Mapping the beyond GDP field: Canonical concentration and insular invisibility in three decades of multidimensional prosperity measurement (1995–2026)

Three decades after the Stiglitz Commission's call to measure “beyond GDP”, multidimensional prosperity frameworks have proliferated, yet cross-linguistic mappings of their paradigmatic and territorial composition remain scarce; existing reviews rely on English-only searches. This article characterises the conceptual, methodological and territorial structure of multidimensional prosperity frameworks published between 1995 and 2026, and tests the robustness of the resulting patterns to alternative definitions of the review scope. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA 2020), we searched Web of Science and Scopus in English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, retrieving 23,048 unique records. Title-and-abstract screening used a deterministic rule-based classifier specified and refined by the two reviewers, who adjudicated every record it passed forward at full text, yielding 583 included studies. Paradigm was coded at two levels — the identity of the framework referenced and the analytical framing of the study deploying it — because the two do not coincide. Robustness was assessed across three nested corpora ( n = 583, 551, 503). The Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) jointly account for 46.3–50.4% of the corpus. Frameworks with a social paradigmatic identity account for 79.0%, ecological for 8.9%, holistic for 8.3%, economic for 2.2% and two-dimensional hybrids for 1.6%. Insular contexts represent 1.0% of studies, and paradigm is not associated with territorial scale (Monte-Carlo p = 0.39), so the concentration is field-wide rather than confined to any territorial tier. Framework paradigm and study-level analytical framing diverge for 73.2% of the studies in which both are determinable: 184 of the 348 studies invoking a social-paradigm instrument (52.9%) are framed economically. Among the 162 bespoke frameworks, 58 integrate all three substantive dimensions but only one imposes an explicit biophysical boundary. All patterns are stable across the three corpus definitions. Three decades after the Beyond GDP critique, the field remains concentrated on a narrow canon of capability-based instruments that are predominantly deployed within income- and growth-centred analytical framings, while ecological-paradigm frameworks and insular territories remain marginal. Paradigmatic plurality appears to require editorial and institutional intervention rather than further conceptual elaboration.