World view Sweden Seen and heard One Swedish city has used citizen engagement to understand the hopes and fears of local people and how they think wellbeing should be measured. Liam Kay-McClean reports What are your priorities in life? Do you treasure time at home with family? Is safety and security paramount? Is positive mental health number one? Do public sector investment decisions accurately reect those priorities, concerns, hopes and dreams? An experiment in Skultuna, part of the city of Vsters in Sweden, sought to examine peoples priorities through a citizen engagement project. It was carried out in partnership between community engagement non-prot Dark Matter Labs and Samhllskontraktet, a partnership between Mlardalen University, Vsters and the municipality of Eskilstuna, which acted as the community anchor. The premise for the experiment was to build on the beyond GDP movement, which seeks to examine metrics for peoples wellbeing, alongside more traditional economic measures, to determine the strength of a local or national economy and society. Numerous nations have attempted to build on this concept (see boxout), but all of these projects took a top down approach. In Sweden, the research team wanted to use civil engagement to allow local people to set their own wellbeing indicators and, therefore, use a much more bottom up process. The researchers began by identifying a local authority team in Skultuna that was looking to run scenario-planning workshops based around a theme of what Skultuna could look like in 2035, together with potential strategies to achieve goals and mitigate threats. The researchers worked with the local authority to run workshops with citizens in Skultuna, examining what wellbeing indicators local people prioritised. We really wanted the indicators to be social connectors, explains Emily Harris, nance and economic innovation lead at Dark Matter Labs. We thought we should go out there and do it in person. There is no point in only having theories about why things are not progressing. Engagement is an issue in many civic engagement projects, and, as a potential problem, it was rmly in the minds of the research team. One of the big challenges we had was communicating to people about why it should matter, Harris adds. People like to talk about what they want in their communities up to a certain point. Then theres always the questions of where is it going?, what is the point? and is it actually going to have any impact? Our challenge was working out how to express the idea of community engagement in a way people could really connect to. People are scared, people are worried; theres lots of polarisation. But a lot of the time, people cant connect what is happening to them on a day-to-day basis to policy issues. They think it is completely irrelevant. The team mitigated this issue by connecting issues such as housing aordability with government policy and banking policy, which helped make the ideas seem more relatable, according to Harris. 14 Impact ISSUE 44 2023_pp14-15 WV Sweden.indd 14 05/12/2023 12:05