The Institutional Foundations of Sustainability: What Can We (Not) Learn from Positive Political Economy?

This article offers a critical synthesis of the positive political economy literature on political institutions from the perspective of sustainability. We consider a socio-economic system sustainable if it allows humans to live lives they deem meaningful and is capable of renewing itself over extended periods of time. Institutions that maintain order, reduce conflict, and allow collective decisions to be made lay the foundation for economic development. However, such development is often unsustainable in the long run without levels of cooperation and foresight that today’s political institutions usually do not achieve. Sustainability requires policies that do not corrode natural capital over centuries and millennia, governance across multiple scales of decision-making, and strategies to deal with exceptionally high levels of complexity. The core of our argument is that the political institutions of the state deemed successful for promoting order and growth are too competitive to meet these particular challenges on their own. We call for political economists’ attention to complementary institutional arrangements that can address these challenges. Conversely, we find that the sustainability literature is insufficiently grounded in the positive political economy theory of the state. We therefore offer suggestions for how these two fields may better heed one another.