Identifying diverse paths toward successful policy performance in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Union countries: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) exploitation of the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) data

Although the policy performance field acknowledges the importance of adopting a long-term decision making perspective to attain more sustainable policy outcomes, it overlooks the way in which sustainable governance conditions and policy performance relate to each other. We address this gap by investigating why some countries succeed in terms of policy performance while others do not. Applying a fuzzy-set QCA to 41 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and European Union countries of the Sustainable Governance Indicators data, we find out that successful economic and social policy performance is mainly driven by executive accountability conditions combined with effective implementation, while the high-quality of media plays a key role in successful environmental policy performance. Considering the multiple paths that practitioners can follow toward sustainable development benefits, they can also learn how to shift from short-term to long-term thinking by identifying “what works and why,” formulating good practices and guidelines for better policy performance in the respective national contexts.