Why Measuring and Tracking Well-being Can Reduce Barriers to Development Initiatives
Well-being is defined as people’s ability to live a life that they value. This can comprise of cultural heritage, health, access to land, or natural resources. It takes into account differences of people’s conditions and experiences, thus providing a framework that focuses on local sets of needs, freedoms, and quality of life conditions. Drivers of well-being can include income, work, social capital, values, education and health. Well-being is a concept that most people in most societies around the world recognise. In practice, it has been utilised in several contexts such as in community-based forest management, fisheries conservation, land use change, and more. It arises out of questions such as, “what do you need to live well in this community?” or “what is important for your quality of life?”, and generates comprehensive and thoughtful responses that surveys or censuses are unable to capture. Broadly, well-being is also concerned with the interests and motivations of people, especially marginalised communities, who are usually excluded or disenfranchised from policy processes and development projects.
To better conceptualise how an assessment of well-being can be adopted, a brief discussion of various approaches and conceptual foundations should be taken. Firstly, well-being can be captured by taking into account both subjective and objective information. For example, happiness economists have argued that a single happiness score can contain enough information to be utilised in policy decision-making. This is widely contested, as a utility score cannot adequately capture the multi-dimensional complexities and fluidities of human lives. As such, evaluations such as these can be important in an objective sense, with regard to how people themselves may evaluate achievements, but it does not accurately represent the reality of people’s lives.
Income measures, such as GDP or the Gini coefficient, are also insufficient at capturing the realities of poverty. In a World Bank study involving 60,000 poor people in many countries of the world, they confirmed that poverty in and of itself is multidimensional, and is experienced differently depending on people’s local contexts. There are eight dimensions of experienced poverty:
Lotus Project staff and local in Lung Thuoc Village, Van Quan District, Vietnam (January 2019)
material well-being (ex: having enough food, asset, work);
bodily well-being (health, appearances, and physical environment);
social well-being (being able to care for, bring up, marry and settle children);
self-respect and dignity;
peace, harmony, good relations in the family and community;
security (civil peace, a physically safe and secure environment; security in old age);
freedom of choice and action; and
psychological well-being (peace of mind, happiness).
Further, traditional social policy theorists Doyal and Gough have suggested that health and autonomy underpin two fundamental human needs. These needs are met and listed in a sophisticated schema: adequate nutritional food and water, adequate protective housing, non-hazardous work and physical environments, appropriate health care, security in childhood, significant primary relationships, physical and economic security, safe birth control and childbearing, and appropriate basic and cross-cultural education. Figure 1 illustrates how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) expands these needs, and what questions can be asked in order to uncover domains of well-being.
Assessing well-being is an important step in reducing barriers to development, especially development initiatives that the Lotus Project focuses its work on in rural Vietnamese communities. Measures of economic impacts (e.g. income) do not always reflect people’s priorities. Arguably, progress and well-being cannot be captured adequately by considering one measure such as ‘income’ or ‘happiness’. Shifting from narrow economic indicators to broader, holistic visions allows for the possibility of positive social impact - sustaining economic growth, social justice, and conservation. A better understanding of people’s well-being can propel wider economic growth and poverty reduction by recognising that people’s livelihoods are impacted by a variety of factors. Putting people’s livelihood and well-being at the centre of evaluation of development initiatives can also inform policy reforms that can influence people’s decision-making behavior. As such, policy that supports local well-being can increase environmentally desirable behavior. Well-being emphasises the interests of people themselves, which is fundamental for the success of the Lotus Project mission.
Well-being in rural areas of Vietnam is underreported, and as such, we propose the assessment of this dimension in order to fill this existing gap. We propose to include a well-being dimension into the Lotus Project’s Rural Development Model (RDM):
Identify which aspects, systemically, are important to people for them to live their lives well, and is comprehensible to the social, economic, and cultural context of rural Vietnam. Identify which aspects, if any, are considered important for the community’s quality of life.
Assess how people are doing in their achievements in respect of the things or values that they regard as important for them to live well. Assessment can include a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative measures such as questionnaires, surveys, informal interviews, and focus groups.
Establish ways to understand how different things that are important for well-being relate to each other.
This proposal aims to fill the gaps that exist in measuring well-being. Implementing these steps can ensure further growth and success of self-sufficient growth.
PAULINE ELEVAZO