International links between energy use and well-being

Project Summary
The Living Well Within Limits (LiLi) project is an ambitious interdisciplinary programme, addressing crucial but understudied questions: What are the biophysical resources, more specifically energy, required to achieve human well-being? What influence do social and technical provisioning systems have on the levels of resource use associated with well-being? The LiLi project’s ambitious aim is to construct the conceptual and methodological framework upon which this type of research can be carried forward, and to apply it using both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse and model the energy requirements of well-being. The LiLi project is based on an innovative framework, integrating biophysical resource use, the social and physical provisioning systems which draw up on these resources as inputs, and the social outcomes which depend upon them.

Summary of the PhD project
This PhD project within LiLi will principally pursue quantitative analysis on the international level. In each case, the analysis should focus on explaining the role of provisioning systems in explaining variations and trends in the “environmental efficiency of well-being”.

The PhD project will take the nation-state as its unit of analysis, conducting top-down international analysis over several decades (highest geographic and temporal coverage). The project will investigate differences in the resource endowments of countries, their level of infrastructure build-up, economic and technological capabilities, governance characteristics, and social and cultural factors. The applicant should therefore be capable of working with large international datasets, and should be interested in international development pathways and political economy.