By Michael Rose
From both global and national-level perspectives, we are witnessing the widespread failure of the ‘sustainable state’ (Bornemann et al. 2025) or ‘sustainability state’ (Rose 2025) and their aspirations for a governed sustainability transformation. When we look at the 2030 Agenda with its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), globally, none of the goals is even close to being on track to be achieved by 2030, and the governance impact of the SDGs is largely confined to the discursive level (Sachs et al. 2026; Biermann et al. 2022). Similarly, the Paris Agreement, and systemic sustainability indicators such as planetary and social boundaries more broadly, are mostly off track (Fanning & Raworth 2025). While international green growth programs seem to fail, niche concepts such as degrowth economies are still being discussed in small activist circles but cannot be expected to be willingly and successfully implemented in any state in the foreseeable future.
Against the background of the polycrisis, the promises of a sustainability transformation are currently shattering against the ‘glass ceiling of transformation’ (Hausknost 2020), in full view of everyone. But instead of doubling down on our joint efforts to break through this glass ceiling, we are seeking exclusionary shelter from the splinters in our nation-states or, in the case of global tech elites, in libertarian visions up in space and private luxury bunkers underground.
Caught Between Greenlash, Resilience and Transformation
At least discursively, resilience is taking precedence over transformation. In light of these developments, the sustainable state is on the defensive, struggling to preserve the little that has been achieved, and falling short of any feasible and broadly appealing democratic vision of a viable, inclusive sustainable future. Its claim to global and intergenerational justice has lost both credibility and appeal and is in serious jeopardy.
Acknowledging these realities does not mean that we should give up on the sustainable state as scientists or citizens, though. Possible alternatives, such as a shift away from multi-level sustainability governance with and beyond the state toward populist, nationalist, authoritarian, or even decentralized tribalist and anarchist approaches, may help us ignore the increasingly severe global sustainability issues in the short term, but seem even less likely to mitigate them in the long term.
For better or worse, we need to take both a resilience and a transformation perspective: working against the short-sighted ‘greenlash’ in governance, policy, politics and society, while developing pragmatic and integrative transformation pathways to a less unsustainable future.
The Special Issue
I originally wrote this text (above) a couple of months ago when I was drafting a contribution to the ‘future perspectives’ section of our editorial for the Special Issue “Toward the Sustainable State: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Sustainability-oriented State Transformations,” edited by Basil Bornemann, Marius Christen, Francesco Laruffa and me. I guess I must have been in a somewhat dark mood. As a benefit of co-authorship, our ‘future perspectives’ now paint a more nuanced picture and offer suggestions for ways forward. But read for yourselves (Bornemann et al. 2026)!
In our editorial, we summarise and critically reflect on the role of the state in sustainability transformations. Is, can, should, and will there be a Green Leviathan? To explore these questions, we review and comment on the ambiguous relationship between the (democratic) state, the polycrisis and sustainability, develop the heuristic of the ‘sustainable state’, and engage with the contributions to the Special Issue. We start with a short discussion of how the current entangled crises seem to strengthen (expectations of) the role of the state. Next, we briefly review political developments and academic discourses of the last 60 years with regard to environmental and sustainability governance with and beyond the state. We focus on more recent developments and narratives that emphasise the state both as the (perhaps only) actor capable of steering systemic sustainability transformations and as a key agent and structure of persistent unsustainability.
Looking forward, we build the heuristic of the ‘sustainable state’ to structure the state-centred sustainability discourse. We distinguish between the political-ideological, policy, institutional, and structural level of the sustainable state, as well as three complementary approaches of analysis: descriptive-analytical, critical-analytical, and prescriptive. While refraining from an agreed definition, we consider the sustainable (or sustainability) state to move beyond the earlier concept of the environmental state and to engage the full normative and functional implications of the idea of sustainability, integrating ecological concerns with social justice and long-term orientations, and recognizing the need for transformative rather than merely managerial change.
After presenting the articles of our Special Issue, we identify and review cross-cutting issues, i.e., the relationship of the sustainable state to economic growth, democracy, and crisis. We conclude by setting out future perspectives, reflecting on current and future political, social, and technical developments, in particular the recent ‘greenlash’ and possible future collapses, and what it means for the prospects of the sustainable state, our roles as researchers, the sustainability transformation more broadly, and future research.
The Special Issue offers rich empirical, conceptual and critical perspectives on the issues raised above and has just been published open access in Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy. Authors include, next to us as editors and many others, Doris Fuchs, Marit Hammond, Max Koch and Amanda Machin.
Link to the complete Special Issue: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/tsus20/collections/towards-the-sustainable-state
References
Biermann, F., T. Hickmann, C. Sénit, M. Beisheim, S. Bernstein, P. Chasek, L. Grob, et al. 2022. “Scientific Evidence on the Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals.” Nature Sustainability 5 (9): 795–800. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00909-5
Bornemann, B., M. Christen, and P. Burger. 2025. “The Sustainable State: A Meta-Governance Framework.” Environmental Politics 34 (2): 344–366. https://doi.org10.1080/09644016.2024.2369015
Bornemann, B., M. Christen, F. Laruffa, and M. Rose, M. 2026. “Toward the Sustainable State in Times of Crisis?” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 22 (1): 2740549. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2026.2740549
Fanning, A., and K. Raworth. 2025. “Doughnut of Social and Planetary Boundaries Monitors a World out of Balance.” Nature 646 (8083): 47–56. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09385-1
Hausknost, D. 2020. “The Environmental State and the Glass Ceiling of Transformation.” Environmental Politics 29 (1): 17–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1680062
Rose, M. 2025. “From the Environmental State to the Sustainability State? Conceptualization, Indicators, and Examples.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 21 (1): 2463188. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2025.2463188
Sachs, J., G. Lafortune, G. Fuller, and G. Iablonovski. 2026. Implementing Sustainable Development: 2030 and Beyond. Sustainable Development Report 2026. Dublin: Dublin University Press. https://doi.org/10.82163/225
