Institutional Change and Sustainable Development

The study field of institutions and institutionalism is quite complex, encompassing theories, concepts, and tools that can be applied in various ways related to sustainable development. At the same time, sustainable development is not uniquely defined and can imply a range of policy, normative, or resource use issues at various scales. Therefore, institutions and their change over time can be analyzed with regard to specific topics on sustainable development such as institutional reforms, learning, institutional interplay, and appropriate designs. Often, institutional designs and institutional change are useful approaches for investigating unsustainability in economic development (Opschoor 1996). This happens when institutions are understood as a structuring element of human–nature relationships, and institutional change is used to redirect institutional failures during the development process. Here, the institutional failures and rigidity explain why one-sided development processes can cause environmental degradation and unsustainable outcomes. However, the terms and metaphors to explain sustainability failures or successes depend largely on the type of institutionalist theory used for the analysis.