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Part I
Sustainable wellbeing in theory and history
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Prologue
Paola Spinozzi
Far from being defined as straightforward, unambiguous concepts, sustainable development and wellbeing are presented as contested fields. Their porosity has allowed for a proliferation of definitions and hermeneutic approaches. Why wellbeing is essential to sustainable development is explored here from interconnected theoretical and historical perspectives.
What wellbeing is, for whom, and how it can be sustained requires considering expectations, degrees of power and agency expressed by various social cross-sections, political parties, economic interest groups, and exponents of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. Reaching an agreement about a fair sharing of benefits and hazards associated with the ever-increasing potentials of science-driven technologies and industries presupposes a complex synergy of concepts, methodological approaches and historical awareness. Environmental decision-making requires integrated paradigms for the sciences and the humanities, allowing the ethical implications of scientific research and its applications to be studied along with the sustainability of cultural histories and memories. Sustainability derives from an understanding of culture as the domain in which peopleâs everyday lives intersect with the various structures of social formation â from traditions to class, politics to the personal. Whether our concerns are with the impact of climate change, global agriculture, or fossil-fuel economies, our response is often enacted in a local context and every single day. The food we buy, cook and eat, the means of transport we choose to travel from home to work, the ways in which we spend time with colleagues, in the family and in the community are framed within specific cultural beliefs about production and enjoyment, fruition, consumption and new production.
The goals of sustainability and wellbeing are experienced at the micro-level while simultaneously featuring as priorities in national and international agendas. How these two dimensions interact is at the core of Paul Jamesâ and Gonzalo Salazarâs chapters. Theories variously informed by positivism or relativism, invoking functionalist agendas or ontological attributes, are examined in order to assess ways in which wellbeing could and should be sustainable.
âCreating Capacities for Human Flourishing: An Alternative Approach to Human Developmentâ develops the idea that social wellbeing and sustainability have become interwoven developmental aspirations but still require adequate theorisation. Being well means being healthy and vital but can also involve individualistic and consumerist pursuits. Dialoguing with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, Paul James explains why he believes that their notion of capabilities is attached to a singular notion of freedom, posited as intrinsic and universal but also ambiguously portrayed as contingent and thus negotiable. Absorbing the early fifteenth-century term capacitĂ©, âability to holdâ, and the Latin term capacitas, âto have breadthâ, and capere, âto takeâ, Jamesâs definition of capacity draws a clear distinction from the concept of capability developing from a liberal approach. He proposes an integrated framework based on an ontological understanding of capacities as essential components of the human condition. While offering a broad range of exemplifications as to why capacity is always-already social, James also articulates a lucid meta-discourse, reflecting upon catchphrases, clichĂ©s, and overused concepts of sustainability and wellbeing.
âThe Incongruities of Sustainability: An Examination of the UN Earth Summit Declarations 1972â2012â by Gonzalo Salazar tackles sustainability in relation to economic and technocratic objectives as well as environmental and holistic goals. The conceptual indeterminacy of the term adjusts diverse perspectives, actors and scales, but it can also generate political exploitation and disorientation in local planning processes. By examining the UN International Agendas over the past three decades, particularly the Earth Summit Declarations of 1972, 1992, 2002 and 2012 and the role attributed to local planning and practice in a global scenario, Salazar identifies two contradictory perspectives on sustainability in the global agenda: an economic and pro-growth vision committed to the epistemology of progress versus a socio-ecological view committed to a relational epistemology. His arguments, elucidating the benefits of socio-ecologically effective sustainability practices, are connected to Anna Kalinowskaâs analysis in âAssessing Public Awareness about Biodiversity in Europeâ in Part II. As socio-demographic surveys reveal that the level of education and self-employment strongly influence the knowledge of biodiversity issues and the Natura 2000 network, it is clear that biodiversity can only be preserved through effective communication strategies and public understanding.
The chapters by Wendy Parkins, Pier-Paolo Saviotti and Paola Spinozzi move along a historical continuum spanning from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in about 1780 to the contemporary age. Industrialisation has led to the greatest increase in productivity in the history of humankind and the challenges of sustainability faced by Great Britain in the nineteenth century still strongly resonate worldwide in the twenty-first century.
In âSlow Living and Sustainability: The Victorian Legacyâ Parkins explains how the critique of modernity associated with âslow livingâ originated in the Victorian period, when a preference for a slower mode of life began to be articulated as an alternative to the dislocation and mechanisation of modernity. William Morris and Edward Carpenter began from the micro-level of everyday life in thinking about how the deleterious global consequences of industrial modernity could be challenged and, they hoped, reversed. They advocated an alternative approach to daily life and work in which the values of nature, beauty, and creativity were posed against the alienation, distraction and dissatisfaction attributed to the growth of Victorian consumer society. Celebrating the handmade and the artisanal, Morris and Carpenter variously began to formulate ideals of sustainability that they believed would enhance everyday life and restore the natural environment. Though permeated by strong ideological and idealistic views, their writings sound pragmatic and feasible; indeed, they show how addressing the problem of sustainability and wellbeing requires connecting vision and context, radical thought and practical agendas. The elements of complexity and simplicity these two Victorian writers associate with a good life resonate in theories of degrowth illustrated by Valeria Andreoniâs âSocial Equity and Ecological Sustainability through the Lens of Degrowthâ in Part II. The DIY (Do It Yourself) lifestyle and the practice of reusing and recycling as a form of ecological intervention indicate how nowadays individuals can take direct responsibility towards sustainable wellbeing.
âInnovation and Consumption in the Evolution of Capitalist Societiesâ by Saviotti illustrates how the evolution of consumption, work and leisure can be traced back to the rapidly rising productivity and slow progress of wellbeing for working-class people, triggered by the Industrial Revolution. Till the end of the nineteenth century consumption was limited to basic necessities and it was only after the First World War that a wider range of goods and services could be consumed by a growing amount of people. Working hours decreased at the beginning of the twentieth century and continued to decrease, but at a much lower rate, after the Second World War. In 1928 J. M. Keynes foresaw that 15 hours of work per week could cover all future needs and people would devote their free time to âhigherâ activities. Unlike his predictions, the observed behaviour shows consumption of higher quality and more differentiated goods, but the time for leisure activities is unevenly distributed. Saviotti persuasively explains the apparent paradox of the rapidly rising productivity and slow progress of wellbeing.
Speculations about humanity, the human environment, and its sustainability have been at the core of utopia as a literary genre since its origin in 1516. From the second half of the eighteenth century the focus of utopian writers began to shift from another place to another time. As the temporal dimension became central, classical utopia became uchronia, expressing concern about history and human development. âIn a Prescient Mode. (Un)Sustainable Societies in the Post/Apocalyptic Genreâ examines modes of foretelling sustainable or unsustainable futures for humankind. The demise of civilisation caused by a global catastrophe and the coming of a new era characterise the ancient, universal topos of apocalypse. Futuristic novels portraying the coming of the new era after a catastrophe are inspired by the apocalypse. Natural or anthropogenic disasters â floods, droughts, fire, earthquakes, total eclipses, climate change, pandemics, famine, nuclear explosions, and collisions of planets â all mark the end of declining societies. By undermining mankindâs confidence in eternal progress and dominion of nature, catastrophe in the contemporary age prompts a radical revision of the expectations about scientific and technological advancement. Perception of risk as a defining component of existence has proliferated in present times. Apocalypse and palingenesis in literary texts can be related to the categories of disaster and rebuilding in order to understand how human beings negotiate risk existentially and socially, within the private and public sphere, and how they make sense of, and respond to, catastrophic events. Adopting the categories of risk and disaster to interpret post-apocalyptic fiction shows how literary criticism can enhance our understanding of risk in present-day societies and strengthen our capacity building. Preparedness, management of risk and post-disaster reconstruction, tackled by Spinozzi, are further explored by Gianfranco Franz in Part III. In âLong-term Visions and Ordinary Management: Post-Earthquake Reconstruction in the Italian Region of Emiliaâ he contends that urban planning can be efficient and effective only if the areas hit by earthquakes are regarded as spaces in which individuals and communities have lived generating specific social and cultural histories. Post-disaster reconstruction can never reproduce what is lost: the culture, the traditions and daily habits of a community are forever changed and the next generations must find ways of metabolising the catastrophic event. Post-disaster sustainability is achieved if tangible and intangible capital assets are recognised as being equally relevant. Mature societies present a large stock of manmade, cultural, social capital. The larger the stock the more intense its potential erosion due to exogenous shocks and lack of investments: diversified investments in all complementary forms of capital are necessary, before and after disasters occur, to create a resilient social system.
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I.1 Creating capacities for human flourishing
An alternative approach to human development
Paul James1
I Core capacities
What are the core capacities that make for a flourishing life? It is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Every philosopher, public commentator and backyard critic seems to have a different view on the matter. Occasionally the terms of what makes for a good life are developed explicitly, but mostly the grounding of such claims is either left implicit or undeveloped. It is as if we all agree on what is good â something that is clearly not true â and spelling out the terms of a good life is unnecessary.
In the Global North the most common appeals assume some variation on the capacities for freedom, connectivity, democracy, and inclusion, with the ideology of freedom usually prevailing. The initiating questions differ. What makes a life worth living? What capacities does a person need to lead a good life? Or what digital capacities should a person ideally have? These questions orient toward the personal and tend to stay focused upon the individual. They are very different from more socially expansive questions. What makes a city liveable? What capacities make for conditions of human flourishing? The first set of questions emphasises individual capacities as the basis of the enquiry; the second set begins with the social as their basis, and includes individual capacities but extends those to the form of social habitation or the conditions of human flourishing as they are lived both variably and relationally.
Our approach begins with the last question: What capacities make for conditions of human flourishing? It suggests that if we can give a working answer to that question, then we have the foundation for answering all those other more narrowly framed or precisely oriented questions. Put the other way around, if we want to know the answers to practical and policy issues such as what makes for a liveable city, what constitutes good digital engagement or what capacities we need to learn in order to live a good life, we need to go back to the basics concerning human flourishing in general. This move will not give us one-to-one or complete answers concerning what should be done â which in any case would partly depend upon differences in time and across place. But at least it will slow down the current tendency towards falsely connected fashion-statements about what constitutes good ways of doing things. Wherever such statement chains begin, they all tend to end in the same ideologically condensed place: the dominance of a certain regime of economics. For example, one recent chain instrumentalises mindfulness: âa good life is mindfulâ, âmindfulness is smartâ, âsmart cities are better citiesâ, âbetter cities require fast connectivityâ, âconnectivity brings growthâ, and âeconomic growth is the only way to increase the quality of lifeâ. Providing a different basis to understanding human capacities is the task of the present chapter.
Philosophically, the long history of an interest in what constitutes the conditions of human flourishing has been one of considerable contestation. The written enquiry goes back to the Greek philosophers of the fifth century BCE arguing over the meaning of the polis and the household. Aristotle used the concept of eudaimonia as the highest human good â from eu, meaning âgoodâ, and daimon, meaning âspiritâ. Across the mid-to-late twentieth century, eudemonia tended to be translated as âhappinessâ, but more recently the term is equated with âflourishingâ. A publication that ma...
