Local sustainable development and well-being/quality of life. An application of the capability approach at regional level

This paper has a twofold aim: the former is to focus on the concept of well-being/quality of life and its relationships with local sustainable development and the latter is to apply the capability approach at regional level. More specifically, one wants to analyse if sustainable development at a local level serves to better understand both the formation of well-being and/or quality of life. The instrument which will allow us to verify the operational value of the capability approach is the building of a multidimensional synthetic index of sustainability. This index will consists of aggregating a set of variables of different nature from the socio-economic to the environmental ones. It may be considered an alternative to the conventional indices, which are normally founded on GDP, and will be applied to the Italian regions. After having standardised each variable so to make them homogeneous, the methodology proposed, which will allow us to gather and compare the Italian regions according to the higher or lower level of quality of life, is the Wroclaws Economic School taxonomic method. The results obtained may represent an information tool for targeting and zoning sustainable development measures which aim at improving well-being/quality of life at a local level.