Sustainable Societal Well-being to Guide Resource Use

Motivation:

The Global Commons Stewardship Index (GCSI) by Yale has been crucial in assessing the ecological footprints of nations, particularly focusing on the environmental impacts of their outsourced consumption. Now, we aim to take this further by evaluating which aspects of this external resource use genuinely contribute to human well-being in the consuming country. This approach will enable us to rank countries based on how their consumption enhances well-being, rather than merely measuring overall consumption.

This research project aims to redefine societal progress by moving beyond traditional economic growth metrics, which often overlook non-market values essential to human flourishing. While economic approaches tend to focus on the hedonic dimension—pleasure and pain—the project will emphasize the eudaemonic dimension, which relates to living a meaningful and purposeful life.

The project seeks to develop a novel measure of "sustainable societal well-being" that integrates both hedonic and eudaemonic aspects, with a particular focus on intergenerational impacts. This measure will serve as a guide for resource use, particularly within the energy-water nexus, a critical area for sustainable development.

Research Questions:

1. How do we measure sustainable societal well-being?
2. How do we use societal well-being to guide resource use?

Approach:

Measuring Societal Well-being (RQ1): This aspect of the project will critically evaluate existing composite indices such as the Human Development Index (HDI), including its components (e.g., Life Expectancy at Birth, Coefficient of Human Inequality, Gender Inequality Index). The goal is to address the limitations of these indices by incorporating the eudaemonic dimension and adjusting for sustainability (for instance: Global Slavery Index, Freedom of Association, access to health infrastructures etc.). This new index will be validated through expert consultations and statistical methods, and its potential to decouple well-being from economic growth will be explored in RQ2.

Linking Well-being to Resource Use (RQ2): The project will then examine the relationship between the societal well-being defined in RQ1 and resource use, with a particular focus on the water-energy nexus. The research Assistant will establish benchmarks for sustainable resource use, defining Fair Use as the upper bound for overconsumption and Subsistence Use as the lower bound for under-consumption. These benchmarks will be calculated for various types of energy and water use, considering country-specific characteristics. The findings will guide future research on resource allocation based on well-being, with an emphasis on environmental justice as well as intra- and intergenerational justice.

Research Plan and Methods:

• Systematic Reviews and Data Compilation: The project will begin with systematic reviews to identify relevant indicators and data. The research assistant will gather data on societal well-being indicators beyond HDI. The energy and water databases are already pretty solid, and the student will clean energy use data from the International Energy Agency database as well as the UN SDGs database and apply statistical methods to develop and validate the new well-being measure.
• Econometric Modeling: Advanced econometric techniques will be used to analyze the relationship between economic growth, well-being, and resource use. The project will also explore potential trade-offs across different indicators of well-being.
• Programming tools use: (with R or Stata).

Expected Outcomes:

1. Development of a new measure of sustainable societal well-being that integrates multiple dimensions of well-being and accounts for sustainability.
2. Creation of benchmarks for sustainable resource use that can be applied to the spillovers ranking in the GCSI, providing more nuanced insights to guide resource allocation based on societal well-being rather than solely on economic growth.
3. Potential publication in an economic journal, offering insights that could drive future research and policy towards more sustainable and equitable resource use.

Impact:

By integrating well-being into resource use policies, this project aims to contribute to more sustainable and equitable development pathways, with the potential to influence research and policy across multiple disciplines.