Final report - Integrated Land Management Bureau

4.0 PART 1: LITERATURE REVIEW AND FULL SUITE OF
INDICATORS OF HUMAN WELL-BEING
4.1 COMPONENTS OF HUMAN WELL-BEING
The purpose of investigating the human well-being literature is to ensure that the
indicators selected to measure HWB on the North and Central Coast are framed in the
most current academic work on human well-being.
The literature review on human well-being was begun in a project previously done for the
BC Ministry of Agriculture and Lands (MOAL) in February 2007 (Morford 2007). That
project involved a review of recent Socio-Economic and Environmental Assessment
(SEEAs) social indicators for each land use plan to assess them in light of the emerging
research on social indicators. The project included a preliminary review of the current
literature on community sustainability and human wellness.
There have been many initiatives to define human well-being in Canada, North America
and internationally. Indices and indicator sets have been developed by many
organizations and authors representing diverse academic world views. The use of social
indicators has a long history in many fields beginning in the middle of the last century
and the use of social theory to guide the development of indicators has matured since the
1970s. The Journal of Social Indicators Research has chronicled social indicator research
since 1974 and includes an increasing number of articles that report on theories of
indicators (Morford 2007).
The current literature discusses indicators in terms of various “indicator frameworks” that
serve as the conceptual structures on which indicators are based. The literature shows that
there are many different ways social indicators are framed, depending on a particular
author’s disciplinary background. The large number of different frameworks (and
disciplines they represent) found in the literature can be overwhelming to practitioners
who are trying to operationalize the use of indicators in land use planning or other
initiatives. Typically, authors base their framework on their academic world view,
leaving the practitioner to decide which framework best fits their own world views. The
selection of indicators is typically left to practitioners who select them based on a defined
set of criteria, such as measurability and availability of data.
Sociologists and rural development researchers have built indicator frameworks based on
sociological concepts such as community capacity and resiliency, using the community as
the unit of analysis. Other authors have built indicator frameworks based on systems
theories that include resilience and adaptation to change, or human health, using
individuals as the unit of analysis.
Until recently, assessing human impacts of land use decisions in British Columbia relied
on indicators relating to community economic stability (usually timber supply-related).
Kaufman and Kaufman (1946) first drew the link between the sustainability of the timber
resource and the sustainability of rural communities. Later researchers such as Marchak
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