The Wheel of Work and the Sustainable Livelihoods Index (SL-I)

Abstract

The concept of a sustainable livelihood affords protection from crises and protects people, including future generations. Conceptually, this paper serves as a study protocol that extends the premises of decent work to include and integrate criteria that benefit people, planet, and prosperity. Existing measures of sustainability principally serve organisations and governments, not individual workers who are increasingly looking for ‘just transitions’ into sustainable livelihoods. Incorporating extant measurement standards from systems theory, vocational psychology, psychometrics, labour and management studies, we con ceptualise a classification of livelihoods, criteria for their sustainability, forming a study protocol for indexing these livelihoods, a set of theory-based propositions, and a pilot test of this context-sensitive model.