هماهنگی، چالش ها، و نوآوری در 19 استراتژی توسعه پایدار ملی

In this article, we study 19 developing and developed countries to identify key challenges, approaches, and innovations in strategic and coordinated action for sustainable development at the national level. We are interested in the institutional fabric of implementing sustainable development. What are governments actually doing to organize the processes required for this? What are the institutional innovations in this regard and what kind of typologies can be identified? Despite some true progress made, our findings indicate that countries are still at the early stages of learning toward effective action for sustainable development. This applies both to developing and developed countries. Key unsolved challenges include (a) coordination with the national budget, (b) coordination with sub-national level sustainable development strategies, and (c) coordination with other national-level strategy processes.

For over a decade now, the United Nations has been asking countries to pursue strategic and coordinated action for sustainable development through the creation of national sustainable development strategies (NSDS, see for an overview UN DSD, 2004). Whereas the concept of sustainable development has established itself successfully as a central guiding principle for many different political institutions at all levels of public and corporate decision making, its translation into concrete action proves to be a much more difficult challenge (Lafferty, 2004, Lafferty and Meadowcraft, 2000 and OECD, 2002). Five years after the Earth Summit in 1992, a Special Session of the United Nations came to a disappointing progress review: single success stories were outweighed by the overall failure of countries to give appropriate political weight to meaningful implementation (Brown, 1997). This review led governments to agree on the target of having a NSDS introduced by 2002, the year of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg. Being pushed by the OECD (OECD-DAC, 2001) and the United Nations (UN International Forum on National Strategies for Sustainable Development, 2001), nearly all countries intensified efforts and subsequently adopted new or revised NSDS shortly before or after the WSSD (Jörgens, 2004). A meaningful translation of the rather broad paradigm of sustainable development into concrete action encounters many problems. International agencies (OECD, 2002, OECD-DAC, 2001 and UN DESA, 2002) as well as academic scholars (Dalal-Clayton and Bass, 2002, Jänicke and Jörgens, 2000 and Martinuzzi and Steurer, 2003) have developed a number of criteria of good practice for NSDS. They have been broadly reflected and repeatedly discussed in recent years. The list of criteria comprises the development of long-term visions and their linkage to short-term action, institutions for horizontal and vertical coordination, broad participation by societal stakeholders, and a constant monitoring of action. It is, however, also a well-known fact that these approaches clash with the core functioning principles of the modern government, like the division of sectoral responsibilities, path-dependencies of policy development, or the mode of negative coordination. Governmental discretion for long-term action is further constrained by the shortness of election and budget cycles. In response to these clashes, strategies for sustainable development were often introduced as a tool to initiate change by learning and continuous adaptation rather than by challenging the existing institutions and power structures. Such an approach has been characterized as a step-by-step procedure: “developing an underlying vision through consensual, effective, and iterative process; and going on to set objectives, identify the means of achieving them, and then monitor the achievement as a guide to the next round of this learning process.” (Dalal-Clayton & Bass, 2002). After more than a decade of strategic and coordinated action for sustainable development in many countries it is time to draw a balance: what are the achievements so far? How has the institutional landscape developed, both in developing and developed countries? How far are countries re-organizing their institutional structures to comply with the needs of integrated and long-term decision making, learning, and adaptation? Do remarkable differences between developing and developed countries continue to exist or do trends converge? During the last few years, a number of studies have assessed progress at the national level. Recently, attention has been shifted from content toward procedural and institutional aspects (Dalal-Clayton and Bass, 2002 and Steurer and Martinuzzi, 2005). This article contributes to this growing body of knowledge by comparing challenges, approaches, and innovations in strategic and coordinated action in 19 developing and developed countries. Building on current thinking we develop a simple model that embraces important aspects of strategy management such as leadership, planning, implementation, monitoring, coordination, and participation. Our findings for 19 countries are featured to create a pragmatic toolbox to assist governmental managers and policy makers.1 This article proceeds as follows: In Section 2, we will discuss our analytical framework and applied research methods. In Section 3, we present empirical findings, organized around the tenets of strategic management and with a special focus on coordination challenges. For each of the aspects of strategic management, the challenges, and findings will be described briefly at first, followed by a short highlighting of the best-practice examples. Section 6 concludes our research findings, focuses on possible trends and discusses the question whether the current reforms in institutional structure of governments in both developing and developed countries are suited well enough for the shifts that the implementation of a strategic sustainability approach of continuous adaptation and learning, implies.2

Research for the 19 countries illustrated that many innovative approaches and tools have been developed and applied over the past decade, both pre- and post-WSSD. The diversity of institutions and tools for the implementation of sustainable development has been constantly increasing. Compared with the starting point more than a decade ago, the institutional landscape for sustainable development has grown richer in its diversity. There are two interesting trends: the issue is moving gradually into the center of the government—nearly half of our countries studied have institutionalized central coordination bodies, mostly located at the Prime Minister’s or President’s Office. And broad participation and stakeholder consultation have become governmental standard procedures. The issue of convergence or divergence of institutional development is a key discussion at the moment. Naturally, it is assumed quite often that there are striking differences between developing and developed countries with regard to the strategic approach and capacities to sustainability. While this might be true for content issues, or for the implementation, our comparison of institutions and procedures in 19 developing and developed countries reveals a great degree of convergence regarding the basic institutional approaches to leadership, planning, implementation, monitoring, coordination, and participation. In our country sample, many countries are experimenting with the same basic institutional innovations. Countries that seek institutional or instrumental responses to certain problems can rely upon a comprehensive sample of other countries experience. This is an indicator that the information exchange via international forums and networks, like the annual meetings of the Commission on Sustainable Development, basically function, despite problems. A similar point can be made for the implementation issue. The need for capacity building refers to developing and developed countries alike. Albeit, of course, on quite different levels we find that there rarely is sufficient political commitment in developing and developed countries. Quite often the sustainable development strategy does not follow an integrated framework of goals, objectives, and measures. New agencies, bodies, or committees are founded but often do not have appropriate staffing, resources, and power. Central budgets remain largely untouched. Many of the strategies serve partly as a means of post-rationalizing the mix of policy initiatives that have already been created from other existing political and institutional processes. However, this is not to say that major differences do not continue to exist, both regarding the institutional context and content. A dominant approach has not appeared yet, also not from a regional perspective. There is obviously room for mutual learning between countries regarding the institutionalization of processes for strategic and coordinated action on sustainability. Additionally, what lessons can be drawn for future policy support by international organizations? First, a national strategy is not simply the solution per se. It needs more than a strategy document and a multi-stakeholder process organized around it to actually change policies for sustainable development. Strategic behavior as demanded by the public policy literature finds its restriction in the politics of bureaucratic interest negotiation. Success depends on a country’s ability to identify leverage points for influencing SD, to identify emerging issues, and to continuously learn and adapt to changes. Getting the process right is critically important over the medium to long term. Prerequisites are, however, stronger political commitment and better coordination. Strategic action for SD will remain at the periphery of the government as long as it is not connected to visible incentives and sanctions that reward action or punish non-action. Strategy processes need better ownership, commitment, and a better common understanding among all levels of the government. The core question is where is this supposed to come from? One approach to catalyze better ownership within government is through strengthening central coordination, probably best through allocating relevant competencies at the Prime Ministers or Presidents Office. This has to go hand in hand with a more systematic use of integrated assessments and indicators. Strategies need, however, also to be manageable. Efforts should be directed at the most urgent problems, and public participation processes should be directly tailored to identify them. Increasing transparency and accountability through reporting obligations, external auditing, and tailored consultation can win new allies. Strong leverage can be reached through strengthening of coordination with the budget, that is, through spending reviews and annual green budgeting reports, and a strengthening of coordination among all levels of government. The institutional fabric—despite all individual progress—remains rather thin from an overall perspective. This confirms the premises from the public policy literature that learning leads in most cases only to changes in minor aspects of policies. A comparison with the rich institutional landscape that we find for economic development and cooperation, that is, that is much richer in terms of actors, rules, sanctions, inventories set of activities, and political leverage, demonstrates best the magnitude of the challenge that countries world-wide are still facing in establishing a sound institutional landscape for Sustainable Development.