Indicators of Social Sustainability and Wellbeing

Dear Colleagues, 

The measurement of human wellbeing is a challenging endeavor that has kept generations of scholars and scientists busy for the better part of the last two hundred years. For most of that timespan, the prevailing intuition was that the measurement of welfare generated by the ability of income to provide for human wants and needs was reasonable enough as an approximation of wellbeing. By the 1930s, the emergence of the first modern models of national accounting had essentially provided the framework for what is today the state of the art in the measurement of income, and national accountants and economists had started to formalize its complicated relationship with the notion of “economic welfare”. Since then, however, it has become more and more apparent to social scientists that narrow definitions of welfare are insufficient to provide a meaningful picture of human wellbeing. First, the idea that a proper measurement of income should measure how much we can consume in a time period without compromising the possibility of future consumption introduced the notion of economic sustainability. Then, in the 1970s, a number of approaches convergently called into question the existing measures of income, for failing to take into account important aspects of human welfare; the project to aggregate the measurement of all that is meaningful for wellbeing into a single measure, for enforcing the reduction of all welfare aspects to a monetary measure; the notion that economic sustainability can stand in isolation from social and environmental concerns and, finally, the individualistic frame of observation, for failing to capture the social and relational aspects of wellbeing. The 1960s social indicators movement was part of such a process and, with its attempt to identify and aggregate key social measures in a small number of powerful social indicators to complement income, it now represents one of the most active areas of research on the sustainability of the various aspects of social environments. This Special Issue is intended to include methodological and applied works—including reviews—that address the issue of indicators of social sustainability and wellbeing.

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• statistical indicators
• sustainability
• wellbeing
• quality of life