Introduction

A crucial reason why governments everywhere drag their feet about the transition to environmental sustainability is that it is widely thought to depend primarily on a reduction in living standards. It looks not only as if reducing carbon emissions will mean tightening our belts and consuming less, but also having to make do with substitutes for what we prefer: having to give up eating meat, stop flying, use less plastic and replace private cars with public transport. In the public mind that inevitably makes facing the climate emergency a pretty dismal prospect, to be avoided for as long as possible.

To counter that perspective, some have argued that it is possible to transition to sustainability while at the same time producing higher standards of human wellbeing. This perspective is based primarily on three considerations. First, that in high-income countries, continued increases in material standards no longer lead to higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Second, that sustainable societies could satisfy fundamental human social needs very much better than high-income societies do now; for instance, by strengthening community life and reducing status competition. And third, that societies using renewable sources of power and electric public transport systems will be cleaner and quieter and will produce higher health standards. These views link the transition to sustainability to large-scale socioeconomic restructuring. Proposals span everything from replacing economic growth with maximizing human wellbeing as the central objective of government policy, to the much more radical demand for the abolition of capitalism itself.

The demand to replace gross domestic product (GDP) with wellbeing as the main objective of government policy has led to a growing academic industry devoted to developing wellbeing measures. Few of these, however, have been supported by research identifying determinants of wellbeing. Even when governments have adopted measures of wellbeing, as a few have, that does not mean that wellbeing will increase, nor does substituting wellbeing for the growth of GDP per head mean that the drivers of growth will lose their force. Not only is economic growth probably propelled by more fundamental forces than government policy, but it is likely that the same is true of wellbeing.