Sustainability and Institutional Change

Dear Colleagues,

The idea of sustainability is about to transform the institutions of societies, slowly but significantly. Often, the adjustment seems just rhetoric, being little more than adding an adjective to an established policy or business practice; increasingly however, it involves a considerable modification in the set of rules, for instance with respect to policy making procedures, property rights in natural resources or the sourcing decisions of business. As the concept of sustainability can be applied to almost all human activities, it has the potential to affect the “rules of the game” at very different levels and spatial scales, ranging from international policy, to nation states and local communities as well as from individuals to households and companies. Thus, the idea, vision or meta-rule of sustainability triggers complex top-down and bottom-up, intended and spontaneous processes of institutional changes whose dynamics and consequences are still poorly understood. This special issue of Sustainability therefore seeks answers to the following questions: How has sustainability been institutionalized at different levels and spatial scales of societies? Is sustainability about to become a social norm, an ethical imperative, a policy and legal principle, or a standard in business and contracting? Have new governance structures been created to support its implementation? What kind of experiences, success and failures, have been gained? What were factors that supported or hampered change? Have institutional changes aiming at sustainability achieved their objectives? Have they had unintended or even adverse side effects? What lessons are to be learnt? We invite scholars mainly from the different social science disciplines to contribute to this special issue. We request for rigours theoretical reasoning and sound empirical analysis based on or related to the theory of institutional change as developed by Douglass C. North, Oliver E. Williamson, Elinor Ostrom and others. We welcome review papers, conceptual and theoretical contributions, and foremost original research papers on the subject.

Dr. Volker Beckmann
Guest Editor

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