Community risk and well-being: towards a spatially integrated social science within a socio-economic framework

Despite the two concepts, community risk and community well-bein seem to constitute the two sides of the same coin - community (especially, local community) as a place to live - they rarely coincide with each other in empirical analyses. The main thesis of tkis paper is that analyzing them jointly seems to be fruitful, especially in a policy-oriented evaluation research conducted in the context of community development. Community well-being is, by its very nature, an example of the truly interdisciplinary notion. When defined in terms of happiness and subjecive well-being it becomes the focus of predominantly psychometric approach. Sociologist prevail in attempts to interpret it in terms of quality of life and of social indicators. And economists and statisticians are trying to measure nation-wide material and non-material aspects of well-being with intention to incorporate them into a appropriately re-formulated, or extended, system of nacional account. As a part of these conceptualizations (moving "beyond GDP") some approaches are being developed to include the value produced under non-market activities, including the non-profit organizations or third sector (either through utilizing Satelite Accounts methodology or through the labor market research. However, no much attention is given in such frameworks to well-being conceived as an attribute of a local community. The objective of this paper is two-fold. First is to demonstrate the compexity involved in the relationships in which the concept of well-being remains with local risk and local capital, at the analytical level. Second, how this complex pattern of interaction can contribute conceptually and methodologically to the advancement of the process of integrating social science research in the area of the pro-well-being community development. To create and use the new types of university-community relations in this context seems to be the most promising approach for social scientists, and is recommended here as a way worthwhile to follow