Sustainable Governance

Abstract

In a time of rapid change, the capability of social systems to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences along with resources increasingly becomes a criterion for competitive survival. For organizations of all kinds, continuous renewal through the reconciliation of future challenges and opportunities, the evaluation of alternative scenarios, and decision-making and implementation, has become a necessity in allowing for their sustainable development over time. But what conditions must be created for a social system to sustain its ability to implement its purpose? This chapter investigates the concept of sustainability in order to address this question. What is sustainability, and how is the concept being applied? And how does it relate to the governance of social systems? A closer look at these questions reveals that it is the governance of a social system that determines to what extent purposes can be implemented. Following a generic theory of governance and building on first principles, one may conceptualize the structural capacity of a social system to implement and maintain its aims, and begin to show how established conditions either promote or hamper a social system in implementing its purposes and maintaining its existence.