During the last decade a multidimensional vision of progress of societies has been gathering increasing attention in developed and developing countries. A worldwide effort about the need to go ‘beyond GDP’ as a measure of societal progress has been organised around the OECD World Forums using the concept of ‘equitable and sustainable wellbeing’, which defines the ‘wellbeing of a society’ (or societal wellbeing) as the sum of the human wellbeing and the ecosystem condition and ‘progress of a society’ (or societal progress) as the improvement in human wellbeing and the ecosystem condition. In the context of the future model of development, which has to emerge from the post‐2015 discussion, the concept of societal progress may represent a common framework for all countries of the world regardless of their level of income, model of consumption, social or political structure or environmental challenges.