Assessing human well‐being constructs with environmental and equity aspects: A review of the landscape

International audienceDecades of theory and scholarship on the concept of human well-being have informed a proliferation of approaches to assess well-being and support public policy aimed at sustainability and improving quality of life.Human well-being is multidimensional, and well-being emerges when the dimensions and interrelationships interact as a system. In this paper, we illuminate two crucial components of well-being that are often excluded from policy because of their relative difficulty to measure and manage: equity and interrelationships between humans and the environment.We use a mixed-methods approach to review and summarize progress to date in developing well-being constructs (including frameworks and methods) that address these two components.Well-being frameworks that do not consider the environment, or interrelationships between people and their environment, are not truly measuring well-being in all its dimensions.Use of equity lenses to assess well-being frameworks aligns with increasing efforts to more holistically characterize well-being and to guide sustainability management in ethical and equitable ways.Based on the findings of our review, we identify several pathways forward for the development and implementation of well-being frameworks that can inform efforts to leverage well-being for public policy

Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales

Monitoring and evaluation are central to ensuring that innovative, multi-scale, and interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are effective. The development of relevant indicators for local sustainable management outcomes, and the ability to link these to broader national and international policy targets, are key challenges for resource managers, policymakers, and scientists. Sets of indicators that capture both ecological and social-cultural factors, and the feedbacks between them, can underpin cross-scale linkages that help bridge local and global scale initiatives to increase resilience of both humans and ecosystems. Here we argue that biocultural approaches, in combination with methods for synthesizing across evidence from multiple sources, are critical to developing metrics that facilitate linkages across scales and dimensions. Biocultural approaches explicitly start with and build on local cultural perspectives — encompassing values, knowledges, and needs — and recognize feedbacks between ecosystems and human well-being. Adoption of these approaches can encourage exchange between local and global actors, and facilitate identification of crucial problems and solutions that are missing from many regional and international framings of sustainability. Resource managers, scientists, and policymakers need to be thoughtful about not only what kinds of indicators are measured, but also how indicators are designed, implemented, measured, and ultimately combined to evaluate resource use and well-being. We conclude by providing suggestions for translating between local and global indicator efforts

Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales

International audienc