Structures and Limits of the Emerging German Sustainability State

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the environmental discourse joined forces with the development discourse, politically facilitating the paradigm of sustainable development. The Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda call upon states to adapt their governance structures and policies to this new paradigm, for instance through integrative national strategies for sustainable development and sustainability councils. Hence, the Rio Process may be understood to be the birthplace of the “sustainability state” - a state that possesses a significant set of formal institutions and practices dedicated to the governance of sustainable development, with specialized administrative and political, regulatory and policy, financial, and knowledge structures that are aimed at shaping political, administrative and societal decision-making towards collectively pursuing sustainable development. However, despite the ambition of the sustainability state to be a “meta governor” (Bornemann et al. 2024), the sustainability state is only institutionally layered on other state functions, such as the welfare state, the fiscal state or the security state. In case of conflict, the state – as a multi-layered, non-unitary political organization – may engage in decisions and actions that ignore – or even go against – the sustainability state to serve competing – and often stronger – functions and interests. The sustainability state is therefore at risk of being decoupled from other state functions served through differing structures, decisions and measures, and therefore of being confined to a sustainability bubble of like-minded actors, instead of succeeding in truly mainstreaming sustainability in political decision-making. Germany can be – and has been – described as an emerging sustainability state. German sustainability governance is formally steered centrally from within the Chancellery. Respective specialized administrative and political structures include national sustainability bodies such as the State Secretaries’ Committee for Sustainable Development to steer and coordinate within Government, the German Sustainable Development Council to advise government and society, the Parliamentary Advisory Council on Sustainable Development within the Bundestag, and the Federation-Länder Experience Exchange Group for Sustainable Development. As for regulatory and policy structures, Germany has a regularly updated National Strategy for Sustainable Development and an obligatory sustainability impact assessment of draft legislation. Specialized financial structures are not yet sufficiently in place, with exceptions of an emission trading system and a public agency specialized on the support of sustainable public procurement. Specialized knowledge structures, however, are mostly in place, e.g., a regularly updated set of sustainability indicators monitoring goals and measures of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development, as well as a scientific advisory council and publicly funded research organizations, think tanks, education and research programs on sustainable development. Applying an analytical framework of structures and indicators of the sustainability state, we extensively map the formal specialized structures of the emerging German Sustainability State based on document analysis. In addition, we shed light on the functions, limits and barriers of these structures in truly shaping political, administrative and societal decision-making, based on elite interviews with policy-makers and experts.