Political and Social Foundations for Environmental Sustainability

This essay quantitatively investigates several possible foundations for environmental sustainability, as measured across countries with varying geography, development patterns, social customs, and political arrangements. We first test two central hypotheses about the roles of democratization and federalism. We find little evidence for variation in sustainability levels given variation in either democratization or federalism. However, we find that the effects of environmental interests, development paths, and religious orientations vary across our three measures of sustainability