René Grotenhuis is correct that there is little new about human well-being: human beings have written about it for centuries. But it would be wrong to assume that further thinking about the concept of well-being has nothing new to offer contemporary development thinking and practice.

There is much more to human well-being than it simply being a new label for development itself. Refocusing development on human well-being offers a way of critically reflecting on the adequacy of our currently accepted wisdom about how we think about and do development. Grotenhuis makes many valid observations, but each of these illustrates the potential usefulness of focusing on well-being.

Yes, well-being cannot be delivered to people by governments, NGOs or other development agents. A state of well-being is something that people (you and I) struggle for and achieve (or fail to achieve) for themselves. But, many development agencies continue to operate with an implicit view that they do deliver well-being, but it is usually their own notion of well-being, embedded in their conception of development. Grotenhuis assumes there is much greater agreement about the idea of development than is observable in reality. In fact, we are well aware that some patterns of development may result in conditions that make it harder for some people to achieve well-being.

This argues that human well-being is not a second-order concept, but that it should be the first-order concept for development agencies. Human well-being is ultimately what development should be trying to promote. Grotenhuis’s comments reflect much of what is increasingly accepted about how we understand development, but which development policy and practice are struggling to find ways to cope with.

People differ in their conceptions of well-being: yes, they do! A focus on well-being tells us that development policy and practice must better recognize and deal with heterogeneity.

Our conceptions of well-being change over time: yes, they do! Development is about change, and development practice must adopt conceptual tools and methods of working that engage with changing goals and aspirations. Perhaps one of the most useful new contributions to development thinking that refocusing on human well-being brings is that it recognizes the potential of the conceptual and methodological contributions from social psychology to human adaptation.

The three-dimensional definition of well-being recognizes that all three perspectives are important in human lives and that development initiatives must take account of all of them. This means that we must work to develop indicators of each of these dimensions and find ways to integrate them into policy design as well as into monitoring and evaluation systems. It requires us to take into account whether needs are being met, and whether people are able to act meaningfully in pursuit of their goals, as well as their own evaluations of how well they are doing in their lives. This way of operationalizing human well-being may make development practice more complicated, but it does not make it impossible.

Allister McGregor works at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and is former director of the ESRC Research Group on Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD), University of Bath, UK.