Paradise Islands? Island States and Environmental Performance

Sverker C. Jagers, Marina Povitkina, Martin Sjöstedt and Aksel Sundström
Additional contact information
Sverker C. Jagers: Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden
Marina Povitkina: Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden
Martin Sjöstedt: Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden
Aksel Sundström: Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-24

Abstract: Island states have been shown to outperform continental states on a number of large-scale coordination-related outcomes, such as levels of democracy and institutional quality. The argument developed and tested in this article contends that the same kind of logic may apply to islands’ environmental performance, too. However, the empirical analysis shows mixed results. Among the 105 environmental outcomes that we analyzed, being an island only has a positive impact on 20 of them. For example, island states tend to outcompete continental states with respect to several indicators related to water quality but not in aspects related to biodiversity, protected areas, or environmental regulations. In addition, the causal factors previously suggested to make islands outperform continental states in terms of coordination have weak explanatory power in predicting islands’ environmental performance. We conclude the paper by discussing how these interesting findings can be further explored.

Keywords: island states; environmental performance; democracy; institutional quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/3/285/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/3/285/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:3:p:285-:d:66148

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().