Are sustainability institutions future-oriented by design? A global comparison

In this paper, I analyse to what extent national sustainability institutions are future-oriented by their design based on a global data set that is currently under construction. I plan to present preliminary results of a descriptive comparative analysis. By sustainability institutions, I understand the manifold formal political bodies installed specifically with the purpose to promoting sustainability in decision-making. They comprise councils, committees, commissions or ombudspersons for sustainability, for sustainable development, for the future or for future generations. Governments around the world have installed such specialised political bodies, often in response to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 or the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development in 2015 (Maurer 1999; EEAC 2019; Breuer, Leininger, and Tosun 2019; Wurster et al. 2015). Cases in point are the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Sustainable Development in the German Bundestag, the former Commission for Future Generations in Israel, or the National Council for Environment and Sustainable Development in Burkina Faso. Now, I want to know whether sustainability institutions are actually designed in ways that promote an orientation toward long-term issues, i.e. the future, into politics. In order to assess the “future-fitness” of their institutional set-up, I develop a catalogue of criteria that builds on factors identified as sources and drivers of political short-termism such as anthropological and structural biases for the present (MacKenzie 2016; Boston 2017; Caney 2019). Upon reversing and adapting these factors, I create an analytical framework with which I assess the suitability of sustainability institutions’ design for promoting a long-term perspective. Further, I am interested in the distribution of different (explicit or implicit) intervention logics that lie behind the sustainability institutions in the data set. I follow Boston’s list of intervention logics of governance mechanisms for the future that include, first, the constraint of decision-makers, second, the enhancement of long-term analysis, third, advocacy on behalf of future interests, and fourth, enhancement of the government’s capacity to exercise stewardship (Boston 2017, 175). By examining their mandates and functions, I attribute these different intervention logics to sustainability institutions around the globe. In combination of the two steps, this exercise will shed light on the intentions as well as the readiness of national sustainability institutions to contributing to long-term governance. Eventually, such analysis may help estimating and managing expectations towards these institutions’ role in the transformation to sustainability.