This article presents a framework for analysing wellbeing in development practice, drawing on the work of the Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group (WeD). Wellbeing is viewed as a social process with material, relational, and subjective dimensions. Wellbeing may be assessed at individual and collective levels, but at base is something that happens in relationship – between individual and collective; between local and global; between people and state. The article considers potential hazards in taking wellbeing as focus, and concludes by considering what real difference such a focus could make.

The ubiquity of references to happiness and wellbeing indicates widespread anxiety that all may not be well, reflecting the erosion of the social in late capitalist modernity. The paper finds that, rather than helping to solve this problem, individualist formulations of wellbeing in policy mimic or deepen the underlying pathology. Drawing on empirical research in Zambia and India, it advocates an alternative approach, relational wellbeing, which is grounded in a relational ontology that can challenge dominant ideologies of the self, places central the generative quality of relationality which is critical to societal change and engenders a socially inclusive political vision.

This paper challenges the dominant 'colour-blind' stance of development, arguing that the silence on race is a determining silence, which both masks and marks its centrality to the development project. The aim of the paper is to set out a basic framework for exploring this further. Noting many continuities with colonial formations, it identifies three critical dimensions of development which need to be interrogated: its material outcomes; its techniques of transformation; and its modes of knowing. Its analysis of race emphasises the diversity of understandings and the fluidity between them which underlie both their potential for transformation and their resilience. Following Omi and Winant's work on the USA, development is suggested to comprise a process of racial formation, made up of a vast range of diverse and contradictory racial projects which link the meaning of ethnic, racial and national identities to material entitlements.

This paper explores the different ways that relationships and the relational figure in the integrative approach, relational wellbeing (RWB). These are (1) conceptualising persons as relational subjects; (2) relationships as the means through which people seek to address a wide variety of needs; (3) inter-relations between the experience of wellbeing and the underlying factors within persons and their contexts that either promote or undermine wellbeing; (4) relationships serving as conduits of power and the making of identities; and (5) inter-relations between the concepts and methods of research with representations of (persons and) wellbeing. The main thrust of the paper is theoretical, but it is anchored in long-standing research into wellbeing in the global South and practical experience in applying RWB in the global North. Empirically, it draws, in particular, on a case study from Zambia of a ‘meshwork’ of relations between birth and foster parents and children moving between households. This places the relational, rather than the individual, at the centre of analysis. It shows how different dimensions of wellbeing may coincide, but there may also be trade-offs between them. Relationships are bearers of power, and it is the interactions of structure and agency that ultimately limit or engender opportunities for sustained individual and collective wellbeing.

The European Journal of Development Research is a multi-disciplinary journal that seeks to broaden our understanding of the processes that advance or impede human development, whether from a political, economic, sociological or anthropological perspective. It is the official journal of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI).