focus on measuring and highlighting entrenched disadvantage. Measuring What Matters is an opportunity to increase the take-up of effective measures of wealth and income disparity within communities, not just between communities.
Secondly, there is growing evidence of the dependence of our economy on the natural environment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in regional areas, where food production, renewable energy and tourism are just some of the sectors which rely on natural capital. Regional areas are also disproportionately impacted (and projected to continue to be) by adverse environmental events and trends, such as drought, extreme heat, reducing overall rainfall, increased intensity of rainfall events, to name a few. This is also an area lacking the most in the uptake of measures at present.
You can read our submission, including our thoughts on measures such as volunteering, in full here.
Trusted insights
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A version of this blog post first appeared on Anna Dixon Consulting’s website, our previous brand.
