What is it about?
Wellbeing has become important in regional development policy as decision-makers grapple with allowing industry to use resources that belong to the public. We investigated what scholars know so far about the links between ‘regional development’ and ‘wellbeing’. We identified an increasing focus on sustainable development; ii) different approaches for pre-development planning and post-development impact assessment; iii) the top four components of wellbeing that are considered are livelihoods, education and skills, health, and the quality of the surrounding environment; iv) scholars are using mixed methods approaches to investigating wellbeing and regional development. We argue that there is a need to rigorously synthesise wellbeing and regional economic research but that this must be done within a carefully designed interdisciplinary approach.
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Why is it important?
Supporting wellbeing (particularly employment and wealth-generating activities) in sub-national or regional areas is an argument that is often used by governments and industry bodies to allow the exploitation of natural resources. But can the complex notion of wellbeing be addressed by regional development, and if so, how? It is important to understand how much we know about this at the moment, and where future research is needed.
Perspectives
This is a literature review and is quite conceptual, but this sort of work is required to provide a base understanding so that we can start to really understand how wellbeing and regional development are linked. What I find fascinating is the distinction between how wellbeing and regional development are linked in pre-development planning and post-development impact assessment. Post-development analysis really didn't consider locally relevant interpretations of how ‘the good life’ could be affected by future developments, even though we know that this can lead to conflict (which is my real area of interest).
Dr Karen A Alexander
University of Tasmania
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emerging functions of the wellbeing concept in regional development scholarship: A review, Environmental Science & Policy, January 2021, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2020.10.005.
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