The Well Being Transition

The purpose of this volume, bringing together key actors of the well-being community, including scholars and policy-makers, is to advance the understanding and undertaking of the well-being transition away from growth and toward resilience and sustainability, at a time when this progress has become a vital necessity. A decade after the publication of the Stiglitz Report (2009), alternative visions to GDP and growth, that flourished in the 1970s, have re-emerged from all corners of the world, at all levels of governance. Yet, GDP and growth remain very much dominant in defining public policies, influencing businesses and shaping imaginaries. This book moves forward on two urgent tasks that stand before us in order to make progress in the well-being transition: first, connecting well-being to sustainability in a consistent framework highlighting their complementarity, using health as a pivot; second, operationalizing well-being indicators, i.e. integrating them into policy at all levels of governance.

Life transitions differ concerning the intensity of the change and the intensity of the child’s reaction to that change. For most children, the first and most significant transition is from the family home to an institution of early care and education, which includes preschool. These transitions can also include children's passage from kindergarten to elementary school. However, the intensity of the child's reaction is related to the size of the change that is happening and also to who or what is involved in that change and the importance a child attributes to that someone or something. Supporting Children’s Well-Being During Early Childhood Transition to School is an essential scholarly publication that examines evidence-based practices and approaches that fully support a child’s well-being during transition periods in early childhood. It serves as a resource to rethink contemporary transition theoretical models, research studies, and applied practices. Featuring a wide range of topics such as emotional competency, language learners, and professional development, this book is ideal for academicians, psychologists, early childhood educators, daycare centers, curriculum designers, policymakers, researchers, education professionals, and students.

Article by Alan Gray annotated separately.

Which open spaces and combinations of green-blue infrastructure provide optimum wellbeing benefits? How we do ensure these benefits are available to all? Can we reduce health and well-being inequalities through sensible design? The volume focuses on specific studies in urban design, environmental psychology and public health combining ‘green’ spaces with ‘green-blue’ infrastructures, active mobility and facilities, showing a series of criteria necessary to ensure that ‘green-blue’ space can work optimally. The book is divided in two parts: Part one goes on to demonstrate how design along waterfronts can contribute to support the well-being of people and encourage urban quality. Part two identifies design concepts for health and well-being in urban spaces.

This book examines the factors affecting the health and wellbeing of young people as they transition to adulthood under the shadow of migration control. Drawing on unique longitudinal data, it illuminates how they conceptualize wellbeing for themselves and others in contexts of prolonged and politically induced uncertainty. The authors offer an in-depth analysis of the experiences of over one hundred unaccompanied young migrants, primarily from Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea. They show the lengths these young people will go to in pursuit of safety, security and the futures they aspire to. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book champions a new political economy analysis of wellbeing in the context of migration and demonstrates the urgent need for policy reform.

This book provides insight into how the Canadian health care system is financed and organized, how it has evolved over time, and how well it performs relative to peer countries.

Resources, checklists, instructions, and training materials for assessing student well-being. The transition to middle school is often fraught with emotional, social, and academic challenges for students. Often, teachers don't have the proper resources to identify students for whom this transition is becoming a problem. In this book, Ann Vander Stoep and Kelly Thompson provide teachers, counselors, and administrators with a complete package for implementing the "Emotional Health Checkup": a program designed to identify and help middle school students who are in need of additional emotional support. Readers will learn how to detect if a student's stress has shifted from a manageable level to an unhealthy "distress" level. They will then learn how to decide if the Emotional Health Checkup is a good fit for their school and how to get the school on board to implement the program. The book is an A-to-Z guide on how to implement the Emotional Health Checkup once the need and commitment have been confirmed. Information includes: how to engage parents and guardians in the process, carry out the logistics of classroom screening day, and develop individualized student support plans. Complete orientation and training manuals are provided.

Stimulating growth through adjusting macroeconomic conditions remains the principal policy responses to pressing problems of unemployment, poverty and environmental degradation. However, are the current policy approaches capable of tackling these problems by generating win-win solutions or are they the root causes of these problems? The current growth trajectory has neither lead to a reduction of our overall resource use – as we use resources and energy more efficiently we consume more – nor create the conditions for employment and well-being. Increasingly, there is the realization that it is necessary to make substantial interventions into our national economies and create better framework conditions and incentive systems in order to more widely and rapidly develop and disseminate workable, innovative solutions for realizing sustainable development. This is the task of politics, and the concrete design of the measures must be built upon a broad public debate and shared long-term visions. The authors of this book intend to trigger a dialogue among stakeholders about how we can shape this transformation process towards sustainability. Following a detailed presentation of the key arguments for reconsidering the necessary conditions for sustainable economies, an international cast of commentators from politics, administration, civil society, business and science engage with the central question: is there an alternative trajectory for Western economies that sustains wellbeing whilst confronting ecological and social breakdown?