Sustainable Wellbeing: capabilities and freedoms.

Jhoner Perdomo, Mauricio Phélan C., and Sary Levy-Carciente.?

Models looking for individual’s life improvement had been evolving towards multidimensional perspectives, highlighting ethical elements, respecting values and principles inherent to human condition -development as freedom- and sustainability; emphasizing an inter-generational awareness and responsibility.

Development as freedom invites us to emphasize the relevance of people's capabilities to forge their own development, following their goals and values. Those individual’s capabilities are intertwined and enhanced among them, and powered by social opportunities and freedoms, to achieving human flourishing and a greater wellbeing of people.

One of the main challenges today is to incorporate future conditions of wellbeing while maintaining present and future freedoms. Achieving positive results, considering the cost that this may have for future generations and even for the current generation at a future moment. A development model can be considered as a generator of wellbeing if it is sustainable over time. The question is not only which model generates more wellbeing, but which one generates more wellbeing in a sustainable way over time. This demands to widen the perspective of what is an acceptable present wellbeing.

Sustainability also invites to include all the dimensions associated with wellbeing: it must be economically sustainable, because otherwise it would generate an unacceptable social debt; it must be politically sustainable, because otherwise it would limit governance; it must be culturally sustainable, because otherwise it would generate tensions that would threaten peace; it must be environmentally sustainable, because otherwise the ecological possibilities would be altered; and naturally, it must be ethically sustainable, because these fundamentals are not negotiable. The dimensions must be equal to guarantee harmony between them, to integrate a temporary vision of sustainability between present and future.

It is also important to replace the vision of measuring by results, with that of capabilities and opportunities that allows obtaining the associated conditions for the sustainability of wellbeing. Amartya Sen argues that sustainability is the promotion of the capabilities of the present, without compromising the capabilities of future generations. So, which conditions generate capabilities? And the answer is that these are multiple and diverse: from institutions, governance, education, family, property rights, or in general, rule of law, freedoms, among others. They are conditions that in themselves empower capabilities and sustainability.

Integrating the capabilities approach and the multidimensional approach to wellbeing lead us to consider the core capabilities proposed by Martha Nussbaum. The 12 dimensions of Sustainable Wellbeing would then be: Life; Bodily Health; Bodily Integrity; Senses, Imagination and Thoughts; Emotions; Practical Reason; Affiliation: Friendship, Affiliation: Respect; Relations with Other Species, Control over Play and distraction, Political control over one's own environment; and Material control over one's own environment.

Gathering them into four large macro-capabilities, we would have: (1) Body: as an element that physically connects us with the world, which must be maintained with health and integrity until its natural death if possible; (2) Mind: to be able to think, feel emotions and specify the reasoning of the good life and the virtues in which we must to be and do; (3) Relation: and (4) Control that allows us to contact society and nature, to put into practice the virtues and our freedoms. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Dimensions of Sustainable Wellbeing.

Source: Own elaboration.

Proposing Sustainable Wellbeing based on the capabilities approach, hypothesize that the greater the capabilities, opportunities and freedoms, there more possibilities to generate sustainability. Thus, in time, people will have the guarantees to be and do what they value, increasing their freedoms and wellbeing. So, for a Sustainable Wellbeing, the risks towards the future must be considered through the existing conditions so that the wellbeing is sustainable over time.

From these theoretical framework, a statistical test was carried out for 18 Latin American countries, using information of several databases: Latinobarómetro, LAPOP, World Economic Forum, World Bank, various United Nations bodies, CATO, HERITAGE and FRASER, as well as international companies such as GALLUP and Google, among others. A total of 116 indicators distributed among the 12 dimensions were selected and a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) was applied.

The countries of the region with the best results and therefore with Sustainable Wellbeing conditions are Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica (see Fig. 2). These are countries where people have, in the present and will in the future, the best guarantees and greater opportunities to be and do what they value. In the case of Uruguay, a harmonic situation is shown among the dimensions, being a country-model to study and extract positive lessons to be adapted for other countries of the region.

Figure 2. Results of Sustainable Wellbeing, Macro-dimensions and Dimensions

Source: Own elaboration.

Concluding remarks: the Sustainable Wellbeing model offers a comprehensive development approach, considering ethical and sustainability values (multidimensional, temporal and environmental), favoring the awareness of a free and responsible citizenry. This research also show a way of measuring a wide and abstract philosophical perspective, to guide both public and private decision-making.

Reference

Perdomo, Jhoner, Mauricio Phélan Casanova, and Sary Levy-Carciente. 2021. "Sustainable Wellbeing Operationalization and Measurement Based on the Capabilities Approach: The Case of Latin America"?Sustainability?13, no. 21: 12202. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132112202