Introduction

Abstract

Wellbeing, resilience and sustainability are three of the most engaging terms in current political usage and have come to have real grip in all our lives in recent years. Here, we begin to outline how they are seen to offer new approaches to issues that recent natural and human-made crises have highlighted as having been inadequately dealt or overlooked by mainstream policy approaches. Either separately or together they have been claimed by some commentators as being elements of a much-needed paradigm shift in political and policy thinking. Here, we introduce some of the commonalities between the ideas, particularly their concern with distinctive human capacities that shape who we are and that imply a particular relationship to our wider social and natural environments. With this in mind, this book sets out to do three things. First, it seeks to explain these three ideas, while also exploring areas of dispute and uncertainty. We thus seek to review the debates about their possible meanings and significance. Second, we explain how these three ideas connect with and even define one another. We outline an understanding of why it is that they have emerged simultaneously, at this particular moment. Third, and relatedly, we wish to examine how these ideas connect with strategies of governance, broadly understood, addressing questions of the current social, political and economic context and wider arguments about the changing global environment. As part of the SPERI series, we are particularly concerned to outline how these ideas contribute to governance ‘after the crisis’, and the questions of social, political and economic uncertainty influence the ways in which these main arguments are developed.