In this paper, I explore the role of national sustainability institutions in decision-making, focussing on the case of Germany. By sustainability institutions, I understand the manifold formal political bodies created specifically with the purpose of promoting sustainability in politics. They may comprise councils, committees, commissions or ombudspersons for sustainability, for sustainable development, the SDGs, for the future or for future generations. Governments around the world established such specialised political bodies, often in response to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 or the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. Despite the prevalence of such institutions around the world, their actual impact remains obscure.
Against this background, my research question is: Do sustainability institutions influence political decision-making, and if so, how? In this paper, I examine the role of four sustainability institutions at the federal political level in Germany: the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Sustainable Development in the German Bundestag, the State Secretary Committee for Sustainable Development, the German Council for Sustainable Development, and the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU).
Methodologically, the case study is based on 29 semi-structured interviews conducted mostly in 2023, mainly with members and former members of the sustainability institutions as well as with experts in the field of sustainability governance in Germany. I apply and adapt an analytical framework developed in previous conceptual work. In my analysis, I carve out these bodies’ different designs and impact pathways to influence decision-making and shed light on the complementarity and interplay between them.
This empirical study increases our understanding of the potentials, limits as well as unintended side effects of specialized political sustainability institutions as building blocks of comprehensive sustainability states.
