The economy grew. Did anything get better?
Broad prosperity is the practice of defining and measuring welfare across all the dimensions that matter, so that trade-offs become visible instead of being averaged away.
Broad prosperity is not just about wealth. Just as the success of public policy is not just about looking at one perspective or metric. Broad prosperity looks at different dimensions across social, ecological and economic factors.
Broad prosperity is about the integral assessment of different perspectives influencing people’s lives. By taking into account the different perspectives, politics, government and the public can make justifiable decisions on what to spend public money on, and transparently communicate in order to get the legitimacy to execute.
In Europe, this debate has been active for the last decade. Australia has been moving in the same direction. Measuring What Matters set out a national framework for defining progress beyond economic output. The way of thinking exists; the operationalisation at the local level has been limited, despite the fact that many of the decisions that affect prosperity are made here.
Broad prosperity is usually presented as a set of trade-offs. Invest here, accept less there. Money can only be spent once. So it is not wrong, but it is incomplete.
Prosperity is not a zero-sum game. Choices between priorities are real — no council or board can invest in everything at once. But no dimension of prosperity should be allowed to fall away because it lost a vote. A defensible position is that no dimension should be driven below the national benchmark by an organisation’s own choices. Priorities decide where to push above that line. They should not decide where to fall below it.
Explicitation can help in cooperation. Within government organisations, cooperation can be improved by using broad prosperity to make the considerations of decisions explicit. Comparing the state of broad prosperity among neighbouring governmental areas can also lead to partnerships with multiple winners and a more efficient allocation of public resources.
TKD advisory has created a Local Broad Prosperity Model, based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The model does three things.
1. It establishes where the community stands. One comparable overview across all dimensions, benchmarked nationally.
2. It structures the conversation about where to invest. Councillors and officers already have debates, usually with partial information and within silos. The model gives them a shared starting position: which dimensions sit below the national benchmark, where do we want to lead, and what are we implicitly deciding by not deciding?
3. It makes the account to residents explainable. Where public money went, which dimension of prosperity it was meant to move, and the reasoning connecting the intervention to the expected improvement — what makes it possible to come back later and say honestly whether it worked.
What the model does not do. It does not tell a council what to prioritise. The data establishes the position; the priorities are political, and they should be. It is also not neutral, and TKD advisory does not claim it is — selecting indicators means taking a position on what prosperity consists of, and a council that disagrees with one should say so. That argument is part of the value.
Start: a broad prosperity scan with interpretation. The model applied to your governmental area, with the analysis that turns a dataset into a picture: where the community sits relative to the national benchmark, which dimensions are moving and in which direction, and which findings warrant a conversation.
Then, where useful: a session with the council or executive. A facilitated discussion on what the picture means and what follows from it — where to lead, where to hold, and where the position is not acceptable. The scan produces the position. The session is where the choices get made.
Beyond that, the work typically continues into strategy, policy development, tool creation or an impact and evaluation framework, depending on what the picture reveals. See our other services →
The first conversation is about what your community’s picture would need to show for it to change a decision.
Start a conversation or call +61 475 923 987