Sustainability Governance Via Institutional Design? Conceptualizing National Sustainability Institutions

Global agendas like the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development hinge on ambitious action at the national political level. National political processes are thus key to understand what shapes countries’ sustainability policies and performances. In this context, the role of formal institutions that were deliberately set up to promote sustainability in political decision-making – installed by governments around the world following the Rio Summit and the Agenda 21 in 1992 – is expected to be decisive. In this study, we consider institutions in the sense of political bodies that are formally part of the national polity: councils, commissions, ombudspersons or civic assemblies for sustainability. While most countries have established at least one of these specialised political bodies, there is surprisingly little (comparative) research on their characteristics and their impact on sustainability governance and performance, lacking in particular studies on the Global South. The overarching motivation to study sustainability institutions is to assess whether they indeed effectively promote sustainability in ongoing politics. In this paper, we prepare the conceptual grounds for assessing and comparing sustainability institutions, asking: How are national sustainability institutions designed and what are their relevant characteristics for influencing national sustainability governance and performance? We examine sustainability institutions along three dimensions. a) On the substantial dimension, we analyse how institutions are committed to sustainable development in their mandates. We consider all specialized bodies as sustainability institutions that are explicitly created to deal with either all three “dimensions” of sustainability (ecological, social, economic), in an integrated way, and/or future generations (long-term perspective and intergenerational justice) and/or the global dimension of sustainability (global common goods and intra-generational justice). b) On the structural dimension, we carve out the institutions’ design features (legal basis, their links to the political system, and the term of their mandate); the actors involved (type of members and participation); and political instruments (from a suspensive veto right against draft legislation to unbinding recommendations). All these characteristics are expected to shape the influence of sustainability institutions on the political decision-making process to a different extent. c) On a functional dimension, we examine the institutions’ roles in sustainability governance such as policy advice, horizontal and vertical policy coordination and integration; knowledge provision, uptake and integration; provision of long-term temporal scopes; sustainability advocacy and awareness raising; and monitoring. Taken together, this allows us to develop an analytical framework for sustainability institutions as well as hypotheses about possible impact pathways to national sustainability governance and performance. Finally, we cluster different theoretical types of institutions to better deal with the diversity in institutional design, considering, inter alia, the institutions’ formal links to the political power branches (legislative, executive, or judiciary) and membership in the institutions (political office-holders or external actors). Throughout the paper, we draw on empirical examples of sustainability institutions from both the Global North and South to underpin and illustrate our conceptualizations.