Well-being is linked to many desirable outcomes, such as healthier relationships, more prosocial behaviour, better health and life expectancy, greater productivity at work, better income, and increased creativity. Happy people are more likely to get involved with social, political, and environmental issues. Longitudinal research with children shows that low subjective well-being can be predictive of future problems, while high subjective well-being was found to be predictive of those things that correlate with wellbeing, such as getting married, becoming parents, having a lower likelihood of a divorce, and a lower probability of losing or changing one’s job. While well-being research has predominantly focused on the individual level, this concept also has an ecological utility, for example at the work, local community, school, or general societal level; community well-being, defined as the sense of well-being shared by a group, has recently emerged as a relevant concept.

NORFACE in collaboration with CHANSE proposed a major transnational programme on the topic of “Enhancing Well-Being for the Future”. This theme can be approached from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, primarily social sciences and beyond. It enables and encourages multi-disciplinarity and provides opportunities for pan-European research integrating researchers from different regions of Europe, and for comparisons across various contexts and over-time.

The program Enhancing well-being for the future has three major objectives:

• To advance excellent and internationally leading theoretical and methodological research on well-being, which may be multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and comparative, and which builds synergistically on a pan-European basis.

• To develop and promote theoretically grounded, research-based knowledge and insight into well-being related to issues of high societal, policy, economic and practical relevance, in ways that have the potential to have substantive impact on people’s lives.
• To motivate and support excellence and capacity building for research on well-being on a cross-national basis throughout the NORFACE countries, Europe, and beyond.

The present program proposes to focus the research on the following themes:

• Crises, challenges, and well-being.
• Environmental challenges and well-being.
• Well-being and mental health.
• Well-being, economy, and politics.