Measuring Local Well-being: reflections on the Local Government (Community Well-Being) Amendment Bill. The Local Government (Community Well-being) Amendment Bill is designed to provide local authorities with greater legal freedom to make investments that will raise the well-being of their local community. The legislation is predicated on the assumption that people’s well-being is influenced by their local context. In order to identify the influence of changes in context generated by local investments, it is necessary to recognise that individuals differ in many ways and that the impact of any given investment can vary substantially from one person to the next. Indicators based on collections of individuals miss much of that variation. It is also necessary to recognise the variety of ways well-being can be measured. This short article raises both these issues by exploring three measures of well-being currently available on the 2018 Quality of Life survey.

The Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, in partnership with Victoria University of Wellington’s Health and Wellbeing distinctiveness theme steering group, hosted a symposium on ‘The Four Wellbeings for Local Government’ on 26 February 2019. The symposium heard brief presentations from eight invitees from local government, central government, the private sector and NGOs: Justin Lester, Lyn Patterson, Karen Thomas, Peter McKinlay, Wayne Mulligan, Meg Williams, Danielle Shanahan and Suzy Morrissey. Inspired by these addresses and by the ensuing discussion, this article considers what the reintroduction of the ‘four well-beings’ into the Local Government Act might mean for local decision making.

This article explores the emergence of localism as a key concept in local governance. It distinguishes between devolution, subsidiarity and localism, and examines how current policy development in New Zealand still reflects a very top-down understanding of governance. It then argues that local government has all the powers required to put in place a radical practice of localism and explains how.

A Focus on the How not the Who: localism in Aotearoa through a community-led lens. Emerging localism discussions in Aotearoa must look further than a structured devolution of roles and responsibilities from central to local government. New operating models are needed that build from local wisdom and leadership to actively involve and empower local communities and iwi/Mäori as genuine partners in decision- and solution-making for their places. Taking a ‘learning by doing’ focus to incentivise and support local stakeholders to better work together is essential. Future localist success will require greater power sharing and concerted trust building at all levels.

Localism is widely supported as an antidote to what are seen as the adverse impacts of globalisation and one-size-fits-all, top-down central government. But interpretations of localism and views on how it should be practised vary greatly. This presents particular challenges for local government, which typically sees itself as the rightful beneficiary of a localism agenda focused on devolution and decentralisation, but must then confront difficult questions about its own institutional frameworks, its revenue base, and sharing power with local communities. While local government in New Zealand is exploring these issues through a national Localism project, its counterparts in Australia seem ill-prepared to follow suit.