Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve Director, Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford
Jeffrey D. Sachs Columbia University, Centre for Sustainable Development
Acknowledgment: We are grateful to Sidharth Bhushan and Pekka Vuorenlehto for outstanding research assistance. We thank Guillaume Lafortune and Grayson Fuller at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network for guidance on the SDG Index data. Use of the Gallup World Poll data is generously granted by The Gallup Organization. We also acknowledge very helpful comments from John Helliwell, Richard Layard, Andrew Oswald, Steve Bond, Tyler VanderWeele, and participants at seminar meetings of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford.
Introduction
This chapter explores the empirical links between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and human well-being. The SDGs were ratified in 2015 as the successor to the Millennium Development Goals and have a target date of 2030. The goals measure different aspects of the economic, social and environmental development within countries. To empirically explore the linkages between sustainable development and well-being we combine two major data gathering efforts. We leverage the SDG Index[1], which measures how far along countries are in the process of achieving the SDGs. We also use the Gallup World Poll, which is a survey that is representative of about 98% of the world’s population and includes an item on how people evaluate the quality of their lives, which we will henceforth refer to as subjective well-being (SWB). Data on other dimensions of subjective well-being, such as the experience of positive and negative emotions, will be referred to explicitly rather than as elements of a more broadly defined SWB. Combining the Gallup World Poll and SDG Index data sets enables us to empirically explore how sustainable development relates to the way people experience their lives.
Intuitively, making progress in terms of sustainable development is likely to benefit both people and planet. Detailed empirical work, however, may reveal some tensions where actions needed to achieve sustainability may challenge people into changing behaviours and potentially reducing their well-being (at least in the short run). In fact, large-scale social movements such as the “yellow vests” in France were initiated when additional fuel taxes were introduced. While fuel taxes are considered an effective way to induce more sustainable behaviour, they put additional pressure on the lifestyles and purchasing power of people living outside of major cities who require more use of automobiles given that there are less public transport options available to them. Alongside social movements such as the “yellow vests,” there are the pro-environment movements such as “Extinction Rebellion” that raise alarm bells over climate change and the need for drastic and immediate measures to reduce our reliance on carbon fuels. By unpacking the seventeen SDGs in relation to well-being, this chapter tries to take a closer empirical look at how sustainable development aligns with the interests of people and planet, but also where there may be inherent tensions that require more complex policy efforts in order to chart a course towards environmentally sustainable and socially equitable growth without reducing human well-being.[2]
A related empirical question concerns the relative importance of each of the SDGs in terms of driving human well-being. All SDGs are important—but some SDGs may be more relevant to well-being than others. This is of interest for a number of reasons. Those SDGs that are most strongly linked to advancing well-being could perhaps be prioritized if budgets are limited (and well-being considered a goal of policymaking). Advancing on SDGs that are negatively correlated with well-being metrics will likely require more complex policy action in order to alleviate other concerns. By unpacking the SDGs in terms of well-being, we also show how their relative importance may change over time and by regional context. The analyses reported in this chapter may provide some broad policy guidance to policymakers across the world’s regions that are keen to advance the well-being of both people and the planet.
In line with intuition, the countries with a higher SDG Index score tend to do better in terms of subjective well-being (SWB)—with the Nordic countries topping both rankings. In fact, there is a highly significant correlation coefficient of 0.79 between the SDG Index[3] and the SWB scores. This shows the importance of a holistic approach to economic development when trying to improve citizen well-being. Interestingly, the best fitting model to describe the relationship between the SDG Index and SWB takes a quadratic form indicating that a higher SDG Index score correlates more strongly with higher SWB at higher levels of the SDG Index. This would indicate that economic growth is an important driver of well-being at early stages but becomes less significant later in the development cycle. Put differently, this result implies increasing marginal returns to sustainable development in terms of human well-being.
A conceptual model that explores the pathways between sustainable development and well-being finds that the SDGs are strongly related to the ‘determinants of well-being’ as laid out in Chapter 2. These are income, social support, generosity, freedom, trust in government, and health. Among the different SDGs, however, we find much heterogeneity in how they correlate to SWB. In fact, some of the environmental goals are significantly negatively correlated with SWB. These are Goal 12 (responsible consumption and production) and Goal 13 (climate action). Moreover, there are significant regional differences in these correlations. For example, Goal 10 (reducing inequality) has a 0.71 correlation with SWB in Europe but is not correlated with SWB in many other regions. As such, these analyses reveal a number of intrinsic tensions between sustainable development and well-being that will hopefully stimulate further research and debate in order to inform policy action.
This chapter begins by discussing the headline correlation between the SDG Index and SWB. We analyse the quadratic relationship depicted and then show which countries significantly deviate from the main trend. We then also look at how SWB is related to other indices that measure progress to show that the SDG Index compares well with them. In the next section, the SDG Index is split into its 17 component goals and we analyse the varying relationships with well-being. Here we discuss the trade-offs that appear when we dig deeper into the relationship between sustainable development and well-being. We finish this section by conducting a variance decomposition analysis to show which goals contribute most strongly to the variation in well-being between countries. Finally, we look into the determinants of well-being and analyse them as pathways by which the sustainable development goals affect well-being. Generally, this chapter finds that the SDGs are a critically important but complex set of targets as governments increasingly appreciate the overarching goal of improving the well-being of their populations.