ABSTRACT
Throughout history, there has been much discussion about what it means to be well or unwell (Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2008; Mathews and Izquierdo, 2009), how these understandings of wellness relate to life experiences (Christopher, 1999), and continued debate about how personal well-being can be measured (Linley et al., 2009). Recently there has been a resurgence of political interest in personal well-being, symbolised in the UK by a request from the Prime Minister for an Office of National Statistics review of well-being measures. Such interest has been fuelled by the recognition that until the recent economic recession, the UK, like much of the Western world, experienced a prolonged period of economic growth and relative stability, which did not result in measurable improvements in personal well-being (Andreou, 2010). As Ryan and Deci (2001) have argued, such material wealth created a ‘culture of surplus’ through which the pursuit of improved personal well-being has involved ever greater consumption of material goods, leaving in its wake a legacy of environmental problems. Despite vociferous calls for greater conceptualisation of the relationship between pro-environmental behaviour and personal well-being, this area of research remains neglected. This chapter introduces a novel unifying framework to understand the relationship between forms of pro-environmental behaviour and types of personal well-being using the concept of a ‘double dividend’.
