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This chapter argues that many scholars still have failed to understand the American state as a “state” and that issues before regarding “sustainability”, “fiscal crisis”, and “legitimation crisis” are still eminent up to now. This raises questions about the state' capacity and responsibility. In addition, the American state remains to be described in terms of false dichotomies–strong versus weak, active versus passive, conservative versus liberal, even state versus society. Also, the chapter presents how the American state appears to be increasingly egalitarian but continues to be hierarchal. The American state's apparent changeability and un-state-like characteristics such as volatility, unpredictability, and reversibility may likely be exacerbated than resolved by the Obama administration.

This chapter develops a theoretical model for evaluating the effectiveness of liberal democracies. It consists of two parts. In the first part, a set of normative criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of political systems is suggested. It includes four policy goals: domestic security, wealth, socioeconomic security and socioeconomic equality, as well as the protection of the environment. In the second part, a set of indicators for measuring political effectiveness with respect to these policy goals is presented. Additionally, propositions about the relationship between the four policy goals are discussed, whether trade-offs or complementary relationships exist.

This chapter presents an empirical analysis of the level, development, and structure of political effectiveness in twenty-one OECD countries between 1974 and 1995. There are three main results. First, regarding the level of effectiveness, the USA is, with the exception of economic policy, always among those countries with the worst performance record. Second, in terms of the development of political effectiveness, the general hypothesis that western democracies have been converging at a lower level of performance can not be confirmed. Third, the thesis of increasing incompatibility or increased tension between different policy goals finds no empirical confirmation.

Fiscal incentives for encouraging sustainable behaviour are contrasted with citizenship approaches. The distinction between environmental and ecological citizenship and the notion of ‘post‐cosmopolitanism’ are introduced. The relationship between citizenship, democracy, and sustainability is discussed.

Environmental sustainability and liberalism are often seen as incompatible because of the latter's reluctance to endorse determinate views of the ‘good life’. This chapter argues for compatibility on the grounds that liberalism's commitment to neutrality commits it to providing and preserving the conditions for practising good lives—including ‘green’ ones.

This chapter summarizes the methods available for collecting data about people's motivations for natural resource use, thus providing information on the social and economic facets of sustainability. The key methods covered include questionnaire surveys, participatory methods, direct observations, experimental economics, cost-benefit analysis and the use of existing databases such as government records. The emphasis is on effective sampling in order to provide representative quantitative results, but qualitative methods for understanding resource users' motivations are also covered. Research on people can cause significant harm if not carried out sensitively, and ethical issues are examined, outlining the steps needed to avoid any negative impacts of the research. Understanding social and economic sustainability generally requires a case-specific combination of techniques, and a set of case studies is used to illustrate a range of possible approaches.

If ‘open source’ is taken as a practice employed in organizing human knowledge-related activities, it may be applied more broadly than just with software. Wherever it is used this chapter contends that processes of negotiation and governance will emerge as means to deal with conflicting interests and visions of community purpose (or epistemic identity). A variety of possible institutional designs for these negotiation and governance processes are possible and each will be tested by the problems of sustaining participation, the growth of the community to include more diverse participants and contests over the paths of development of collective effort. These designs and their subsequent tests are examined empirically for the Debian open source software distribution and Wikipedia open source encyclopaedia creation communities. Conclusions regarding the significance of the initial choice of rules, the processes available to alter these rules, and the potential for dissipation or disruption of efforts are reached, and a proposal to conceive of open source activities as having important parallels to the management of museums rather than bazaars is advanced.

This chapter begins with the idea that at the most general level, the goal of economic policy is to maximize long-term societal well-being in an equitable and sustainable manner. It addresses in detail the meaning and relevance of the goals of economic policy that are often put forward — from enhancing economic security and reducing unemployment, to reducing inflation, enhancing growth, and maintaining external balance. It also examines the link between stability and growth, and between short-term growth and sustainable growth. More specifically, the chapter critiques the narrow focus of the Washington consensus on price stability and emphasizes that economists should, instead, focus on long-term sustainable growth. The chapter concludes by highlighting the broader social consequences that choosing alternative economic policies may have and by emphasizing that all economic policies have trade-offs.

This chapter reviews income and welfare measurement and examines the central topics of assets and sustainability with the evaluation of key conceptual and theoretical literature. It also outlines the methods of asset accounting and presents selected empirical results from ‘greening’ the national accounts. Linkages to policy are explored, followed by broad conclusions on some basic questions: To what extent has the promise of environmental accounting been realized? Which approach has the greatest policy significance? And where is environmental accounting likely to be most useful? Finally, it studies the recent empirical results from Southern Africa and explores policy linkage with concluding remarks.