Keywords

The last decades of the 20th and 21st century have been a busy period in civilization: the invention of the Internet, decoding the human genome, and subsequent explosion of technological advances from cell phones to biomedical procedures are only some examples. Yet, the search for a better life—for something more—seems to be persistent in both academia, politics, and popular culture. If the world is so much better as some claim, then why are we seeing greater demand and interest in well-being and happiness? For example, although calorie intake among the poor is increasing, this indicator does not capture the full range of impact. Questions about quality, and “what kinds of calories are these?” is important to answer in regards to quality of life status. Pagani and Huot (2007) use data from Canada to show that children living in poverty are more likely to have an unhealthy diet, leading to obesity. Beaulac et al. (2009) and Larson et al. (2009) pointed out that in low-income neighborhoods there are significantly less numbers of grocery stores or farmers’ markets where people can access fresh fruits and vegetables.

We see this demand as a pushback response to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—centric paradigm that focuses predominately on economic, quantitative accumulation rather than a more balanced goal. However, we also see limits to the current focus on happiness and individual well-being in academia as well as political realm. In response, we suggest that community well-being is a more appropriate concept to connect governments—and governance —to citizen lives. Yet, community well-being has its critics as well. For example, Scott (2012) has pointed out that this term has been used by those on the left as well as right on the political spectrum due to the ambiguity around its meaning, and thus can mislead citizens. Lee and Kim (2014) have also emphasized the danger surrounding this ambiguity and this chapter explores some of these concerns. In detail, we situate community well-being in the welfare state framework as the raison d’être of local governments and governance, presenting an asset and capital-based model of community well-being. We hope this model will serve as a map for interdisciplinary studies that are crucial for the realization of community well-being.

Why Community Well-Being? Function of Local Governments

Community well-being is a key concept in the 21st century welfare state discourse (Seo et al. 2012). Since the prior century, the theory of the welfare state has received much attention as the value and goal of nation states and successful cases of welfare states have been widely circulated. GDP and meeting material needs became the main criteria for assessing the state of progress or policies in nation states. However, in the 1970s criticisms against the GDP were voiced and furthermore, efforts to measure progress on an individual, collective, and national level were made. GDP uses material production and consumption as the essence of human life and was not able to answer criticisms that human life is not defined by material needs only. This led to concepts other than GDP being used to discuss social issues.

Happiness is one example. Happiness became a popular term in the 1970s and in particular, the tiny country of Bhutan attempted to replace the GDP with a Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. However, happiness was focused on an individual’s subjective emotions and thus limited in its use as a national and collective criterion. As a response, there were efforts to replace happiness with the concept of quality of life and well-being. Continued demand for a new concept can be identified in various disciplines (Smits and Hoekstra 2011) and these demands were in line with the social indicator movements led by the United States and Scandinavian states (Ilić et al. 2010). The need for a concept that encompasses the non-economic, non-material aspects, such as culture and context became clear. National governments made various efforts to discover something more than simple GDP as policy visions. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of general well-being as a national policy vision, while former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s election victory is an example that shows economics is not the only important element in deciding the outcome of elections (Ormerod 2012). In addition, French President Nicholas Sarkozy focused on social welfare rather than simple GDP to evaluate the nation’s standing. These countries are key actors in international organizations and thus their experiences are being widely circulated and shared with other countries. Community well-being is deeply connected to a government’s capacity and ability to realize the social welfare state.

If a nation state’s goal is to realize a welfare state, then the question of who is the actor in this process is important. In Development as Freedom, Sen (1999) discusses this question using the term “agent.” He defined progress as the expansion of capabilities on the basis of individual freedom and emphasized that public policies can strengthen these capabilities. The agent’s evaluation is based on citizens’ goals. Given this, even in a small, centralized nation state, it will be difficult for the national government to directly act as an agent. Instead, the task of coordinating the several activities of welfare realization will be more realistic. It is difficult for national governments to directly connect with citizens, and thus local governments will become the key agents. Local governments may pursue the welfare state on a national level but local governments will be the main agents and the goal of a welfare state is inappropriate for local governments.

The reason for local governments acting as the agents of the welfare state is that the welfare state and community well-being share commonalities that can be separated by the level at which this is being realized. Well-being is the point at which the national government connects to local governments because both community well-being and welfare states contain the concept of well. The term well signifies good, best, or ideally acceptable. The only difference is that one sees well as a fare (i.e. state) while the other sees well as being. Despite this difference, the state of well and the being of well can be seen as synonymous. Fare is a more macro condition whereas being is an individual aspect of this condition. If the national government pursues welfare and local governments pursue well-being, the end product is actually the same: a collective body of well citizens.

Thus we see that community well-being can be the value and goal of local governments in the realization of a welfare state. We have also argued in previous studies that community well-being is the value and goal of local governments (Seo et al. 2012; Kim and Lee 2013). Our arguments are based on the following assumptions. Local governments affect the national government. Local governments deliver the services that local residents need and can affect the level of citizen satisfaction with respect to national governments. Second, the issues faced on a local level are multidimensional. The local community is where individuals’ daily lives are practiced. Third, local issues require the involvement of local governments. The local community is where individuals’ needs and demands are voiced and they expect local governments to respond to these voices.

In sum, there needs to be an appropriate value goal for local governments, and this chapter aims to model community well-being as the appropriate value goal. The community well-being model is based on an analysis of related concepts and highlighting the uniqueness of community well-being. It is also connected to community development as local government is typically very concerned with this dimension. Community development can be defined as both a process and an outcome for communities:

A process: developing and enhancing the ability of a community to act collectively and an outcome: (1) taking collective action and (2) the result of that action for improvement in a community in any or all realms: physical, environmental, cultural, social, political, economic, etc. (Phillips and Pittman 2014: 6).

Community development builds on the concept of assets or capital in an area across all realms as just defined. Building this capital and capacity entails active governance, with both local governments and their residents involved and participating in these processes. Governance essentially implies an active state of governing where residents and other stakeholders work with local government leaders to accomplish goals. Further, it implies that it is participatory, which has been found to be essential in successful local government models (Phillips and Pittman 2014). Within community development, we can see the direct relationship to community well-being, as both a goal/outcome and process of progressing towards desired states of well-being.

Comparing and Contrasting the Concepts of “Beyond GDP”: The Uniqueness of Community Well-Being

Comparing and contrasting concepts of quality of life, well-being, happiness, and sustainability show that not all agree on their definition (Lee and Kim 2014). Some previous studies have attempted to tease out the difference between and among these concepts, while others have treated them synonymously. Easterlin (2001) studied the relationship between happiness and income at the national level and treated subjective well-being, well-being, satisfaction, utility, and welfare as synonymous. Booth (2012) also shows that a study by the Institute of Economic Affairs in the U.K. that analyzed more than 100 countries used well-being and happiness as the same concept. Well-being and quality of life both focus on an individual’s psychological evaluation while subjective well-being is treated as an element of quality of life and thus it is difficult to precisely distinguish these terms. Meanwhile, happiness is similar to well-being in that they both focus on a subjective level of satisfaction but in general, well-being includes more than subjective evaluations, such as objective environmental and economic elements. Well-being can be seen as more objective than happiness since there is a certain criterion for levels of well-being while the criterion for happiness is entirely subjective and differs for every ind ividual.

Lee and Kim (2014) compare and contrast happiness, quality of life, individual well-being, and community well-being using the following aspects: individual or collective, domain of study, quantity or quality, objective or subjective, static or dynamic, approach, goal, and value judgment. In sum, they see community well-being as the most comprehensive concept. For example, happiness is seen as being limited to the psychological domain, having an affective (i.e. emotions) approach, and limited to the subjective while community well-being includes cultural, economic, environmental, social, physical, and political domains and including both subjective and objective aspects. Quality of life is seen as being limited to qualitative aspects while community well-being encompasses both qualitative and quantitative. The term well-being is seen as an individual concept that is inappropriate for guiding public policies or local government decisions that affect the collective group. Community development is included to show the similarities of dimensions (Table 1).

Table 1 Comparison of community well-being and related concepts
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Modeling Community Well-Being

We use the definition of community well-being to analyze its characteristics and ultimately suggest a model of community well-being. To define community well-being, we compared previous literature on community well-being and modeled community well-being for in depth studies. We focus on the group of community for community well-being. In this process, given that individuals are the building blocks of a community, we also include individual elements. In particular, we see community well-being as an asset based approach . In contrast, quality of life aims to fill up deficiencies to achieve a zero base while well-being aims to go beyond a zero base of accumulation, flourishing, and production.

While there have been previous attempts to define and model these concepts, Adler (2013) points out that differentiation amongst these concepts has been weak and lack normative definitions. In fact, with a weak understanding of well-being among philosophers, the empirical studies of well-being by psychologists and economists are severely limited (p. 6).

The Multidimensional Approach

We use a multidimensional asset approach to modeling community well-being. This approach was chosen with an explicit attention to the fact that individuals have different levels of assets at their disposal. This is in line with the capability approach of Sen (2005) where the consumption focused models proposed by economists were critiqued because they ignore the fact that individuals have different levels of assets and more consumption from an unequal starting point cannot be a sustainable solution.

This study used an asset and capital approach to model community well-being . White (2008) discusses two approaches to community well-being: the first approach views community well-being as the sum or mathematical mean of individual well-being; the second approach sees community well-being as a unique feature of the collective. These approaches have implications for the indicator development process. In detail, the first approach focuses on measuring individual well-being and then calculating the total level of well-being, while the second approach searches for a unique measure of collective well-being that is not entirely derived from individual well-being measures. His community well-being measurement model consists of identical domains as that of individual well-being, such as material, subjective, relational elements. However, he offers different indicators within these domains. The material elements are related to welfare or quality of life , while relational elements are related to the individual or social relationships, and subjective elements include subjective values, perceptions, and experiences.

NWMO (2009) treats community well-being as a complex concept that combines an abstract idea with human behavior. Just as does community development , community well-being reflects the interests of individuals within a community, and also reflects the collective interest of the group. Thus, the term is unique to each group and also to each individual. NWMO defines community well-being by defining community and well-being separately and then combining them, which is similar to the first approach of White (2008). According to their definition, well-being includes social, economic, psychological, and cultural elements and include an individual’s health and safety, is connected to the satisfaction level and quality of life within a group. A community is defined by geographical proximity or interests.

Assumptions of the Community Well-Being Model

Community well-being needs to examine the basic characteristics of well-being first. Community is the level at which we examine well-being and thus we focus on the characteristics of well-being in this section and use them as the following four main assumptions to model community well-being.

We assume that, community well-being shares the unequal characteristic of well-being. That is, this study uses a asset approach to community well-being which inherently contains inequality. Assets are already unequally dispersed throughout a nation and across the globe. Thus, there are unequal levels of community well-being. This study aims to achieve a balance and harmony despite this given structure, and thus uses an asset and secondary capital approach. This is in line with the freedom that Sen emphasizes: the freedom to realize one’s capabilities. The government has a responsibility to provide the opportunities to realize these capabilities. This is why community well-being needs to be studied in close relation to local governments. Utilitarianism is also based on these assumptions and is an effort to maximize efficiency in the consumption of such goods. Local governments can balance the inequality of opportunities in its role of delivering services. The task of balancing the unequal distribution of assets at the stage of transforming assets to capital and well-being is given.

Community well-being is dependent. Well-being is dependent because it depends on the process of transforming assets to capital. Well-being has a strong subjective characteristic and is influenced by individual feelings or level of satisfaction. At the same time, this implies that there needs to be an agent that can rationally utilize individual assets in the best way possible and transform them into capital. Local governments can play this role of coordinator.

Community well-being is social. In other words, well-being presupposes a collective group. Social characteristics are based on collective groups, and thus we include both subjective indicators and objective indicators to measure community well-being. Subjective indicators concern the individual feelings, perceptions, and psychology while objective indicators go beyond individual levels. This study does not propose an ideal set of community well-being indicators, but rather a realistic, practical set of indicators.

Community well-being is made up of elements that are interdependent. Well-being can be seen as having several elements that affect and are affected by each other. For example, health, education, and income can be examined together. We see relationships wherein people with high education levels have higher incomes and are more likely to have access to better healthcare and are able to maximize their opportunities to prevent illnesses. In sum, the elements of well-being have intricate connections.

Modeling the Relationship Between Assets and Capital

The community well-being model in this study is based on the following assumptions about the relationship between assets and capital. We use this approach because the assets that each individual has is inherently unequal. We use asset and resource synonymously while capital is the broader, processed format of an asset.

First, community well-being is made up of assets and capital . Assets are static and when assets are processed they become a dynamic secondary asset. Hicks (1939) mentioned the asset capital of developed countries that garnered much interest in capital. The capital of human life was treated as the welfare of assets and the possibility of fulfilling this was assumed. However, this position was changed to accommodate capital and especially the human being himself or herself becomes an asset and capital. Welfare was defined as consumption, that is consumption of materials but in fact, human well-being is more than consumption—that is consumption of assets, and this approach ignored the emotional aspects. In sum, the aggregate of consumption is not the realization of welfare. This turn of attention of assets to capital began with human capital and human capital was seen as education levels and this framework expanded to include natural capital, intellectual capital, and social capital. Welfare is possible when there is capital and so we connect capital to welfare and capital can be made when there is enough assets. Thus we see assets and capital as primary asset and secondary asset. Assets are the raw format before processing, while the processing of assets produces capital. Capital is what enables humans to function and therefore it is a secondary asset.

Second, capital is produced when individuals use primary assets and process them. Capital is again used to accomplish another goal and can be seen as a secondary asset.

Third, as capital is a secondary asset, local government intervention is possible. By local government intervention, we mean that local governments can manage and utilize the primary assets so that individuals can use a new asset. This process of producing capital will differ according to a local government’s capacity.

Fourth, assets are collective while capital is individualistic. Assets are limited within a community, but capital is made from assets and thus becomes individualized depending on each individual’s capacity. Assets are used by individuals, transformed into capital, and thus becomes an individual’s possession.

Fifth, primary assets will be depleted while secondary assets can be artificially produced and can be renewed. Figure 1 shows these relationships between asset and capital.

Fig. 1
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Characteristics of asset and capital

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The relationship between assets and capital can be summarized in Fig. 1, and in this model we identify social, human, and natural assets. Natural assets are the environmental assets within the geographical limits. Human assets are the artificially created elements.

Elements of Capital

The assets discussed above are processed into capital that individuals can use. Capital is the processed form of these assets and we identify the following six types:

  1. 1.

    Economic capital consists of built capital and financial assets.

  2. 2.

    Natural capital consists of the physical and ecological environments.

  3. 3.

    Human capital consists of labor, education, health, and housing.

  4. 4.

    Social capital consists of trust, commitment, community bonding, and participation.

  5. 5.

    Cultural capital consists of leisure, sharing, and mutual help; it also centers on societal accumulation and as such is an important aspect of community quality of life and well-being (Phillips and Shockley 2009).

  6. 6.

    Infrastructure capital consists of physical and social aspects (Fig. 2).

    Fig. 2
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    Modeling community well-being

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Based on these assumptions, the national government can be connected to local governments and the effective practice and response to resident needs becomes the opportunity to participate. Community well-being is discussed in this framework.

Defining Community Well-Being

Residents’ expectations of government services emphasized specific concepts, but the singular focus on certain concepts cannot effectively realize well-being or enhance quality of life. This is why we need a more comprehensive concept. Based on this need, this study recognizes that the several elements of well-being influence each other and focus on the relationships among these elements. There is no generally accepted definition of community well-being (Forjaz et al. 2011). Community well-being will differ depending on the culture and society (Cox et al. 2010) (Table 2).

Table 2 Definitions and conditions of community well-being
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Community well-being signifies the most ideal condition of community life and is a concept that signifies the ideal of people living together harmoniously in a sustainable, thriving community (Rural Assistance Information Network 2004). According to Wiseman and Brasher (2008), community well-being is the necessary social, economic, environmental, cultural, political conditions for satisfying the needs of the members of a community and is the ultimate goal of such a process and strategy. These conditions are the necessary items for realizing individual well-being and capacity. Thus he emphasizes an ecological understanding of well-being and to go beyond the individual, collective well-being to human and environmental well-being. That is, community well-being enhances mental health, mental health is a necessary condition of realizing community well-being and this is not an individual issue but a social, psychological, mental well-being. The necessary socioeconomic conditions for an individual’s mental health include freedom from violence and prejudice, equal rights and sense of community, economic participation and safety, as well as social progress. It cannot be measured by economic growth alone but needs to include indicators of social and environmental problems as well.

Although there are previous studies that treat community well-being as the simple sum of individual well-being, this study differentiates the two concepts and define community well-being as a unique concept. The simple sum of individual well-being is strongly subjective and does not reflect the community characteristics. Treating individual and community characteristics leads to confusion in understanding underlying theory and its application. In terms of policy analysis, an implied causal relationship is that the sum of individual well-being affects individual well-being. However, as discussed before, when governments focus on individual well-being as a policy goal it is very inefficient and unrealistic. Thus, we explicitly differentiate individual well-being and community well-being (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Hypothetical relationship between individual well-being and community well-being. Source Lee and Kim (2014)

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Also, community well-being can be differentiated as a concept of state or a concept of process (Kee et al. 2013). Community well-being as a state focuses on the present and emphasizes current thoughts and behaviors of citizens who affect local policies periodically through elections. Also, flexibility refers to the relationship among government, residents, and local community that are constantly affecting each other. This leads to the possibility of innovative policy making. On the other hand, community well-being as a process has high sustainability and can help achieving capabilities through service delivery and evaluation based on a lifetime process.

The uniqueness of community well-being is identified by comparison with related concepts and extraction of key elements. The following reasons account for why community well-being can be the key value of welfare states and local government administration. Community well-being is not restricted to the realm of individual control as is the case with quality of life, well-being, and sustainability. These related concepts can be controlled by individuals but community well-being cannot and must be coordinated and managed by another actor (see Table 3). Community development on the other hand, is inherently of the collective and is more akin to community well-being in aspects, particularly that of process and concepts of assets and capital.

Table 3 Characteristics of community well-being in comparison to related concepts
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We propose community well-being as a necessary condition for maximizing happiness, quality of life, and well-being . This is connected to the previous point in that community well-being cannot be controlled by an individual. Kee et al. (2013) discuss the relationship between individual need and impacts on these at the community level. We support that individual happiness or well-being is affected by community well-being and we can see community well-being as the necessary precondition for happiness, quality of life, and well-being.

Community well-being has a relationship of necessary condition and sufficient condition with related concepts. Community well-being needs to be distinguished from other concepts to be discussed in this way. It is difficult to discuss community well-being without distinguishing it as a unique concept. Community well-being needs to be separated because happiness, quality of life, and well-being become customers of community well-being. In other words, community well-being affects happiness, quality of life, and well-being so it is important to understand what their characteristics are and how they are affected. Community well-being is discovered by local governments and used for local government actions but it is important how the individual components, the residents, feel. These feelings are reflected in elections and this is the focus of politicians and public administration is again connected to politics. This is why community well-being also considers the individual, subjective perspective of happiness, quality of life, and well-being. Community development, both as a practice and a discipline, can be seen as a complementary concept that has at its core some of the same principles as community well-being, predominately to improve people’s lives.

Table 3. shows these comparisons with related concepts of community well-being. Community well-being is used in various ways by different researchers for different purposes. This study aims to use community well-being as a key value of public administration and thus defined and modeled community well-being through a literature review. We compare these concepts on seven criteria, assessing the level of high, medium, low. These levels are not absolute but only relative.

Community well-being is not only the physical space, but also the community’s changing population and interest that focuses on the context and is the necessary social, economic, environmental, cultural, political elements for an individual and community to reach their capabilities (Kee et al. 2013). This definition assumes that the individual, community, and local government checks and decides on the necessary conditions and includes the community member, community organization, and community members’ well-being in a dynamic network. By meeting the life cycle needs of the members it contributes to the process of realizing capabilities and community well-being becomes the goal of local governments. Thus community well-being is enhanced by distributing, delivering, producing the goods and services that can be the conditions for local members, local government, and local organizations. In addition, it contributes to an individual’s realization of capabilities by meeting the life cycle needs of an individual. That is, community well-being is the state and process of individuals and communities to flourish and reach its capabilities through the necessary social, economic, natural, cultural, and political conditions.

Conclusion

This study has presented community well-being as a consideration for local governments to help foster better states for their residents. We modeled community well-being as a guiding principle of local governments and governance by examining its origin and use. We examined the background of community well-being and well-being as common factor on the national and local level. We identified the characteristics of community well-being and used assumptions of local government roles to define the concept and build a model. The modeling approach is focused on the assets and the capital of communities. We looked at the related concepts of community well-being including happiness, quality of life, and community development and their previous studies and compared them in a comprehensive way to build a multidimensional model. Expert consultation and expert modeling consultation and forums were used and this model will be used in future studies.

Community well-being model positions local governments and has a close connection to the role of the state. It defines the role of state for building a welfare state and it can be connected to the happiness and happiness realization role of states. Happiness and well-being are not completely unrelated. These two concepts are used interchangeably in reality. The government needs to act to enhance citizen happiness and they do this through policy making and when these policies are connected to daily lives they involve local governments. Therefore, this study has suggested community well-being as directing the role of local governments in connection to the welfare state and modeled community well-being to explore the role of local governments.

As such, community well-being is the goal and value goal of local governments and this dictates the role of local governments. Community well-being requires studies on service delivery mechanism as local resident well-being is realized through efficient service delivery processes and it also requires indicator studies for residents to evaluate local governments based on levels of satisfaction. Local governments can serve as tools for realizing resident well-being while also “producing” well-being. Local governments can be thought of as the delivery actors of resident well-being, and can address distribution of well-being asset to the disadvantaged. Well-being has the characteristic of inequality and resident well-being is not distributed fairly in terms of needs. Thus individual well-being needs to be coordinated in order to ensure individual happiness and this is a primary role of local governments. If not, there will be social costs. This is why community well-being can assess the well-being of local communities and then help with evaluation and prescription of how local governments can enhance community well-being in the process of service delivery. We modeled community well-being as the first step towards developing community well-being indicators. Community well-being appeared as a new agenda in the process of moving from the central government to the local level. This is because the local level is where individual lives are lived out and the possibility of enhancing the quality of life is present. In fact, as life satisfaction has become important the local level became more vital because this is where individuals spend time on a daily basis and this has led to an increase in interest in local government involvement, or governance. This is transformed into local government services and thus local government services become even more important. This goes beyond the resident’s freedom and self government and services related to the problem of unemployment, aging, pollution, safety, education, and culture are important for the local governments as appropriate actors for these problems. In other words, the various problems due to changes in environment that relate to resident life and happiness can be addressed very directly at the local government level. Obviously, there is a role and need for national governments to help address pressing issues and challenges; rather, we are implying that local government and good governance can address issues at the level of where the residents experience it most directly.