Sustainability of Wellbeing: An Analysis of Resilience and Vulnerability Through Subjective Indicators

Many scholars have focused on how the concepts of vulnerability and resilience may be employed in the analysis of sustainability. Different approaches have been proposed, concerning different fields of application (from environmental to financial settings). While much of the existing literature on vulnerability and resilience is sector-specific, we propose a more holistic approach that allows the sustainability of human well-being to be analyzed as a whole. In particular we apply those concepts to BES (Benessere, Equo e Sostenibile) framework, where 12 domains are included. Moreover, while the majority of studies consider the vulnerability and resilience as aspects of the sustainability of a “system” (a society, a country, or even the whole planet), we focus on an individual dimension of wellbeing, considering the exposure to risk and the ability to recover of the single persons. We show how the proposed scheme lends itself to the use of both objective and subjective indicators of well-being. Finally, using Italian data provided by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), we propose an example of how to analyses the subjective aspects of wellbeing in terms of sustainability.