Ian Gough, editor
Deputy Director of WeD
Professor of Social Science
i.r.gough@bath.ac.uk
J.Allister McGregor
Director of WeD
Senior Lecturer in International Development, Economic Anthropology
j.a.mcgregor@bath.ac.uk
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Editors : Professor Ian Gough and J. Allister
McGregor
Wellbeing comprises more than money, commodities
and economic growth. Analyses based on limited views of wellbeing
are likely to produce sub-optimal and unsustainable policies.
This book integrates three challenges to existing approaches:
human development; the analysis of resource distribution
and use; and research on subjective wellbeing, happiness
and quality of life. It shows how these can combine to form
a new approach to development, based on human wellbeing.
International experts from a wide range of disciplines contribute
towards establishing a new strategy and methodology for researching
wellbeing.
To be published in April 2007 by Cambridge
University Press ISBN-13: 9780521857512
In a world where many experience unprecedented
levels of wellbeing, chronic poverty remains a major concern
for many developing countries and the international community.
Conventional frameworks for understanding development and
poverty have focused on money, commodities and economic growth.
This book challenges these conventional approaches and contributes
to a new paradigm for development centred on human wellbeing.
Poor people are not defined solely by their poverty and a
wellbeing approach provides a better means of understanding
how people become and stay poor. It examines three perspectives:
ideas of human functioning, capabilities and needs; the analysis
of livelihoods and resource use; and research on subjective
wellbeing and happiness. A range of international experts
from psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, political
science and development evaluate the state-of-the-art in
understanding wellbeing from these perspectives. This book
establishes a new strategy and methodology for researching
wellbeing that can influence policy.
• International experts from a
wide range of disciplines set out a new strategy and methodology
for researching wellbeing
• Challenges the dominant view
of wellbeing and development being based on money and goods
• Will appeal to researchers,
academics and graduate students in sociology, social policy,
politics, psychology,
economics, research methods and development studies
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Contents
and Authors
INTRODUCTION
1. Ian Gough, J. Allister McGregor and Laura Camfield, WeD:
Theorising wellbeing in international development
(WeD) research was founded on three conceptual frameworks:
Human Need Theory, the Resource Profiles Framework, and Quality of Life Research.
This chapter provides a detailed conceptual overview of each of these in sections
2, 3 and 4. The introduction seeks to justify a wellbeing/ illbeing approach
to the traditional concerns of poverty in developing countries. The conclusion
summarises the links and tensions between these approaches. The intention is
to provide a solid conceptual foundation for the remaining stages of the ongoing
WeD programme. This includes a conceptual synthesis of the idea of wellbeing
applicable to development contexts; a suitable methodology and suite of research
instruments to study wellbeing; and the generation of significant, reliable
and meaningful data and findings in our four research countries.
SECTION 1 - HUMAN NEEDS AND HUMAN WELLBEING
2. Des Gasper, ISS, The Hague:
Conceptualising human needs and wellbeing
3. Richard Ryan and Aislinn Sapp, Psychology, Rochester U, New York:
Basic psychological needs: a self-determination theory perspective on the promotion
of wellness across development and cultures
4. Sabina Alkire, Harvard U. and Global Equity Initiative:
Measuring freedoms alongside wellbeing
5. Geof Wood, WeD:
Using security to indicate wellbeing
This chapter argues that basic security should be given greater prominence
in human wellbeing. Security and predictability express a primordial instinct
to seek safety for oneself and valued others, and to avoid fear of uncertainty.
Although the idea of security is inextricably associated with law and order
and statutory rights, here the focus is more upon the informal and social conditions
for the predictability of wellbeing. The second section relates individual
to societal security by building on to the human development 'freedom to' agenda
a 'freedom from' security agenda, using the 'welfare regimes' framework of
Gough and Wood et al. The third and fourth section focuses on informal welfare
regimes and their 'dependent security', wherein poor people secure some measure
of informal protection and predictability in return for dependence on patrons
and longer-term insecurity. The remainder of the chapter defines dependent
security and indicates how to track movement towards more autonomous security.
It identifies
seven principles to improve poor people's security: altering time preference
behaviour; enhancing capacities to prepare for hazards; formalising rights;
'de-clientelisation'; enlarging choice via pooling risks; improving the predictability
of institutional performance; and strengthening membership of well-functioning
collective institutions. In each case, indicators are proposed to track these
and monitor security. The chapter identifies those ingredients of behaviour
which are, or could be, in the control of ordinary people in poor situations,
given
modest policy support. In this way, the paper concludes, socio-economic security
can be better integrated into our analysis of wellbeing.
6. Mark McGillivray, WIDER:
Towards a measure of non-economic wellbeing achievement
SECTION 2 – RESOURCES,
AGENCY AND MEANING
7. Sarah White and Mark Ellison, WeD:
Wellbeing, livelihoods and resources in social practice
This chapter explores the ways a concept of 'resources' can contribute to our
understanding of wellbeing. The major argument is that resources do not have
a fixed meaning but are constituted through social practice. While we may construct
'resource profiles' to record different types of resources, their significance
for wellbeing will depend on understandings about how these resources can and
cannot be used in particular contexts. We must avoid reifying categories like ‘capitals’ or
'assets'. All forms of resources, such as land for example, have material,
relational and symbolic dimensions. How resources are used in practice also
depends critically on who is involved, and the structural forms of power they
can deploy. This approach exposes the common 'conceit' when development agencies
assume that because they are familiar with 'a resource' they understand what
would constitute its 'rational' use in different contexts. The paper concludes
with a plea for some balance between a universal framework and one sensitive
to local understandings.
8. Tony Bebbington and Leonith Hinojosa, IDPM, Manchester, Diego Munoz, DfID,
La Paz, Rafael Rojas, CEP, La Paz:
Livelihoods and resource accessing in the Andes: desencuentros in theory and
practice
9. James Copestake, WeD
Poverty and exclusion, resources and relationships: Theorising the links between
economic and social development
This chapter investigates the nature of illbeing in a Latin American context,
with particular reference to debates over the relationship between resource
endowments and processes of social exclusion and inclusion. It does so by summarising
and criticising one particular approach - the social exclusion theory of the
Peruvian economist Adolfo Figueroa. The chapter outlines how his sigma society
model explains the persistence of dualism, inequality and poverty in developing
societies such as Peru. What is novel for economics is how the persistence
of dualism and inequality are endogenous to the model; this is because of the
interest elite groups in Peru have in investing in status differences and cultural
barriers to defend unequal power relations. The model warns against a false
optimism that economic growth can resolve the structural dynamics that reproduce
exclusion and poverty. Going beyond the model the paper argues that a more
realistic framework acknowledges greater fluidity in the negotiation of relationships,
rather than assuming these are quite such a rigid function of people's resources.
SECTION 3 - QUALITY OF LIFE
AND SUBJECTIVE WELLBEING
10. Monika Bullinger and Silke Schmidt, Hamburg-Eppendorf U.
Cross-cultural Quality of Life assessment: approaches and experiences from
the health care field
11. Valerie Moller, Rhodes U, South Africa
Researching Quality of Life in a developing country: Lessons from the South
African Case
12. Mariano Rojas, Universidad de las Americas-Puebla, Mexico
The complexity of wellbeing: A life-satisfaction conception and a domains-of-life
approach
CONCLUSION: RESEARCHING WELLBEING
13. Philippa Bevan, WeD:
Researching wellbeing across the disciplines: Some key intellectual problems
and ways forward
A research agenda into wellbeing requires multi-disciplinary research but this
is notoriously difficult to achieve. This paper explores some of the barriers
and proposes a route forward. Based on an independent research project which
included the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) programme and other multi-disciplinary
poverty research as its subjects, it develops what is labelled the Foundations
of Knowledge Framework (FoKF). The FoKF identifies nine foundational elements
of conceptual thinking in the social sciences as they attempt to study poverty:
the domain or research question, the value or normative standpoint, the ontology
or underlying assumptions about the nature of the world, the epistemology or
ways of knowing about the world, the central theories and models, the associated
methodologies and modes of analysis, the nature of the empirical findings,
the rhetorical language in which the results are couched, and the implications
for policy and practice. It is argued that these generate the intellectual
barriers to successful multi or inter-disciplinary communication and work.
All nine must be considered when academics from different disciplinary or sub-disciplinary
backgrounds come together in efforts to collaborate effectively. The Framework
makes explicit what assumptions, presumptions or blind spots are present in
particular disciplinary contributions to the study of poverty or wellbeing.
The final part builds on the framework to advocate ways of handling the nine
elements to enable successful multi-disciplinary studies of wellbeing.
14. J. Allister McGregor, WeD:
Researching wellbeing : From concepts to methodology
This chapter presents an integrated model of wellbeing and
summarises the suite of methods to assess it developed within the Wellbeing
in Developing
Countries
(WeD) ESRC research group. The chapter begins by rehearsing the underlying
notion of wellbeing in the WeD project: an interplay between the resources
that a
person is able to command; what they are able to achieve with those resources;
and the meanings that frame these and that drive their aspirations and strategies.
The second part identifies five key ideas that underpin a new theory of human
wellbeing. These are: the centrality of the social human being; harm and needs;
meaning, culture and identity; time and processes; resourcefulness, resilience
and adaptation. Part three then draws these together to present an integrated
model of wellbeing. This requires an interdisciplinary research methodology
outlined in part four. The WeD suite comprises six
research components grouped
into three pairs: those that deal with outcomes, those that deal mainly with
structures and those that deal with processes. The paper concludes by noting
the challenges that still confront the wellbeing agenda: how to undertake inter-disciplinary
research, how to make it accessible to policy-makers and politicians, and how
to reconcile competing visions, notably global and local deliberations on the
universal and normative.
Background information
This book brings together papers by leading international scholars on researching
wellbeing in developing countries. The book stems from an intensive international
workshop held in July 2004 at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Germany,
co-sponsored by the ESRC Research Group on Well-Being in Developing Countries
(WeD) at the University of Bath, the WIDER Institute in Helsinki and the
Hanse Institute. The book presents the outcomes of WeD’s first, conceptual
phase of research.
Aims
The book reviews new thinking on human well-being and its component themes
of needs, resources, and quality of life across the social sciences and address
the challenges in translating this into meaningful empirical research in
developing country contexts. It has two specific aims: first, to report on
and evaluate the state-of–the-art in understanding well-being from
different disciplinary perspectives. Second, it critically evaluates the
emerging research strategy developed in ‘WeD’ (Wellbeing in Developing
Countries), a major ESRC-financed research programme at the University of
Bath. Among other things this will research and evaluate human well-being
in four poor and middle income countries (Ethiopia and Bangladesh, Peru and
Thailand).
Understandings of and prescriptions for development
in poor and middle-income countries depend on and change
with dominant conceptions of well-being. The dominant conception
has been and probably remains an economic one – well-being
comprises the resources people or nations control and can
utilize and dispose of, measured by income and at aggregate
levels by national income per head. But over the last two
decades this has been challenged at the level of conceptual
argument and, equally important, in devising new measures
and indicators.
Three challenges are of particular importance.
First, the idea of development has been extended from economic
to human development. The earlier challenges from the Basic
Needs Approach were strengthened by Sen’s ideas of
human functioning and capabilities and the construction of
the Human Development Index. There is now a vigorous intellectual
community discussing the nature of human needs, capabilities,
freedoms and so on represented for example in the Capability
Approach Network.
The second challenge critiqued the narrow notion
of resources in the standard economics approach and progressively
extended this from monetised commodities and certain public
services to include human capital, natural capital and later
on social capital. This was synthesized in the Livelihoods
Approach and later on in the debates on Social Capital. Again
there is now a large academic and policy-related literature
interrogating these ideas, developing new indicators and
debating their policy implications.
The third, more recent challenge, has returned
to the individual subject to question the ends of development
and how we conceive and measure them. The related ideas of
Subjective Well-being, Life Satisfaction, Quality of Life,
Happiness etc has brought subjective evaluations centre-stage
and proposes to measure these directly rather than via proxies
such as income or human development. The explosion of interest
in the economics of happiness or the psychology of subjective
well-being relate to - yet challenge - both of the above
discourses.
This book is the first to set out, discuss
and relate all three of these critical approaches to conceiving
and researching well-being in developing countries.
One novel feature of the book is its inter-disciplinary
range. The contributions come from anthropology, economics,
political philosophy, psychology and sociology. Moreover,
the disciplines do not reside in separate compartments. Thus
we find a psychologist writing about basic needs, a sociologist
writing about resources and an economist writing on subjective
life-satisfaction. The book sets out an integrated cross-disciplinary
method for researching well-being in developing countries.
Synopsis
To reflect all three of the above debates the book is divided into three sections:
on Human Needs, Resources and Quality of Life. In each section papers cover
both conceptual and methodological issues. In addition, each section contains
explicit discussion of the methods available to research wellbeing in developing
countries.
The last section of the book addresses
the inter-disciplinary issues raised by trying to combine
and research these broader conceptions of well-being. Lastly
it sets out some of the implications for development policy
of putting human well-being at the centre of research in
poorer countries, and summarises the evolving research
programme in the ESRC-financed research programme at the
University of Bath. |