Multiple satisfier pathways to human well-being and their environmental footprints

Abstract: Economic growth remains the dominant metric of progress, yet it obscures non-market foundations of prosperity such as ecosystem integrity and social cohesion. We develop a global typology of sustainable development paths by integrating two decades of Social Progress Index indicators with Decent Living Standards satisfiers and consumption-based environmental footprints. Using hierarchical time-series clustering across 173 countries from 2000-2020, we identify distinct trajectory clusters connecting social outcomes, material provisioning, and resource use. 

Countries achieve comparable well-being through multiple routes, but resource efficiency and environmental pressures differ widely within and across clusters. Historical institutional legacies account for much of the divergence in social and governance outcomes, whereas access to services and infrastructure reflects more recent policy and investment choices. 

Linking trajectories to environmental footprints reveals where growth delivers sustainable well-being and where structural transformation is needed to stay within planetary limits, operationalizing a beyond-GDP agenda for peer benchmarking and policy targeting. 

Significance Statement: Despite decades of calls to move beyond GDP, no empirical framework links human well-being trajectories to both the material satisfiers that enable them and the environmental footprints they produce at global scale. We fill this gap by clustering 173 countries over two decades, showing that comparable well-being is achieved through multiple provisioning routes with widely varying resource intensity. Historical colonial legacies predict which path a country follows, while panel models reveal that no development cluster has achieved absolute decoupling of growth from environmental pressure. These findings provide an empirically grounded, policy-actionable alternative to GDP-based country rankings for sustainable development.