politics

Governing the Sustainability Transformation is Failing. What Now?

~ Michael Rose ~ Leave a comment

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)!

Image: The Green Leviathan.

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

ERC Advanced Grant GAPS – Global Assessment of Public Participation in Sustainability Governance: Performance, Justice and Democracy

~ Jens Newig ~ Leave a comment

The European Research Council (ERC) will fund a five-year Advanced Grant project on the role of public participation in sustainability governance in all world regions. We are now recruiting the full team: one postdoctoral and four doctoral researchers (see below under ‘Open positions’).

Public participation has become a standard part of sustainability governance worldwide – from citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting to stakeholder consultations, and across democratic and non-democratic systems alike. Participatory decision-making is expected to improve environmental decisions, strengthen democratic legitimacy, and give marginalised groups a voice. However, we lack sound knowledge on whether participation actually delivers on these goals. The evidence is scattered across thousands of individual case studies in different languages, disciplines and outlets, each usually limited to one format, sector or region.

Public participation is now a global phenomenon – well beyond Western democracies where most of it was first studied and theorised. But we do not know whether models developed there travel – or whether political regime, level of development and culture fundamentally change how participation ‘works’. Comparative research has so far mostly stopped at single regions or sectors, leaving the cross-regional patterns, and the prevailing North–South and democratic–authoritarian assumptions, largely untested.

What GAPS will do

The project plans to assemble and analyse virtually all documented cases of public participation in sustainability governance for which scholarly publications are available – from all world regions and across the past fifty years, coded into one common framework. The aim is to find patterns on which forms of participation improve sustainability, strengthen democracy and advance justice – and how this varies across political systems, levels of development and cultures.

GAPS will use the case survey method, which our group has applied and tested in 300+ cases of participatory environmental decision-making in Western democracies (EDGE project), and scale it to thousands of case studies worldwide, supported by Large Language Models (LLMs) for coding, benchmarked against human coding.

Simplified Conceptual model, including exemplary items to assess.

To address the global challenge, GAPS will pursue a more nuanced approach than is often taken: Instead of assuming a divide between North and South, democratic and authoritarian, or West and East, GAPS treats human development, regimte type and culture as continuous variables and matches each case to country-level data from available global databases on human development (HDI), liberal democracy (V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index), and cultural orientation (World Values Survey).

The three context dimensions used to place each case. Shading shows human development (HDI) and liberal democracy (V-Dem LDI); diagonal hatching marks cultural orientation from the World Values Survey, self-expression (“Western”) against survival (“Eastern”) values. Map created with Claude.AI.

To allow for causal analysis, we will combine statistical analysis, including path models to uncover mechanism variables and multi-level models to account for the nested case–country structure, with Large-N Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and causal process tracing on selected cases.

The research team, based at Leuphana University Lüneburg, will collaborate closely with Prof. Nicolas W. Jager at TU Berlin.

Open positions

We will be hiring one postdoctoral and four doctoral researchers, all at the Institute of Sustainability Governance (one PhD jointly with TU Berlin at Nicolas Jager’s group). Each PhD addresses one component of the overall research programme; the postdoc leads the methodological and synthesis work and helps coordinate the project. All team members will have strong methodological experience.

Postdoc · 100% · 5 years – Participation in sustainability governance and AI-assisted comparison. Co-leads the AI-assisted case database and quality assurance, supports qualitative and quantitative PhD analyses, leads synthesis and theory-building.

PhD · 75% · 4 years –  Participation and sustainability performance. Whether and how participation produces better environmental decisions, across climate, biodiversity, pollution and resource management.

PhD · 75% · 4 years – Participation, democracy and justice. When participation strengthens democracy and legitimacy, and includes marginalised groups in fairer procedures and outcomes.

PhD · 75% · 4 years – Global patterns of participation in sustainability governance. How political, developmental and cultural contexts shape participatory designs and their effects; carries the country-level data and multi-level analysis.

PhD · 75% · 4 years · with TU Berlin – Participation in environmental impact assessments. Comparing more and less participatory environmental impact assessments worldwide. Co-supervised by Prof. Nicolas W. Jager, working in Berlin and Lüneburg.

All positions start 1 October 2026. The application deadline is 10 August 2026, and interviews are expected to take place on 17–21 August 2026, with all decisions finalised by 28 August 2026. The individual calls on Leuphana’s jobs page specify the profile and required documents for every position. For questions about the project and the positions (but not about individual eligibility), please contact jens.newig@leuphana.de.