COMMONWEALTH ASSOCATION FOR
EDUCATION, ADMINISTRATION AND
MANAGEMENT
VOLUME 2 ISSUE 1
ISSNO NO 2322-0147
JANUARY
2014
THE LINK BETWEEN HUMAN WELLBEING AND
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Excellence International Journal of Education and
Research (Multi- subject journal)
Excellence International Journal Of Education And Research
VOLUME 2
ISSUE 1
ISSN 2322-0147
THE LINK BETWEEN HUMAN WELLBEING AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
BASHER.M
Lecturer Business Studies Department
Salalah College of Techmology
Salalah, Sultanate of Oman
Email id: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Globally, human wellbeing and environmental wellbeing seems to be at a collision course.
Human wellbeing is a broad concept, which derives from the consumption of goods and services.
It is also related to people’s functioning and capabilities, ie, the freedom and possibilities they
have, to satisfy their needs. Achieving sustainable development requires difficult decision
regarding reducing the negative effect of economic growth on natural environment. This paper
examines variety of approaches to human wellbeing and draw attention to the need for
improving human wellbeing while at least maintaining the basis for future wellbeing. In a finite
world sustainable development requires a robust understanding of why environmental resources
are important to human wellbeing and how social and economic institutions may be structured to
make best use of these assets.
KEY WORDS
Approaches to human wellbeing, consumption and wellbeing, people’s functioning and
capabilities, quality of life and wellbeing, socio-economic institutions and environmental
wellbeing
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INTRODUCTION
Human wellbeing generally refers to quality of people’s experience of life. There will be
difference in what people regard as important for their wellbeing, depending on who they are,
their position in society and where they are. What is important for wellbeing also differ
depending on geographic, economic, social and cultural contexts. What a young woman needs
for her wellbeing in a city context is likely to be differed to what an old man need for his
wellbeing in a rural village. This is true not only for their physiological needs but also for their
social and psychological needs. Because of the diversity of what people need for wellbeing, most
of the recent literature and evolving approaches to human wellbeing have come to the conclusion
that there are three broad dimensions of human wellbeing – material dimension, quality of life
dimension and sustainability dimension. Further to this, the concept of human wellbeing has
different connotations as it is covered in wide range of scientific field –economics, psychology,
happiness literature etc.
Traditionally, economists have followed a welfare approach in which wellbeing is related to the
utility that people derive from consumption. The more conventional way to describe human
wellbeing is by charting their consumption of food, clothing and shelter, their health status,
educational attainment and other so called objective factors.Amartya Sen severely criticized this
utility approach. Different individuals have unequal abilities in transforming resources into
wellbeing. Sen conceptualizes the objective aspects of wellbeing by means of “functioning and
capabilities” approach. Functioning can be conceived as collection of each person’s observable
achievement of objective factors relating to a wide range of factors such as education, health, etc.
But it is important to look beyond these achievements, to include full range of opportunities open
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to people. It is for that reason Sen strongly emphasizes the importance of freedom. The more
freedom people have the more capabilities they have to increase their range of opportunities. The
key issue is empowerment of people, that is, individuals should be seen as actors of their own
development.
Happiness literature argues that the way in which people value their lives should be integral part
of any investigation into human wellbeing. The quantification of human .wellbeing should not be
restricted to what people choose to consume and how it affect their health, educational level etc.
Also the extent to which people value these outcomes are relevant. The happiness literature is
represented by an overall subjective indicator which stresses the way in which people perceive
their quality of life. Here wellbeing is a measure in terms of life satisfaction or happiness.
Richard Layard identifies the main determinants of wellbeing as “the big seven” and it include
family relations, financial situations, work, community and friends, health, personal freedom and
personal values. This list is, of course, not exhaustive. But empirical research shows that
people’s life satisfaction depends primarily on these themes.
Another attempt to identify the main determinants of wellbeing is provided by Maslow. He tried
to formulate a need based framework of human motivation and behavior. In his work he
distinguished different types of human needs. The distinction of several categories of human
needs may be helpful in attempts to identify the main quality of life theme.
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Self
Actualisation
Esteem Needs
Social Needs
Safety Needs
Physiological Needs
Maslow’s pyramid of human needs
The first layer of the pyramid of human needs concerns the physiological needs which are
required to sustain life. Food, water, clean air, shelter, sleep and sexual satisfaction etc are the
most important physiological needs. Next importance is the safety needs such as safe
neighborhood, medical insurance, job security and financial reserves. After these most
elementary needs Maslow pointed out the importance of social needs which includes elements
such as friendship, belonging to a group, as well as giving and receiving love. Higher up in the
pyramid of human needs we find the esteem needs. These needs can be internally motivating
such as self-esteem, accomplishment and self-respect or externally motivating due to reputation
or recognition. Self-actualization forms the top of the pyramid and dealing with the extent to
which individuals can reach their full potential. Self-actualized people tend to have motivator
such as truth, justice, wisdom and meaning.
Maslow’s work has been criticized on a number of points. Higher order needs also have a vital
role to play in human psychological survival. There are also numerous examples from both
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developed and developing societies where people’s choices disprove the notion of hierarchy of
needs. There are many circumstances where people will act to satisfy higher order needs before
fully satisfying basic needs. However the shortcomings, Maslow’s work are most of all useful to
define a number of important domains which are relevant while studying human wellbeing.
WELLBEING AND DEVELOPMENT
The ultimate purpose of economic development is to provide improvement in the lives of men
and women who generated development and in the lives of children who we hope to generate
development in the future. Achieving a state of wellbeing is important for all people everywhere,
whether in developed or developing countries. It is important that people have enough food and
their basic needs are met. It is also important that their efforts to live well and with dignity is not
overlooked in international development policy. Arthur Lewis, one of the founders of modern
international development thinking noted in 1955 in his Theory of Economic Development that
economic growth was not the purpose of development , rather it was a means to increase the
choice available to people. The purpose of having these choices available was to enable people to
find ways to live their lives better. This was an important reminder in the post-world war two
years when the economics of development was strongly focused on reconstruction and capital
accumulation. In 1969, Dudley Seers proposed that there are three considerations that help us to
distinguish whether economic growth could be equated with positive development. These are
whether poverty was being reduced, whether employment was being reduced and whether
inequality was being lessening.
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The formative contribution of the Human Development Report by UNDP has been to promote a
human centric understanding of development. This took consideration of human outcomes such
as improvement in health and education gender equality and sustainability. In recent years
human development paradigm has been greatly strengthened and has been pushed to expand its
boundaries.Although poverty reduction has been a global priority for number of decades, it is not
clear that a focus on absolute income measures of poverty provides us with a good enough
understanding of the complexity of poverty to make a sustained headway in policy efforts
.Assessing poverty interns of income or consumption may be helpful for some limited policy
purposes, but these do not capture the range of different outcomes that poverty manifest itself.
As such they provide only limited support to effective policy design for poverty reduction. It is
important for policy makers not just to consider the material dimensions of poverty, but to
recognize that people’s own perceptions and aspirations also matters if we are to understand how
poverty policy might work. A growing economy does not necessarily indicate that all people in
all places within the national economy are experiencing positive development. There are many
examples where economies have been growing but the situation for many people within the
economy may be worsening. It is increasingly observed that growing inequalities in the
distribution of benefits from developments are a matter of concern.
WELLBEING AND SUSTAINABILITY
In 1987, the Brundland report provided an important landmark for international development
when it defined sustainable development as … “development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs”. Conventional
economic measures of development has been accounting for the negative effect of economic
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growth on the natural environment. Environmental challenges are likely to be increasingly
significant in the coming century and the issue of how to achieve sustainable development has an
ever more urgent profile in global policy agenda. Pressures on scarce natural resources are
increasing and the current development pathway are generating changes in the global
environment that are recognized as being unsustainable It is the humankinds’ effort to achieve
ever greater levels of wellbeingover the last two centuries that is behind the current unsustainable
pattern of use of planet and its resources. Any future pathway towards sustainable development
will depend on the achievement of globally sustainable notion of human wellbeing.
The measure of human wellbeing should be a more realistic measure of socioeconomic
conditions than narrowly monetary indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product. It can be the
average of “how long people may expect to live in good health; the stability of family size; how
well needs are met from income; food; safe water and sanitation; the size and condition of the
national economy including inflation; unemployment and the debt burden; education that include
primary, secondary, and higher secondary school enrollment rates; communication that include
accessibility and reliability of the telephone system and use of the internet; political rights; civil
liberties; press freedom; corruption; peacefulness; military expenditure; deaths from armed
conflicts and terrorism; violent crime rates; the difference in income share between the richest
and poorest of the population; disparities between males and females in income, education, and
parliamentary decision-making and so on.
The measure of environmental wellbeing should be a broad measure of the state of the
environment, with a fuller and more systematic treatment of national environmental conditions.
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It can be the average of how well a country conserves the diversity of its natural land
ecosystems; maintains the quality of the ecosystems that it develops; river conversion by dams;
the water quality of drainage basins; emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting
substances to the global atmosphere; the quality of city air; how well a country conserves its
wild species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and higher plants, and the variety of its
domesticated livestock breeds; how much energy a country consumes; the demands its
agriculture, fishing, and timber sectors place on resources and so on.
CONCLUSION
The narrow economic approach to development has emphasized the importance of increasing
incomes in order to be able to live increasingly well. This approach champions an individualized
notion of wellbeing, where the individualized desire to live well is seen as the core drive of the
growth dynamics. The wellbeing of some is often achieved at the expense of the wellbeing of
others. Most theories of governance realize that the purpose of governance is to create
arrangements and institutions that arrange us to live well together. When the challenges of
achieving sustainable development is reframed interns of the human wellbeing, it become clear
that the challenges for global governance is to find ways for us to live sufficiently well together
so that there is regard for others and the planet both now and future.
The main reasons why no country combines high levels of human and ecosystem wellbeing are
that it is inherently difficult to do and—more importantly—no country is committed in doing it.
Certain initiatives are needed for countries to achieve ways of living that are desirable, equitable,
and sustainable. They include commitment to human and ecosystem wellbeing as a national goal,
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regular wellbeing assessments to build support for the goal,national information systems on
human and ecosystem wellbeing, coverage of all aspects of wellbeing by the news media,
replacement of existing taxes with taxes on energy and materials, regional wellbeing alliances so
that groups of nations can harmonize their efforts to achieve sustainability, partnerships between
rich ecosystem deficit and poor human deficit countries to exchange development support for
ecosystem capacity.
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