People need services like healthcare, transportation, finance, and, increasingly, digital communications to survive. Whether people are able to get the services they need depends on both provision and access.

Service provision is a question of whether a service exists. Does an institution or a person have the knowledge and resources at their disposal to both a) have identified the need or demand for a given service, and then b) be able to carry it out to an acceptable quality standard?

Access is about whether people have the resources to get to the service they need. Resources that determine access can include physical things like personal finances or local transportation infrastructure, and social resources like knowledge about service options or a reliable support network.

A major task in a wellbeing economy is figuring out the right way to balance service provision and access to meet local needs. For example, Frankfurt, Germany, is home to one of Europe’s largest international airports, and is a major centre for the finance sector and tech industry. These industries mean there are significant employment opportunities, which mean the region around Frankfurt/Rhein-Main is anticipating continued population growth. But these industries have also contributed to the development of a significant portion of Frankfurt/Rhein-Main’s land, which has made providing affordable housing and coordinating transportation for the growing population while preserving remaining green space two of the region’s major challenges.

People need reliable access to goods and services to survive and thrive. Geographic distance is one facet of the proximity of goods and services, and is an especially pronounced challenge in rural areas.

But through digital and social networks, goods and services can be physically distant while being easy to access. For example, broadband allows people to use services like online banking, even if their banks are based far away.

Through globalized supply chains, most people can easily buy something made across the world at a store within a few kilometres of their home. But the level of coordination between the resource and communication flows needed to sustain networks at such a massive scale, makes them fragile, especially at their peripheries. 

On the flip side, goods and services can be physically close to someone who needs them, but socially distant. For example, someone who isn’t confident using digital technology might have more limited access to timely, accurate information about businesses near them than their tech savvier neighbors.

Minimizing the geographic and social distance between people, goods, and services makes communities less reliant on distant systems or markets, and, thus, more resilient.

Ecosystem services are the things nature does that contribute to human wellbeing. Growth-based development frameworks generally emphasize the monetary value of individual products that derive from natural resources (e.g., the market value of one liter of milk or petrol) as the basis for decision-making.

Some classic examples of market goods, like food or fiber, are also examples of ecosystem services. But an ecosystem service approach also captures the value of processes necessary for human life but that aren’t directly valued in conventional markets, like soil formation or photosynthesis.

Wellbeing economies recognize that ecosystem services rely on complex, layered interactions that drive ecological processes, and accordingly prioritize development pathways that protect nature. Essentially, this task involves minimizing the gap between a) the price markets currently assign to an individual good, and b) what the good’s actual price would be if the value of the ecosystem services essential to its provision were accounted for.

Want to learn more? The Ecosystem Services: A Natural Resource Management Approach for more Integrated Rural-Urban Governance Learning Guide provides more information about the ecosystem services approach, and gives practical examples of tools and strategies the ROBUST Living Labs used to protect nature while promoting wellbeing.

The principle of circularity — using waste as raw materials for new products as much as possible — is an important component of many economic models that prioritize wellbeing.

Raw materials can either only be used once, ever (e.g., petroleum) or are replenished through ecosystem services that are only possible within the parameters of planetary boundaries. Fish stocks can’t replenish themselves if the ocean is too acidic, for example.

Common threats to the ecosystem services that replenish stocks of raw materials, incidentally, are the extraction and the emissions from using non-renewable resources. This means that the more circular the relationship between raw materials, products, and waste, the better economies can meet the needs of both present and future generations. In practice, a more circular economy needs to rely on renewable energy, and explores new ways to convert any necessary waste into raw materials for new products or into clean energy.

New platforms and tools are also needed to help consumers get more use out of the things they have, share things with each other, and get things second-hand rather than new.

As you learned in the previous modules, social networks are what connect people with the services that are central to their wellbeing. In a wellbeing economy, which is more decentralized and localized, communities rely less on distant markets, and need to cooperate and collaborate closely to meet each other’s needs.

Culture acts as a glue in communities, a critical conduit for knowledge that shapes values and practices. Understood as “a way of life”, culture is both the process behind and the sum of the behaviors we learn from each other over time. Communities form identities through the values, norms, traditions, rules, and other ways of doing things that they share.

Understood as “art forms”, culture is the way people express themselves and work together creatively in a given time and place. In a wellbeing economy, people come together through shared media like literature, painting, and film. A community’s culture can be reflected through “tangible heritage”, material objects or spaces that hold specific symbolic meaning, or through “intangible heritage”, like rituals or traditions.

To learn more about how culture can be used to better connect rural and urban areas, read the ROBUST Cultural Connections Learning Guide.