Sameera Almalki (p)

Yashi Jain

Following the example of the TPI MATHER Project and its Culture Based Development approach for tracing the impact from various forms of capital on regional development, I present my work that showcases an exploration of the cultural capital impact on female integration in the educational sector across the regions of Saudi Arabia and the wellbeing impact of this integration. The paper compiles a unique dataset, composed of (i) my own hand-picked plethora of cultural heritage and living culture indicators in Saudi Arabia, which I have gathered following the CBD methodology as well as (ii) the unique regional data obtained from the Government Regional Dataset, that I have been granted special access too. This unique compilation of data allows me to compare the levels of female integration across regions and sectors in Saudi Arabia and explain them through the local cultural capital, as per CBD and the MATHER methodology for policy makers. This is in a way a continuation of the MATHER Project methodology applications, with a direct application in a different geography. This demonstrates the transferability of the CBD approach for policy making across geographic locations.

Yashi Jain (p)

Thomas Avery

Following the example of the TPI MATHER Project and its Culture Based Development approach for tracing the impact of various forms of capital on regional development, I present my exploration of how the ecological capital has been tapped across the Public Service Boards across Wales. In doing so, I am using the three main indicators offered by the MATHER Tool to policymakers, quantifying the quantity, impactfulness and ratio (between productivity impact and rate of exploitation) of the ecological capitals in Welsh PSBs. I take the analysis beyond the standard MATHER Project reports by comparing these three MATHER Tool indicators to well-being data. The relevance of my findings for the Welsh Government and my insights on the matter from my internship for the Welsh Government unit on the topic of ecology and circular economy topics further complete my contribution.

Thomas Avery (p)

Annie Tubadji

Wellbeing is a key concept and responsibility in Welsh policymaking and legislation, broadly defined by the Welsh Future Generations (Wales) Act (WFGA, 2015). However, local implementation and reporting on this statutory duty, which falls to regional Public Services Boards (PSBs), has to date been relatively ad hoc. While PSBs must assess and evaluate their impact on local wellbeing, there is no agreed means for achieving this and the value to society of this work goes unmeasured.

This paper summarizes support provided to two PSBs through the UKRI/ESRC & The Productivity Institute (TPI) funded MATHER Project. The project aimed to operationalize wellbeing and productivity concepts to enable feasible data collection and evidence-based reporting by PSBs. An analytical tool was co-created with input from stakeholders, policy makers, and the researcher team to enable consistent reporting across PSBs. These processes enabled the structured measurement and analysis of capital inputs from PSB work and the resultant outputs in terms of measures of wellbeing.

Findings are presented from qualitative analysis of focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and SWOT analysis that accompanied the economic Culture Based Development (CBD) analysis. This engagement, supported by Swansea University’s Local Challenges Research Office, explored how local stakeholders engage with the eight forms of local capital as defined by CBD and how they contribute to local development and wellbeing. We cross-checked how the capitals as conceived in the MATHER tool were perceived and used by PSB workstream leaders in promoting wellbeing. The qualitative interventions therefore enabled a transfer of knowledge from academia to practice and ensured consistent and clear development and usage of the tool for all involved parties. These processes will enable project scaling across Wales, offering PSBs a means to better measure and compare their wellbeing work’s impact on local productivity.

Initial findings from workshops held in 2024 and 2025 suggest social capital plays a strong role in offsetting limited financial capital, with much of the PSB’s work relying on goodwill within shared partnerships between public bodies. More comprehensive findings and policy implications will be presented subject to the completion of interviews and further workshops in spring 2025.

Annie Tubadji (p)

Maryam Alomair

The paper presents the economic analysis work under the UKRI/ESRC & The Productivity Institute (TPI) funded MATHER Project in Wales. The paper offers a structured summary of the entire process of helping local authorities in Wales to address the issue of local inequalities in an evidence-based manner. The local authorities (PSB) were helped by the Swansea University Local Challenges Research Office (LCRO) and its CBD Team to create a novel database of their policy projects for fighting poverty. On the basis of this data, the CBD team has generated analysis and trained the local authorities to implement themselves the same CBD type of analysis in the future. This exercise results in enhancing the administrative capacity of the local PSB units to generate independently fully adequate modern socio-economic quantitative evidence for policy making purposes. In particular, the CBD team focuses in equipping the administration ahead of many economic scientific sub-fields with clear delineation of the forms of capital: cultural capital, social capital and intangible capital among others.

Maryam Alomair (p)

Sameera Almalki

Following the example of the TPI MATHER Project and its Culture Based Development approach for tracing the impact from various forms of capital on regional development, I present to your attention an exploration of the cultural capital impact on road security in the regions of Saudi Arabia. The paper uses Google Trends sourced data for the period 2013 till 2022, which is used to demonstrate how linguistic digital footprint can serve as a quantitative measure for local cultural capital and estimate the cultural sensitivity of road safety throughout the country. The road-security and cultural data is also compared as trends with wellbeing data for the same period. This is in a way a continuation of the MATHER Project methodology, but also a novel CBD-specific application, as it is a CBD specific approach to use linguistic digital data as measurement for culture, but this is done in CBD research and never in policy relevant applications as the case of MATHER before. Thus, this is the unique value added of my paper.