Measuring Well-Being: A Buen Vivir (Living Well) Indicator for Ecuador

Contributions of Subjective Well-Being and Good Living to the Contemporary Development of the Notion of Sustainable Human Development

“…First, the findings provided by our research confirm, broadly, that sumak kawsay, originally an indigenous paradigm, in addition to expressing a philosophy of life, constitutes a critique of Western development as a universal, homogenizing and exclusionary model that prevails over its cultures and territories [35]. In this sense, Good Living is a proposal of indigenous resistance, which aims to be an alternative to development, for the recovery of human and natural communities and for mitigation of problems such as climate change.…”

“…In the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of the fundamental problem of socio-environmental sustainability has opened a discursive space composed of multiple more or less critical responses [34]. Good Living or sumak kawsay is a concept that breaks from traditional paradigms [35] and focuses on the philosophy of a balanced relationship between people, their community, their well-being at work and their natural environment [36]. In other words, it is based on the responsible enjoyment of human rights while respecting common goods in the context of harmonious coexistence.…”

“…In recent years, the invocation of Good Living has gained popularity as an alternative to classic positions about development and quality of life [35]. As an example, this spirit has been formalized in two countries, Bolivia and Ecuador, being recognized in their new constitutional texts.…”

Developing a Comprehensive Multidimensional Wellbeing Index Based on What People Value: An Application to a Middle-Income Country

“…On the contrary, this type of information is utilized by the literature on country-level multidimensional wellbeing indexes, which has focused on HICs (Elliott et al, 2017 ). However, a growing literature on LMICs (Canaviri, 2016 ; Collomb et al, 2012 ; Férnandez & Gómez, 2019 ; Haq & Zia, 2013 ; Heshmati et al, 2019 ; Mero-Figueroa et al, 2020 ; Van Phan & O’Brien, 2019 ) has incorporated many of the aforementioned dimensions, used individual-level datasets, and relied on data-driven or statistical methods.…”

“…Following a similar pathway to the abovementioned international wellbeing indexes, other studies have devised country-level multidimensional wellbeing measures for application to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Latin America (Canaviri, 2016 ; Férnandez & Gómez, 2019 ; Mero-Figueroa et al, 2020 ), Africa (Collomb et al, 2012 ; Heshmati et al, 2019 ), and Asia (Haq & Zia, 2013 ; Senasu et al, 2019 ; Van Phan & O’Brien, 2019 ). Nevertheless, the literature on indexes of wellbeing still centers mainly on high-income countries (HICs) (Elliott et al, 2017 ).…”