Towards a ‘science of sustainability’: Improving the way ecological economics understands human well-being

Abstract Ecological economics seeks to recognize what traditional economics often ignores; that the economy is embedded in wider social and biophysical systems. To date ecological economics has focused on the biophysical dimensions of these interactions. Yet achieving sustainable development will require difficult decisions regarding which environmental and other assets should be preserved, and in what form. This emphasizes the importance of understanding why particular environmental resources and services are important to human well-being, and how social and economic institutions may be structured to make the best use of these and other forms of capital. The paper thus examines a variety of approaches to well-being, characterizing these as interpreting well-being as a state of mind, as a state of the world, as human capability, or as the satisfaction of underlying needs. The literature surveyed is drawn largely from political philosophy and psychology, and includes classical utilitarianism and self-evaluative approaches, descriptive utilitarianism and preference-based approaches, the basic needs approach, functional approaches, and underlying needs-based and virtue-based approaches. Particular authors include Michalos, Scitovsky, Easterlin, Hirsch, Galbraith, Rawls, Sen, Maslow, Boyden and Max-Neef. The ideas examined are found to have significant implications for economic theory and policy, especially regarding the social construction of preferences, the treatment of distributional issues, the identification of universal underlying needs, and the relationship between the satisfaction of these needs and perceived well-being. These insights suggest that rising real incomes are unlikely to result in improved community well-being, calling into question the traditional economic view of progress. They also offer a new path to sustainable development, in which the primary focus is on the cultivation of appropriate institutions and attitudes, rather than on the better management of resources. The paper concludes that important aspects of social, economic and environmental systems are codetermined, and thus that achieving sustainable development will require an expansion of the scope of analysis to encompass a wider system dynamic. The most promising approaches to well-being in this context are those that identify universal underlying human needs, thus avoiding the commodity fetishism of mainstream economics.