When Partners for a New Economy was founded in 2015, shifting how the world measures economic progress was one of the defining challenges of our field. Ten years on, that challenge has moved from the margins to the centre of global policy.
For the first time in history, the world has formally committed to developing measures of progress that go beyond GDP. This commitment, embedded in the 2024 Pact for the Future and signed by all UN member states, is a political mandate, and the UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP has now been tasked with turning it into a global framework.
Why GDP was never enough
GDP, the Gross Domestic Product, measures the monetary value of goods and services produced in a country. It was invented in the 1930s to help manage production during the Great Depression but its own creator, economist Simon Kuznets, explicitly warned that national welfare “can scarcely be inferred” from it. That warning was ignored.
For decades, GDP has been used as the primary yardstick of national success, yet it misses much of what actually shapes people’s lives. It does not count the unpaid care and domestic work that holds societies together, work that accounts for 65% of women’s working hours globally. It treats environmental destruction as a gain, where a flood, a clear-cut forest, or an oil spill can all increase GDP. It is blind to inequality, allowing a country where wealth concentrates entirely at the top to show strong growth while most people’s lives deteriorate. And it ignores cross-border harms, from carbon emissions to resource extraction from poorer nations.
What is different this time
Previous attempts to move beyond GDP, by Nobel laureates, major commissions, and national governments, all fell short. What makes this moment different is the convergence that have never existed simultaneously. The UN, the same institution that made GDP inescapable, is now mandated to standardise what comes next. And for the first time, scientific communities, civil society movements, and advocates for climate justice, feminist economics, and tax justice are all pushing in the same direction at the same time.
“GDP is the most widely used metric of economic progress and well-being. But it cannot be the only one. In our world of deep inequality, GDP is indifferent to whether income goes to billionaires or to the poor ….. We need to count what matters: health, biodiversity, job creation, human rights, equality, and peace.”
– António Guterres, UN Secretary-General –
António Guterres’s LinkedIn Post
What the report proposes
In May 2026, the UN High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP released a report that does not ask the world to abandon GDP. It asks something more ambitious: to look at the full picture, and to act accordingly. At its core is a simple but radical principle — that progress means equitable, inclusive, and sustainable well-being.
To measure this, it proposes a dashboard of 31 indicators structured around four components: foundational principles, current well-being, equity and inclusion, and sustainability and resilience. Together, they map not just how a society is doing today, but whether it can hold together over time.
Read the full report: https://www.un.org/en/beyondGDP
It calls on governments to establish and regularly publish national progress dashboards, embedded in the core processes of policy, planning, and budgeting. It calls on the UN system to produce an annual Beyond GDP global progress report. And it calls on academia, civil society, the private sector, and the media to drive innovation in measurement and shape public discourse.
P4NE grantee partners, including Rethinking Economics, ZOE Institute for Future-Fit Economies, Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll), the OECD WISE Centre, Earth4All, and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), are part of the broader ecosystem working towards this vision. We have been building alternative economic indicators, advocating for systemic change, and imagining what a different kind of prosperity could look like.
What comes next
The next 18 months will be decisive. Member states will negotiate the design of the intergovernmental process, its scope, timeline, and whether it leads to binding commitments or voluntary guidelines. The process could result in a strong UN-led implementation mechanism with real funding and accountability, or it could produce a polite resolution that invites voluntary uptake and quietly disappears.
Media Briefing – Counting what doesn’t count: The UN’s push to rewrite the rules of “progress”
Which way it goes will depend on sustained pressure from governments, civil society, and movements around the world, including all of us in the new economy field.
For those of us who have spent years funding and supporting the organisations pushing this agenda forward, this is the moment we have been working toward.
Mai Colamorea
P4NE Communications Manager