Sustainability, Well-Being and Socio-Environmental Quality

Is it preferable to have a high income or more leisure time? To promote industrialisation and employment in a given territory, or preserve its environmental and landscape integrity? Realistically, each of these dimensions is important in defining individual and collective well-being, in which all these aspects should coexist in a truly balanced and sustainable development path at the local scale. An approach measuring well-being, and possibly, sustainable development, based solely on the economic sphere, is reductive and misleading as a policy-relevant tool. The complexity of the argument at stake requires refined approaches and more elaborate measures – than simple gross domestic product (GDP). It is possible to conceive truly sustainable economic policies relying only on instruments and indicators involving multiple dimensions, in turn promoting quality of life. Moreover, applications of this perspective at regional and local levels are important, as territories are the collecting agents guaranteeing and promoting processes of supra-individual utility, for example, environment quality or social cohesion. These institutions are responsible for the important role of outlining specific development policies for communities and the sustainable paths to be undertaken, with the aim of increasing the effective well-being of individuals. Following these assumptions, and on the basis of recent developments in the academic literature, this edited book debates extensively on these topics, offering an updated theoretical ground and pragmatic examples delineating an operational and coordinated evaluation of well-being that integrates the economic dimension with the environmental and social ones, thus assuring a more complete interpretation of complex (local) development paths.