A fairer society means quality of life for all

Author: Professor Wendy M. Purcell, PhD FRSA, Rutgers University, Rutgers Health, School of Public Health, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health & Justice, New Jersey, USA.

The ultimate transformative deliverable of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is the creation of a world that leaves no one behind ^[1]. This unequivocal commitment, across the 193 UN Member States’ signatories to Agenda 2030, is that we work collectively to liberate the potential of every person.

Simply put, this progressive program envisages a world where everyone can enjoy a quality of life. This relates to both extrinsic factors, such as access to clean water and air, nutritious food, health and education, as well as systems-level matters such as peace, justice, and equity and extends it to the livability of place and economic inclusion. While the SDGs capture these issues, quality of life does so in addition to bringing in intrinsic aspects of what makes us human such as joy, self-actualization, and flourishing. In this way, quality of life takes the sustainable development agenda forward for humanity.

UN Habitat, the UN program responsible for urban development, seeks to advance quality of life with the city as the microcosm of progress on global policy agendas such as the SDGs ^[2]. Working across scales from the individual to neighborhood and community levels, quality of life can connect local development with global growth that is sustainable. Working with the Quality of Life Center in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ^[3], UN-Habitat recently convened a group of global scholars as a community of practice. This group was invited to reflect on the concept of quality of life ^{[4, 5]} and to go beyond simple concepts of a ‘good life’ and conceptualize what it truly means for quality of life to be a key driver of human progress. With people drawn from a range of disciplines, from public health, architecture and planning, geography, urban development, design thinking, government studies, engineering, and economics, the group explored quality of life across its axes – extrinsic, systemic, and intrinsic.

Given the ‘polycrisis’ underway across the world, from climate change to conflict, technological and humanitarian disruption, and growing polarization in terms of inequity, adopting a quality of life lens offers the opportunity to prioritize action on those interventions that will bend the arc towards a fairer society. In this way, both the individual and collective needs of people are  placed front and center in shaping local solutions to accelerate progress on the global goals. Such progress is sorely needed given the lack of timely delivery on many of the SDGs with calls for measures to drive implementation ^[6]. Using quality of life as an over-arching principle, supported by local-level measures that enjoy high face validity, offers a construct that is both meaningful and quantifiable. There is something about the simplicity of the pursuit of quality of life that belies its inherent complexity and flexibility. As such, it allows for both general understanding and individual meaning, enabling its adoption as a universal construct that can be tailored to the local needs of people, a truly both-and dialectical concept.

Here, we explore what quality of life brings to our consideration of a fairer society. How might our thinking change, our priorities adapt, and our attention be guided to what really matters in creating a world that takes everyone forward when we adopt quality of life as our lens? What will be see afresh, anew, in a different light? How will quality of life influence our perception, comprehension, and evaluation of sustainable progress? As we reflect on quality of life as both an end in itself and an organizing principle, will it deepen our understanding of what makes for a fairer society in actuality – namely, the lived experience of people?

There is something intuitive about quality of life that the SDGs do not capture to the same degree. Perhaps it is the sense of meaning inherent to a life well-lived, or one that has the potential to be so. Or it might be that we understand that it goes beyond having our basic needs met and tackling the inherent unfairness in systems designed for monocultures. Without knowing it, quality of life seems to capture Maslow’s hierarchy of needs ^[7] and effortlessly move beyond it. Rather than self-actualization being situated as the peak for some, quality of life positions it as a right for all people – the ultimate outcome goal of a fairer society.
 

References

[1] United Nations: Leave No One Behind
[2] UN HABITAT: Quality of Life Initiative - Brochure
[3] Vsion2030 Quality of Life Program
[4] UN-Habitat (2024). Quality of Life in Urban Areas – Position Paper from Academia. March 2024.
[5] UN-Habitat (2024). Valuing What Matters in Urban Areas – A position paper of the Quality of Life initiative. March 2024.
[6] United Nations: World risks big misses across the Sustainable Development Goals unless measures to accelerate implementation are taken, UN warns
[7] Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50 (4), 370-96.