What Is Rural Well‐Being and How Is It Measured? An Attempt to Order Chaos*

Abstract

While a substantial body of literature has been built on rural well‐being, due to the great heterogeneity of rural territories, the literature is highly fragmented, even contradictory. Moreover, no systematic review of the entire domain exists to guide rural decision‐makers. Debated conceptualization, contradicting results, and pressing policy requirements make it timely to deliver a systematized state‐of‐the‐art on rural well‐being to anchor public policies in the rural development domain. By systematically reviewing the scholarly literature on rural well‐being and all documents developed by government and private entities that academia highlighted as relevant to this subject, the study provides a bibliometric and thematic analysis of the domain without a time limit. Thirty‐three rural well‐being dimensions and over 9,000 indicators within these dimensions have been identified, their interconnections established and their relevance to international development goals highlighted. The study presents the structure and content of this indicator database and provides suggestions for rural researchers and policymakers on how to use it to build their own well‐being framework. It also provides an overview of each rural well‐being dimension by discussing the key theories, the main inconsistencies, the most relevant studies and authors, the fundamental measurement frameworks, and the indicators used.