Green Well-Being and Governance

This paper explores the relationships between indicators designed to assess the quality of natural habitats, the quality of governance, and self-reported well-being (often equated with ‘happiness’) at the country scale. A habitat/species ‘protection’ group of indicators was identified comprising the Terrestrial Biome Protection based on national weights (TBN), the Species Protection Index (SPI), and the Protected Area Representativeness Index (PAR), all of which require identification, demarcation, management, and protection of habitats and species, typically backed up with legislation, by government. This group of ‘protection’ indicators had a statistically significant and positive relationship with both the quality of governance and happiness (p < 0.05). However, it is suggested that the positive impact of this group of indicators on happiness is indirect; a better quality of governance has a positive influence on both this group of ‘protection’ indicators and happiness. A fourth indicator, the Species Habitat Index (SHI), differs from the other three in that it assesses the proportion of suitable habitats for a country’s species that remain intact relative to a baseline year, and this is not necessarily tied solely to protected areas and thus to government intervention. The SHI had no statistically significant association with the quality of governance and had a negative association with happiness (p < 0.001). It is suggested that the SHI may be conceptualized as an inverse indicator of perceived ‘development’; lower SHI values equate to greater pressures on land use for housing, farming, and industry, among others, and all of these can be seen by at least some people as positive and thus improve their sense of happiness. This paper makes suggestions for future research in this important nexus for sustainability of environment, governance, and happiness.