Toward the sustainability state? Conceptualizing national sustainability institutions and their impact on policy‐making

Abstract

The achievement of global sustainability and climate objectives rests on their incorporation into policy-making at the level of nation-states. Against this background, governments around the world have created various specialized sustainability institutions-councils, committees, ombudspersons, among others-in order to promote these agendas and their implementation. However, sustainability institutions have remained undertheorized and their impact on policy-making is empirically unclear.In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for sustainability institutions and systematically explore their potential impact on more sustainable policy-making. We define sustainability institutions as public, trans-departmental and permanent national bodies with an integrated understanding of sustainability that considers socioecological well-being, global contexts and a future-orientation. Drawing on literature on sustainability and long-term governance as well as on illustrative case examples, we propose conducive conditions and pathways through which sustainability institutions may influence policy-making. As conducive, we assume sustainability institutions' embodiment of sustainability governance principles as well as their authority, a strong legal basis, resources, and autonomy. Further, we outline how sustainability institutions can influence policy-making based on their roles in the public policy process. We conclude that the increasing prevalence of national sustainability institutions indicates an ongoing shift from the environmental state toward a more comprehensive sustainability state. However, sustainability institutions can only be one building block of the sustainability state out of many, and their potential to reorient political decision-making effectively toward the socio-ecological transformation hinges upon individual design features such as their mandate, resources and authority, as well as on the specific governance context.

Institutional Proxy Representatives of Future Generations: A Comparative Analysis of Types and Design Features

“…Moreover, while a proxy need not care for future generations exclusively, it must represent their construed interest at least to the same extent as the sum of possible other constituents' interests, such as current generations, so that in cases of internal conflicts between interests, the (construed) interests of future generations would not be disregarded (Rose, 2018). Sustainability institutions represent a borderline case (Mathis et al, 2023).…”

“…Details, variants, and anchor examples of each design feature are presented in the analytical framework in the Supplementary File (see SM Table 1). While the selection of design features is partly informed by literature (Mathis et al, 2023;Rose, 2018;Rose & Hoffmann, 2020), I include only design features that have at least one expression in real-world proxies to avoid unrealistic expectations of proxy designs.…”

Policy integration through the Sustainable Development Goals? The case of the German Federal Government

“…Institutions are rules and norms that create necessities, opportunities, and constraints for actors to act and interact. Institutions that contribute to integration offer meeting spaces between horizontally, vertically, and sectorally differentiated policy arenas and enable interaction, information exchange, and cooperation between actors, for example, through inter‐ministerial and cross‐level coordination bodies or societal dialog processes (Stafford‐Smith et al, 2017; Tosun & Leininger, 2017: Mathis et al, 2022).…”