Environmental sustainability and Institutional quality - An ambiguous relation
(2010) STVK01 20101Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- Sustainable development is a frequently used concept these days. It is often captured trough three dimensions of economic, social and ecological sustainability. As the importance of institutions has been accentuated within the first two dimensions, it has lately been the object of study within the dimension of environmental sustainability. As environment is often described as a collective good, the problem with maintaining a sustainable environment can be understood as problems of collective action due to the conflict between individual and collective rationality. High-quality institutions are assumed to generate trust, making people cooperate. They could therefore be the reason why societies manage to elude these collective action... (More)
- Sustainable development is a frequently used concept these days. It is often captured trough three dimensions of economic, social and ecological sustainability. As the importance of institutions has been accentuated within the first two dimensions, it has lately been the object of study within the dimension of environmental sustainability. As environment is often described as a collective good, the problem with maintaining a sustainable environment can be understood as problems of collective action due to the conflict between individual and collective rationality. High-quality institutions are assumed to generate trust, making people cooperate. They could therefore be the reason why societies manage to elude these collective action problems. The thesis analyzes if institutional quality affects states´ performance in environmental sustainability, trough a quantitative method. Due to the breadth of the concept environmental sustainability, the analysis is divided into two different sets using two different indexes as dependent variables, Environmental Performance Index and Ecological Footprint.
The result confirms that institutional quality affects environmental sustainability. The effect is contradictory however, depending on which variable is used as the dependent one. This ambiguous result makes it hard to come to a general conclusion regarding institutional quality and environmental sustainability but rather demonstrates the complexity with broad concepts and their vagueness. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/1608176
- author
- Strand, Helena LU
- supervisor
-
- Åsa Knaggård LU
- organization
- course
- STVK01 20101
- year
- 2010
- type
- M2 - Bachelor Degree
- subject
- keywords
- Environmental sustainability, Institutional quality, Quantitative method, Collective action problem
- language
- English
- id
- 1608176
- date added to LUP
- 2010-06-29 13:24:54
- date last changed
- 2010-06-29 13:24:54
@misc{1608176,
abstract = {{Sustainable development is a frequently used concept these days. It is often captured trough three dimensions of economic, social and ecological sustainability. As the importance of institutions has been accentuated within the first two dimensions, it has lately been the object of study within the dimension of environmental sustainability. As environment is often described as a collective good, the problem with maintaining a sustainable environment can be understood as problems of collective action due to the conflict between individual and collective rationality. High-quality institutions are assumed to generate trust, making people cooperate. They could therefore be the reason why societies manage to elude these collective action problems. The thesis analyzes if institutional quality affects states´ performance in environmental sustainability, trough a quantitative method. Due to the breadth of the concept environmental sustainability, the analysis is divided into two different sets using two different indexes as dependent variables, Environmental Performance Index and Ecological Footprint.
The result confirms that institutional quality affects environmental sustainability. The effect is contradictory however, depending on which variable is used as the dependent one. This ambiguous result makes it hard to come to a general conclusion regarding institutional quality and environmental sustainability but rather demonstrates the complexity with broad concepts and their vagueness.}},
author = {{Strand, Helena}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Environmental sustainability and Institutional quality - An ambiguous relation}},
year = {{2010}},
}