Special Issue "Sustainability and Institutional Change"

Guest Editor
Dr. Volker Beckmann
Faculty of Law and Economics & Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University Greifswald, Grimmer Str. 88, 17487 Greifswald, Germany
Website: http://www.rsf.uni-greifswald.de/beckmann/personen/lehrstuhlvertretung.html
E-Mail: volker.beckmann@uni-greifswald.de
Phone: +49 3834 86 4122
Fax: +49 3834 86 4107
Interests: institutional change; institutional economics; environmental and resource economics; governance of natural resources; agricultural and land economics; conservation; technology adoption; sustainable land management

Dear Colleagues,

The idea of sustainability is about to transform the institutions of societies, slowly but significantly. Often, the adjustment seems just rhetoric, being little more than adding an adjective to an established policy or business practice; increasingly however, it involves a considerable modification in the set of rules, for instance with respect to policy making procedures, property rights in natural resources or the sourcing decisions of business. As the concept of sustainability can be applied to almost all human activities, it has the potential to affect the “rules of the game” at very different levels and spatial scales, ranging from international policy, to nation states and local communities as well as from individuals to households and companies. Thus, the idea, vision or meta-rule of sustainability triggers complex top-down and bottom-up, intended and spontaneous processes of institutional changes whose dynamics and consequences are still poorly understood. This special issue of Sustainability therefore seeks answers to the following questions: How has sustainability been institutionalized at different levels and spatial scales of societies? Is sustainability about to become a social norm, an ethical imperative, a policy and legal principle, or a standard in business and contracting? Have new governance structures been created to support its implementation? What kind of experiences, success and failures, have been gained? What were factors that supported or hampered change? Have institutional changes aiming at sustainability achieved their objectives? Have they had unintended or even adverse side effects? What lessons are to be learnt? We invite scholars mainly from the different social science disciplines to contribute to this special issue. We request for rigours theoretical reasoning and sound empirical analysis based on or related to the theory of institutional change as developed by Douglass C. North, Oliver E. Williamson, Elinor Ostrom and others. We welcome review papers, conceptual and theoretical contributions, and foremost original research papers on the subject.

Dr. Volker Beckmann
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 800 CHF (Swiss Francs).

• sustainability
• sustainable development
• institutional change
• new Institutionalism
• institutional Economics
• ethics and social norms
• ideology
• public policy
• property rights and law
• governance structures
• business and contracting
• consumer behaviour
• entrepreneurship