Efforts recently attempted to integrate various aspects of economic progress, environmental sustainability and social welfare into an aggregate measure of well-being share one major weakness concerning the identification of key aspects of well-being and of weights to aggregate these dimensions, they all suffer from lack of legitimacy. In this paper we present an innovative and well tested approach that attempts to overcome such limitation granting legitimacy through a broad consultation of civil society organisations. After a brief review of the state of the art, we present the methodology followed to build the QUARS (Index of Regional Quality of Development) and we point out strengths and weaknesses of our approach. We summarize the results according to the selected variables for Italian regions, we present the outcomes of our dissemination work and assess the robustness of the composite indicator.