INSTITUTIONALIZATION: PROCESSES AND ELEMENTS IN THE LIGHT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

More than two decades after the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development, sustainable development remains a major challenge. Politics and administration, especially in democratic societies, have a special responsibility for coordinating sustainable development. To fulfill this role, the regulative idea of sustainability must be integrated into policy and governance decision-making at all levels, from the local to the global. Taking this into account, we analyzed the development of the institutionalization of sustainable development as a cross-cutting and long-term problem. Drawing on a theoretical-conceptual framework derived from the theory of democracy, bureaucracy and political management/governance, we applied qualitative methods to understand how sustainability is integrated into political-administrative practice. In this article, we examine the elements and processes of institutionalization and present a perspective on how exactly sustainability is understood at the level of strategy formation. A deep analysis of the dynamics of the development of processes and elements of institutionalization indicates that the old institutional economics and the new institutional sociology can become an effective basis for an extended theoretical study of social and environmental accounting and reporting. The interaction of these two theories allows consideration of various aspects of institutions and their dynamics, including regulatory, normative and cultural-cognitive aspects. It is important to approach aspects of the old institutional economy, where the emphasis is on normative and customary aspects such as norms, conventions, rules and routines. The old theorists of institutional economics emphasize the importance of habits, procedures, and rules that define and maintain existing forms of behavior. Routines are «patterns of thought and action commonly adopted by groups of individuals», while rules are «a formally recognized way in which 'what should be done'». This approach reveals the difference between stable routines and formally defined rules that can be subject to change and institutionalization. On the other hand, new institutionalism is defined by a shift in focus from normative elements to shared understandings of social reality, such as symbols, meanings, and beliefs. He considers cultural and cognitive elements, as well as regulatory, as socially constructed phenomena that define a «common structure» for perceiving events and taking actions. As for the concept of «sustainable development», it can be concluded that it is a complex and ambiguous term that does not have a strict definition, but covers various aspects and understanding. Different points of view lead to different interpretations of this concept. As noted in the sources, in the additive model of sustainability, different actors may prioritize different aspects of sustainability (social, economic, environmental), depending on their interests and field of activity.