Wellbebe

WELLBEBE

WellBeBe

Toward theoretically sound and democratically legitimate

indicators of well-being in Belgium.

This research is part of the "Science for a Sustainable Development-SSD" Program of

Belgian Science Policy

Context

Sustainable development will not be achieved without some fundamental changes in our patterns of living. Therefore, it will be necessary to rely less on material commodities and more on immaterial goods to realise our conception of a good, valuable life while maintaining or even improving our overall well-being. However, in order to trigger a democratic and participative transition towards sustainable development, it is necessary, first to know what are the shared conceptions of a good, valuable life and second, what criteria citizens use to assess social arrangements in terms of quality of life. On the other hand, improved indicators of well-being have become indispensable to guide public policies as it is widely acknowledged that increasing production and consumption has ceased to induce more well-being and happiness.

Project Description

1) Objectives

The project aims at working out an index of well-being in Belgium which would be altogether internally consistent, democratically legitimate and suitable for guiding and assessing sustainable development policies. This general goal can be subdivided in the following intermediate objectives:

- Identify the different conceptions of the “good life” and their distribution in the population. More precisely: what does well-being mean for people, what makes a life valuable for them, what are its main dimensions and what importance do they attach to each of them.

- Analyse how people assess social arrangements in terms of well-being;

- Identify the best indicators for each component of well-being and collect the corresponding available data at the collective level;

- Subject the basic indicators to a sample of citizens in order to collect statistically significant weights for their aggregation;

- Aggregate the data in one or at most a handful of synthetic indices;

- Analysis of the behaviour of the indices during the recent past and its correlation with other indicators (GDP, unemployment rate, poverty rate…)

- Explore by (qualitative) simulation the implications in terms of well-being of hypothetical sustainable development policies.

2) Methodology

Newt to analysis and synthesis of the philosophical, sociological, economical and psychological literature, four different methods will be used:

- Focus group methods for collecting reflexive opinions on well-being, quality of life, happiness and human flourishing;

- Q-Methodology for uncovering communalities in social discourses and to get a first estimate of the weights of the different dimensions;

- Large sample survey and multi-variate statistical analysis for collecting statistically significant weightings for the components of well-being, exploring the socio-demographic correlates of the subjective assessments of well-being and their relationship with objectives facts about respondents conditions of living;

- Policy simulation for exploring the likely impact of hypothetical sustainable development policies on well-being.

Partners

Paul-Marie Boulanger et Anne-Laurence Lefin

Institut pour un Développement Durable (IDD),
Rue des Fusillés 7, B-1340 Ottignies.
Tel: +32 (0)10 41.73.01; Fax: +32 (0)10 41.36.49;
idd@iddweb.be ; http://www.iddweb.be

Tom Bauler, Emilie Mutombo, Nicolas Prignot

Institut de Gestion de l’Environnement et d’Aménagement du Territoire (IGEAT) / Centre d’Etudes du Développement Durable (CEDD) (Université Libre de Belgique), cp130-02, avenue FD Roosevelt 50, B-1050 Bruxelles.
Tel: +32 (0)2 650.43.32; Fax: +32 (0)2 650.43.12; tbauler@ulb.ac.be ; http://www.ulb.ac.be/igeat/igeat/ulb_igeat/hp/hp_fr.htm

Luc Van Ootegem, Sophie Spillemackers
Hoger Instituut Voor de Arbeid (HIVA).
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Parkstraat, 47 3000 Leuven
luc.vanootegem@hiva.kuleuven.ac.be
http://www.hiva.be



Copyright 2008 IDD