Institutional Sustainability

The CSES is preparing for its first joint publication on the theme of “institutional sustainability”. We are gathering various opinion around this topic in order to organize a collective symposium and discuss about the publication. The aim of the symposium is reaching a chapter structure for the further publication.

Institutional Sustainability

Inspired by the awareness that our global system has reached a threshold made of multiple unsustainabilities: a complex rethinking of the global society is urgent and mandatory.
We aim to foster a discussion on the institutional unsustainability starting from the evidence that the global pandemic has revealed the weaknesses of our institutions and the limits of the political and social control that on global phenomena can be exercised.
Are the institutions, from the local level to international one, able to face the quick evolving of the our hyperconnected world? Or do we need a redefinition of the roles among political actors?
Is there a new form of institutional sustainability that can better cope with global forces and phenomena?
What kind of new institutional sustainability form can be imagined?

The socio-economic crisis that will arise after the present Covid-19 pandemic is going to be even bigger than the health emergency. In order to imagine the consequences of such a drawback, an understanding of how it has been managed is necessary.
Guaranteeing people’s health has been a security imperative worldwide. However, the crisis management policies were not conceived at a global or international scale.
The main actor in charge of managing the Covid-19 response to safeguard its citizens has been the national State, producing the different approaches and disputes that we have witnessed in the past months.

Unable to adapt in time its policies, the nation State dimension has been weakened in the encounter with a virus that is not constrained by borders.
The State has shown its limits, generating a delay in responses and institutional voids.
Those limits are not actually new when it comes to dealing with global crises and global forces in general.
Global phenomena such as economy, finance, migration flows – just to name a few – have shown the poor political control that can be exercised on them.
In other words, every global phenomenon and any possible crises related to it are beyond our ability to contain them.
That is what we defined as institutional unsustainability.

The CSES is preparing for its first joint publication on the theme of “institutional sustainability”. We are gathering various opinion around this topic in order to organize a collective symposium and discuss about the publication. The aim of the symposium is reaching a chapter structure for the further publication.