An analysis of community well-being in biocultural landscapes: are we living well?

This chapter draws conclusions from an analysis of the importance of well-being assessment from a community perspective, which is different from the sum of individual assessments. One of the reasons is that biocultural relationships in the landscape express themselves at the community level and this expression of shared and often cultural experience can be different from its expression at the individual level. External support to endogenous processes in communities includes the capacity of support organizations to understand and facilitate community-level assessments. Several stages for such support can be identified in the cases presented in this book. A plea is made to integrate interior dimensions, such as the sociological, psychological, religious and behavioural, in community well-being assessments. For policies to succeed, they have to take community realities – social, spiritual, and material – into account.