Wellbeing, Resilience and Sustainability: The New Trinity of Governance
Be Well! Be Resilient! Act Sustainably!
This book looks at three of the most engaging terms in current political usageâwellbeing, resilience and sustainability. These three ideas have come to have real grip in all our lives in recent years. They have entered popular consciousness and emerged in political and policy-making narratives over the last decades to great acclaim, being viewed as providing answers to some of the most serious challenges of our times. They are seen as offering new approaches to issues that recent natural and human-made crises have highlighted as having been inadequately dealt with by our current governance arrangements and by mainstream policy approaches. Either separately or together they have been claimed by various commentators as being elements of a much-needed paradigm shift in political and policy thinking.
Elements of all three of the concepts are to be found in many of the efforts to rethink or reform our economic and societal arrangements in the post-financial crisis era. Many governments and international institutions are promoting the idea of âinclusive growthâ as a necessary reform of the orthodox economic growth paradigm that will better address the social and political tensions generated by growing inequalities, in which those with wealth have been further rewarded while many others are marginalized and left in an economically precarious position. The OECD, one of the leading institutions in this global effort, begins its main position paper on this by stating that inclusive growth is a human-centric vision of development, âin which wellbeing is the metric of successâ (OECD 2018, p. 3). In their argument for âCivic Capitalismâ, Hay and Payne go straight to the political nexus and propose that an ideological shift is necessary, âto one that puts the market in the service of the public, as citizens, rather than the citizens in the service of the marketâ (Hay and Payne 2015, p. 9). The narratives of the environmental movement have also expanded to embrace the three concepts. All three feature strongly in Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the source of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs], UNGA 2015). While in more critical writing on sustainability, a number of authors argue that environmental sustainability will only be meaningfully achieved when it takes on board the significance of understanding of human wellbeing (Helne and Hirvilammi 2015; Jackson 2017).
The three concepts sometimes stand in tension towards one another, but there is more that binds them together than drives them apart. They have a number of things in common but foremost amongst these is their concern with distinctive human capacities that shape who we are and that imply a particular relationship to our wider social and natural environments. With this in mind, this book sets out to do three things. First, it seeks to explain these three ideas, while also exploring areas of dispute and uncertainty. These ideas are still being formulated and at times are deployed in ways that are unclear and ambiguousâsometimes deliberately so. We thus seek to review the debates about their possible meanings and significance. Second, we explain how these three ideas connect with and to some extent even define one another. We outline an understanding of why it is that they have emerged simultaneously, at this particular moment. Third, and relatedly, we wish to examine how these ideas connect with strategies of governance, broadly understood. This addresses questions of the current social, political and economic context and wider arguments about the changing global environment. In terms of context, we write this book at a time when people are talking of governance âafter the crisisâ, where attempts are being made to think about how people and governments ought to behave and how societies ought to be governed. Questions of social, political and economic uncertainty influence the ways in which these main arguments are developed. Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability, while presented in a positive manner as eminently desirable qualities and objectives, are key ideas for times that are considered to be uncertain and unpredictable. Indeed, their desirability may derive precisely from this more troubling wider picture.
This book starts with three chapters, one on each of the three ideas. In these chapters, we look first at the recent emergence of the ideas, then at discussions about their meaning and how they might be used in governance and policy-making. The chapters highlight areas of contestation and debate as well as identifying what is distinctive and innovative about these ideas. In particular, they identify the human and social element of these ideas, how they enhance or are enhanced by human or social capital through greater awareness and reflection upon available resources (human or social), information, networks and support, and how they relate to governance by encouraging reflexivity, awareness and innovative and enterprising behaviours. These chapters focus on each idea in its own right, but also indicate where and how they relate to one another. The fourth and concluding chapter takes the analysis of the relationship between the concepts further and explores the implications of different trajectories in how these ideas develop and are operationalized for policy and governance at different levels. It is here that we identify issues of contention about the way that the ideas are developed, tending towards a more individualised approach to the major issues thrown up in the way of crises like the environmental crisis and financial crisis.
Although the origins of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability go back much further in time, it is their rise to prominence in the last two decades that we are most concerned to explain. It is hard to reject the idea that our economic development and societal development should be intended to improve human wellbeing. Politicians and policy-makers have for many years been promising that is what they would do if elected or empowered. However, until recently this was rather a symbolic promise. Over the last two decades, the idea of operationalizing wellbeing for meaningful use in policy thinking has come to the fore, and since a pivotal report of the Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress in 2009, there has been a burgeoning number of initiatives to understand, measure and promote wellbeing, at global, national and local levels. The concept of wellbeing deals with questions of what is required for a good life, thus encompassing a broad range of economic and non-economic factors that contribute to our material wealth, mental and physical health, freedom and, crucially, how people experience the quality of their life. Wellbeing is first and foremost, a state of being. This makes it a concept that is at once comprehensible to all people in all places, but elusive for policy to get a grip on. Many of the recent discussions of wellbeing take as a point of departure that there is more to human development than measures of GDP and other economic indicators, but what these different measures are to be is matter of great contention. The wellbeing literature strongly connects to notions of resilience at both individual and societal levels and also increasingly features in global sustainability narratives. Having agreed that a reframing of the objective for societal development and that new measurements are required, there are then many different directions in which wellbeing initiatives have gone. The chapter explores different conceptions of wellbeing and current concerns about what wellbeing metrics should be used by policy. These different conceptions and their related measurements have profound implications for how we are to conceive ourselves and what kinds of societal arrangements should be encouraged by policy and governance.
It can be argued that no idea has risen quite so rapidly and to quite such prominence as that of resilience. This chapter seeks to highlight the way the idea has acquired such influence in policy discourse and to briefly examine some of the areas where it exerts its influence. Despite this influence, the meaning of the term is still not entirely agreed. Broadly understood, resilience can be defined as the ability to prepare for, withstand and recover from shocks and stresses (European Commission 2012). The first question this raises concerns the subject of resilience. Are we talking here about resilient individuals, communities and societies or about resilient infrastructure and institutions? Of course, we can be talking about the resilience of all of these, but policy discussions differ on where to place most emphasis. Some arguments shift emphasis away from physical infrastructure and emphasise the resilience of people. Within this, the next question is whether to emphasise societal, community or individual resilience. Do we place more emphasis on institutions, or on informal networks? A third question concerns the purpose of resilience. Is it really to withstand and recover as our broad definition suggests? As we shall argue, a key defining feature of resilience is the ability to adapt. This means changing our ways of organising and operating. Crises can actually be seen as an opportunity to change, so that rather than trying to restore previous functioning, âbouncing backâ should mean âbouncing back betterâ. This message is useful when reconfiguring governance after the financial crisis in such a way as to maintain the neoliberal emphasis on individual enterprise and initiative, particularly in the face of adversity.
Sustainability has a longer history of popularity compared to the other elements of the trinity. Environmental sustainability has been a major global concern from the Club of Rome in the 1970s through to todayâs Sustainable Development Goals and the current narrative about the anthropocene. The idea of sustainability has strong links across to both resilience and wellbeing. Current sustainability narratives draw strongly on notions of human and ecosystem resilience and sustainability concerns have always been a strong driver of wellbeing thinking, drawing attention to the quality of the environment in which we live and the resources upon which we depend. Like the other ideas discussed, sustainability has a potentially radical character that can challenge current orthodox growth programmes. It might also be said, however, that the current approach that dominates the Sustainable Development Goals is more accommodating in character, complementing the logic of economic with ameliorative concerns for unsustainable social and environmental outcomes and processes. This has led to some critics declaring that current discourse is concerned with trying to sustain what is known to be unsustainable (BlĂźhdorn and Welsh 2007, p. 198). After outlining the development of the sustainability discourse, this third chapter explores the various forms that the sustainability narrative takes and considers the challenges of the new narrative of the anthropocene.
It is difficult in each of these chapters to talk about one element of the new trinity without straying into discussion of the others, albeit sometimes in tension and sometimes with different understandings or interpretations of the ideas. In the fourth and concluding chapter, we draw these connections together to argue that the ideas of wellbeing, resilience and sustainability indeed can be understood as an emergent challenge to existing paradigms of growth and governance. Focusing on the issues of governance and the management of populations, we argue that this trinity combines to generate new ideas on the governing of populations and their relationships to their wider environments. Here, and throughout the book, we explore the tensions that this generates.
These ideas are popular because they shift emphasis onto âthe humanâ and, specifically, they appeal to a set of intangible human qualities or capacities. This is consistent with both new forms of governance and new economic thinking. They help consolidate the so-called human security approach as well as a more human-centric approach to economic growth and development. The new trinity also represents a turn to the social, but it is a matter of contention about the ways that the three concepts are differently interpreted to reframe our understanding of social embeddedness and how this relates to notions of human autonomy. These ideas also reflect broader changes and shifts in forms of intervention, at global, national and local levels, as well as the changing understanding of the human condition and our place in a complex world. Interestingly, ideas like resilience and sustainability satisfy a desire for a more systemic approach to complex problems while also suggesting that there is not much we can do to change the system, thus shifting responsibility onto human behaviour (Joseph 2018). We argue that following the financial crises, and in the face of an ongoing environmental crisis, the ideas of the trinity allow for a rethinking of intervention and a recalibration of governance in line with this way of thinking about complex systems.
The concluding chapter is concerned to present the arguments for these new ideas while also highlighting the nature of their contestation at this time. This contestation derives largely from the wider set of discourses and practices within which these ideas operate. In particular, we wish to draw attention to different political and cultural contexts and the effects that this might have on how the terms are understood. We concentrate here, and throughout the book, on the governance dimension of this, and its relationship to dominant economic arguments and practices. We emphasise the positive aspects of these new ideas while also detailing the tensions and contradictions that arise from their place within wider economic and governance discourses and practices, particularly those of a more Anglo-Saxon character.
While recognising that each of these concepts has a meaning and resonance in other cultures and these other cultural perspectives have fed into the current understanding, we consider the decidedly Anglo-Saxon character of the dominant narratives in each. Most notably, we address the relationship of these ideas to neoliberal thinking and debates about neoliberalism âafter the crisisâ. We relate ...