Comparing the Arrangements of Governance and Sustainable Development in OECD Countries: Coupled or Decoupled?

Abstract

This study attempts to analyze to what extent governance and sustainable development (SD) empirically appear compatible in the thirtyfive OECD countries through the fuzzy-set ideal type analysis, and identify which ideal types appear coupled or decoupled, and then reveal which countries belong to the coupled types or to the decoupled types. In short, twenty-two countries (including Sweden (fuzzy score, 0.953), Denmark (0.920), Finland (0.914), Norway (0.911) in Type 1 (G*S, ‘strong G-S coupled countries’); and Turkey (0.906), Greece (0.833), Mexico (0.828) in Type 4 (g*s, ‘lite g-s coupled countries’) are in line with the accepted conventions regarding the compatible relationship between governance and SD. On the other hand, the rest of thirteen countries (including USA (fuzzy score, 0.815), Luxembourg (0.721), Australia (0.660) in Type 2 (G*s, ‘G-s decoupled countries’); and Slovenia (0.728), France (0.644), Czech Rep. (0.625) in Type 3 (g*S, ‘g-S decoupled countries’) may indicate that the relationship of governance and SD is in fact experiencing tensions in the national contexts. These findings are characterized by the substance (of SD) and procedure (of governance) divide. Considering the results, this study focuses on the idea of reflexivity or reflexive capacity.