2 November 2026 6:13 pm
Saudi Architecture Guidelines: Regional Identity Matters

Saudi Architecture Guidelines: Regional Identity Matters

Nov 1, 2026

Traditional Middle Eastern architectural designs on buildings in Medina, Saudi Arabia. by Ruveyda Yigiter via Pexels

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Saudi architecture guidelines: From research to design

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Aedas explores how understanding regional architecture can inform contemporary buildings at different scales

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By Staff Writer

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Saudi architecture guidelines: From research to design aedas
Architecture guidelines map
Highlights by Level4 AI

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How can regional architectural traditions inform buildings whose scale, use and construction differ substantially from the forms that shaped them?

This is a practical question for architects working in Saudi Arabia.

As building programmes become more complex, regional identity needs to inform decisions about massing, proportions, materials and façades from the beginning of the design process.

Through its involvement in the Saudi Architectural Design Guidelines, Aedas explored how research into regional architecture could become a useful resource for contemporary practice. Saudi Arabia’s architectural heritage developed through close relationships between climate, available materials, construction knowledge and cultural traditions.

Understanding these relationships gives architects a basis for judging how that heritage can evolve as the demands placed on buildings change.

Understanding the relationships

The research examined how individual architectural elements work together to establish regional character.

Central Najdi architecture offers a useful example. Variations in building height, asymmetrical compositions, façade depth and rhythmic ornamentation contribute to a recognisable architectural language. Their character emerges through the relationships between these elements, including the balance of solid walls and openings, the proportions of individual volumes and the placement of detail.

aedas

Traditional, transitional and contemporary architectural styles reflect the evolution of regional identity

A recessed opening, for example, affects shadow, depth and the apparent thickness of a wall. Its size and spacing influence the composition of the whole façade. Understanding these effects helps turn the study of a precedent into a set of design decisions.

“Architectural identity isn’t about repeating familiar forms. It’s about understanding what makes a place unique and translating those qualities into something relevant for today. The guidelines give us the freedom to explore new possibilities while retaining that essential connection to place” – Ignacio Gomez, Global Design Principal, Aedas

That distinction becomes particularly important when moving between scales. A composition developed for a small building requires careful reconsideration when applied to a much larger programme. Architects need to assess which relationships remain relevant, which require adjustment and how they can be expressed through contemporary construction.

Making room for interpretation

The traditional, transitional and contemporary approaches provide different ways of interpreting regional character, within the requirements established for each location.
Each offers a distinct architectural language while maintaining a meaningful connection to the cultural and environmental context.

For architects, this creates a responsibility to understand the underlying reasoning behind the guidance. Decisions about materials, openings, proportions and ornament need to support a cohesive, well-resolved building, with each contributing meaningfully to its relationship with place.

The value of the research lies in making those decisions more considered and informed. It provides a clear, shared basis for design while allowing diverse responses to programme, scale and context.

“As a Saudi architect, this project carries significance beyond design. It is an opportunity to contribute to how our architectural identity is understood, reinterpreted and carried forward, helping shape the architectural character of future generations” – Lama Al Kharboush, Associate Director, Aedas

Regional identity can continue to meaningfully develop through this process. Its relevance depends on how thoughtfully architects translate inherited knowledge into the buildings being conceived and designed today. The ambition is to give that knowledge an active and lasting role in contemporary practice, where it can continue to shape architectural character as building types and construction methods evolve.

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The Twilight of Oil in an Age of Uncertainty: Regional Analysis

The Twilight of Oil in an Age of Uncertainty: Regional Analysis

Oct 31, 2026

Dramatic aerial twilight view of Riyadh city skyline with lit streets. by Abul Lais via Pexels

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The Twilight of Oil in an Age of Uncertainty: From a Vicious to a Virtuous Cycle

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The global hydrocarbon order is changing. Economic diversification and developing productive economies have become essential for Middle Eastern and North African states, requiring them to address social and political challenges and rethink domestic, regional, and global settlements.

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By Nur Arafeh, Ishac Diwan, Hamza Meddeb, Marwan Muasher
Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center – Published on Oct 30, 2026

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The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been a major producer and exporter of hydrocarbons since the 1930s. In 2025, around 30 percent of global hydrocarbon exports originated in the MENA region, with collective regional revenues amounting to over $1 trillion.1 Since 2000, when the second oil boom began (the first being in October 1973), MENA has sold $25 trillion worth of oil and gas (adjusted for 2025 prices). As demonstrated by the conflict between the United States and Iran, events in the region remain consequential for international energy markets. But equally, hydrocarbons have shaped the region’s economies, governance structures, and societies in ways that now define the nature of the challenge ahead.

The challenge in question is one of fundamental economic transformation. The global hydrocarbons order is facing profound change, as environmental and geopolitical pressures undermine the foundations on which many MENA economies have rested. In this context, economic diversification is no longer optional; it has become both strategic and urgent. Yet diversification is not merely a technical exercise. It brings with it at least three types of fundamental and interconnected challenges. The first is economic, and involves countries determining how to increase their labor productivity and build sustainable productive capacity outside hydrocarbons in economies long structured around resource rents. The second challenge is social and political, affecting how to renegotiate social contracts that support more inclusive societies. The third is regional, where the success or failure of transformation will depend not only on domestic reform, but on whether a more stable regional order can emerge, one in which economic cooperation prevails over conflict, fragmentation, and escalating tensions. Escaping the current vicious cycle and turning it into a virtuous one is essential for the region’s future.

This paper does not offer a single prescription and acknowledges that the MENA region encompasses countries at very different stages of development, with very different resource endowments, institutional capacities, and political settlements. The analysis focuses on three groups of countries: high-income hydrocarbon exporters (Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries), middle-income hydrocarbon exporters (Algeria, Iraq, Libya, and Iran), and middle-income hydrocarbon importers (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia). We offer an integrated approach to the economic, political, and regional dimensions of the diversification imperative and the need to strengthen productivity, as well as policy recommendations organized around the five key questions that structured the commission’s deliberations.

The first question is the most fundamental one: Why must MENA countries diversify, and why now? For all the countries examined here, the answer is that, for various reasons, the demand for hydrocarbons is falling in a world shaped by a volatile energy transition and a pressing imperative of energy security. This will inexorably reduce oil and gas exports and revenues over the medium to long term, sharply constraining these countries’ access to foreign exchange and deepening their fiscal pressures. Many of the hydrocarbon exporting countries understand therefore that, because they will not be able to finance employment of their growing labor force in the public sector, they must immediately begin investing in productive jobs if they are to meet future challenges. Energy importers face a different challenge: They realize that it will be impossible in the coming years to export carbon-intensive manufactured goods to Europe as carbon border adjustment mechanisms and other environmental regulations take effect. The war with Iran has exacerbated such tensions. For one thing, oil revenues will fall more rapidly, implying a need to diversify more rapidly. Additionally, the war is likely to force changes in the way in which diversification takes place. The oil importing countries, especially Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, will sustain indirect losses, which is one more reason why they need to try harder to improve their labor productivity through growth-enhancing reforms.

The second question concerns the current state of play: What is the situation when it comes to diversification efforts in the MENA region? The picture is highly uneven:

  • GCC countries are heavily engaged in investing in productivity and diversification, but the results remain mixed. The most dynamic sectors have been oil products, entrepôt trade, tourism, hospitality, entertainment, and more recently renewables and artificial intelligence (AI) centers.2 However, generating productive jobs has been challenging, and the globally oriented model that underpins Gulf diversification strategies is threated by regional instability. The ability of the GCC countries to navigate a turbulent global energy transition is also in jeopardy.
  • Among the middle-income hydrocarbon exporters (Iraq, Algeria, Libya, Iran), the pattern is one of rent consumption rather than investment. Productivity growth is absent, rent per capita is falling, and there is as yet no credible exit path from this trajectory.
  • Middle-income hydrocarbon importers present an equally troubling picture, as they have been stuck in a severe form of the middle-income trap: They are operating below potential, with fragile social and financial situations, and are failing to pursue growth-enhancing reforms. Savings are low, as is investment, underemployment is rampant, and these countries each face a brewing debt crisis, while state services have been severely rolled back. The main problem is an unbalanced form of capitalism dominated by a closed economic elite that is unwilling to allow space for competition from firms not under its control. Political connections are based on loyalty, not productivity, which represents a key obstacle to transformation.

The third question is political. What are the social and political implications of the current trajectory? Across the MENA region, the social contracts that offered material provision in exchange for political acquiescence are under mounting strain. The generation now entering the labor market is better educated than its predecessors, holds higher aspirations, and has grown up with direct exposure to different global living standards. However, it also faces higher unemployment than preceding generations, deteriorating public services, and more precarious labor markets. The nature of this strain diverges across country groups, reflecting fundamentally different distributional bargains. In the GCC, the rentier bargain is being restructured through nationalization of the labor force and subsidy reform, generating grievances with few formal outlets to express them.3 In middle-income hydrocarbon exporting countries, revenues sustain narrow patronage networks, but cannot finance mass consumption or broad legitimacy. In hydrocarbon importing states, such as Egypt and Jordan, external geopolitical rents that once underpinned the social contract are being eroded, leaving governments with shrinking fiscal space and facing rising social instability.

What unites all three country groups is the dilemma of how to deal with the fact that the reforms needed to build productive diversified economies are politically costly in the short run, even as inaction is economically unsustainable in the long run. Faced with this dilemma, governments have responded across the board by centralizing power and intensifying control, either to manage reform (in the case of the GCC countries) or avoid it (in the case of other states, such as Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia). However, this approach is straining the very foundations on which a durable economic transformation must rest—rule of law, investor confidence, legitimate channels for objection. The difficulties reformist politicians are facing are complex. They must propose attractive reforms that generate support from a coalition of reformist parties or pressure groups, create mechanisms that compensate losers and bring them into the fold, put in place checks and balances to avoid costly mistakes and learn from experience, and finally permit the voicing of grievances to avoid the type of explosion that was common during the decade of Arab uprisings.

The fourth question concerns the external environment. How do regional and global dynamics shape, and potentially undermine, diversification efforts? Falling hydrocarbon revenues will intensify regional competition in the oil and gas market if it is not matched by improved regional cooperation, as countries seek to defend their share of a shrinking market. This reality has become more acute since the beginning of the war with Iran, which dampened global appetite for Gulf oil and gas due to elevated perceived risks. Moreover, increased insecurity has also disrupted Gulf diversification strategies in areas that are highly sensitive to security conditions—foreign direct investment, tourism, or trade.

In this more volatile environment, countries need to imagine growth paths that are more resilient to shocks and less likely to generate them. This requires building regional economic interdependencies, which today remain underdeveloped. It would mean expanding intraregional trade and investment, advancing a regional security architecture that reduces business risk and lessens reliance on any single external guarantor, and diversifying external economic relationships in a world increasingly organized around geopolitical blocs. To be able to sustain diversified relations, stronger regional bargaining power helps. This could come in the form of more robust soft power derived from better management of regional public goods such as defending the environment, improving security, caring for refugees, and preventing states from failing. There are other arguments for improved regional cooperation in the form of the growth of a regional market: the need to bring some accumulated savings in the form of globally placed Sovereign Wealth Funds’ assets closer to home, given rising expropriation risks; the fact that environmental challenges are regional; and the advisability of preserving and diversifying regional trade routes.

The fifth and final question is a holistic one: How do these elements interact, and under what conditions can the region move from a vicious to a virtuous cycle? The elements discussed above can interact positively or negatively. The status quo increases regional tensions, political risk, and doom loops—or self-reinforcing cycles that exacerbate problems—of economic decline and violence. The overlapping aspects of the transition—economic, social, political, and environmental—create structural tensions, but progress on one front can create momentum for broader reforms and a virtuous cycle that facilitates progress:

  • A regional security deal would be much enhanced by regional economic cooperation. Moreover, the financial rates of return to the region of sovereign wealth fund investment would be greater if invested in large rather than small markets. Cooperation is also needed to fight climate change.
  • The ability to implement industrial policy to develop new value chains in a secure regional environment would enable the region to bargain for a fairer role in a fragmented world order.
  • Reduced regional instability and the development of a regional market would create positive incentives for recalcitrant regimes to invest in growth, especially in middle-income countries.

Read the whole article from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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What is Artificial General Intelligence Explained Simply

What is Artificial General Intelligence Explained Simply

Oct 29, 2026

Close-up of AI-assisted coding with menu options for debugging and problem-solving. by Daniil Komov via Pexels

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What is artificial general intelligence – and is it already here?

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Waqas Ali, University of Wolverhampton

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OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, recently suggested that its advanced model, known as GPT-6 Astra, could mark the arrival of something called artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

If AI itself is often defined as the ability to simulate human intelligence, OpenAI defines AGI as an AI system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work – to be better at the majority of digital and cognitive tasks a human can perform. This includes tasks such as writing computer code, organisational activities or managing projects.

For now, at least, it excludes work that involves physical labour, such as agriculture or construction. Though the integration of AI with robotics means such sectors of industry may not be the exclusive domain of humans forever.

This definition by OpenAI focuses on breadth of competency by an AI system. However, other experts maintain that AGI will be characterised by additional cognitive leaps beyond present-day AI models. For example, Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, has said that AGI should be able to do “pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do”.

This definition makes AGI more about brilliance and a bit less about depth. Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta, believes the term AGI itself is flawed and should be replaced by “human-level AI”.

These represent snapshots from a vigorous ongoing debate over when AGI will arrive and how to recognise it.

Venturebeat magazine reported Brockman acknowledging this at a closed press briefing about GPT-6 Astra in September when he said: “When we started OpenAI, we kind of thought that there was going to be this well-defined moment that everyone would recognise … it hasn’t played out like that.”

But he added: “For me personally, I do think we’re there.” Just a few days after Brockman made his comments, the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, called in an essay titled: “We must pace the frontier” for the AI industry to slow down the pace of its development. Within hours of this essay being published, both Sam Altman and Elon Musk signalled their agreement.

So is Brockman right about AGI being here? The evidence still points in more than one direction and is therefore inconclusive.

The clearest shift with GPT-6 Astra is in how people use it. Earlier models needed detailed instructions at each step. Astra is built for longer jobs where the user sets a goal and some boundaries, and the model works out the sequence itself.

OpenAI’s demonstrations showed the frontier model handling several unrelated tasks at once. The company presents this as moving past the pattern in which a human supplies the next instruction every time.

That is a real change, and it is the part most users will notice first.

One of the benchmarks show that Astra scored 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, a test that places an AI agent in unfamiliar interactive games with no instructions and measures how efficiently it works out the rules.

OpenAI estimates that the average human scored 48% when asked to work out the same unfamiliar games. The detail matters here, however. ARC Prize, which runs the benchmark, reported that Astra’s best score through the shared “harness” it gives every model was 62.7%. A harness is a kind of software operating system, or physical environment, within which the AI system works. ARC Prize provides Astra with this software harness.

The 99.9% came from a different harness, built by OpenAI for Astra, which preserves the AI model’s reasoning between requests. Essentially, Astra did better when it was able to reuse previous work and wasn’t “starting from scratch” between requests in terms of its reasoning.

Evaluators disagree

Independent evaluators disagree about how much of an advance GPT-6 Astra represents on its predecessor. The independent research institute Epoch AI places it right at the frontier, alongside other cutting-edge AI models such as Claude Fable 5.1, Kimi K3 and GPT-5.5 Pro. The independent analysis company Artificial Analysis did not rate it as being radically ahead of its predecessor – GPT-5.6 Sol.

Toby Walsh, an AI researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, described the intelligence in frontier AI models such as GPT-6 Astra and others as “still today very jagged”, telling Al Jazeera that there are simple things that even the best AI models do poorly.

On September 8 2026, OpenAI published a claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize problems in mathematics. This has often been reported as Astra’s work. It was not. OpenAI says the proof came from an unreleased internal model, significantly more capable than Astra, running roughly 10,000 AI agents (AI models that perform tasks in response to human instructions) in parallel for about 88 hours.

Astra’s contribution was the formalisation and verification afterwards, which took a further 17 hours. The proof has not yet been checked by the mathematical community.

Amodei’s September essay calling for an AI slowdown remains the strongest recent statement about the risks of frontier models. He wrote that within six to 12 months, a swarm of agents could be capable of taking over the internet with a persistent botnet. This could lead to the catastrophic failure of key systems and would cause damage possibly running into hundreds of billions of dollars.

Claude misuse

It is worth examining Amodei’s warnings. Anthropic’s September threat report sets out examples of how AI is already being used in alarming ways.

According to the Anthropic report, a group in northern Yemen recently used Claude code to build guidance software for rockets and a missile. Russian and Chinese operators automated espionage work. A single French-speaking individual built used AI to build a software platform that made personal information about people affiliated with a targeted political movement searchable online. In each case, a human chose the targets and the model supplied the labour.

That is a narrow capability applied at speed and scale under human direction. It is serious, but it is not a description of general intelligence.

Capability and general intelligence are separate things, and they call for different responses. Amodei’s proposed response is to slow frontier development while expanding independent evaluation and coordinating safety standards across countries. A genuinely general system would raise questions that those measures are not designed to answer.

GPT-6 Astra does not settle whether AGI has arrived. Instead, it exposes why that question is becoming harder to answer. Intelligence is increasingly a property of an AI system comprising a model, memory, tools and agents, rather than of a model tested in isolation.

On the narrower question of whether these systems can now cause serious harm, the people running the companies have said plainly that they definitely can.The Conversation

Waqas Ali, Lecturer in Business Management and Research, Faculty of Arts, Business, and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Less is more: Why Restraint Matters in Eco Practices

Less is more: Why Restraint Matters in Eco Practices

Oct 28, 2026

A bustling overhead view of an urban market with various stalls selling fresh produce and goods. by Hanif Ismail via Pexels

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Less is more. So why does more feel greener? 9 studies probe the “sustainable additive bias”

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Consumers judge companies greener when they add eco-friendly items more so than when they remove unnecessary ones, researchers found.

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By Sarah DeWeerdt
Anthropocene  - October 27, 2026

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Less is more. So why does more feel greener? 9 studies probe the "sustainable additive bias”

People are drowning in eco-friendly swag—cloth tote bags, reusable water bottles, recycled notebooks, sustainable hotel toiletries, and on and on—distributed by organizations and companies eager to demonstrate their environmental bona fides.

What might be even more sustainable than manufacturing and distributing all these eco-friendly products is to just…stop. The trouble is that consumers have trouble giving brands credit for such restraint, a quirk of human psychology that researchers dub “sustainable additive bias” in a new paper.

“Companies that genuinely try to take eco-friendly actions, such as reducing packaging or promotional giveaways, are often not rewarded,” says study team member Linda Lemarié, associate professor of marketing at Audencia Business School in France. “What we don’t see is hard to take into consideration, and reduction leaves nothing visible, even though it’s often the best strategy from an environmental standpoint.”

In the paper, Lemarié and her colleagues conducted nine different studies to demonstrate how this bias works—and what companies can do about it.

The studies included a field experiment in which hotel guests rated the sustainability of the room they had stayed in, a lab experiment in which business school students chose gifts to hand out to trade show attendees, and seven online investigations in which a total of more than 2,900 participants were asked to evaluate complimentary hotel toiletries, hair care sets, music festival welcome bags, and other collections of products.

Overall, the studies show that consumers see businesses as more sustainable when they provide more eco-friendly items rather than when they remove unnecessary ones—even though subtracting can lead to lower waste and a smaller footprint.

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“We were first surprised by the robustness and consistency of the effect across different contexts and with different metrics,” Lemarié says.

For example, study participants judged a hotel room stocked with a large selection of eco-friendly toiletries as more sustainable than a room with a more modest set of eco-friendly products. They also judged a limited-edition tea box to which eco-friendly tea filters had been added as more sustainable than one from which they had been removed.

“Then we were also surprised by the bias’s resistance to knowledge,” Lemarié says. When items weren’t labeled as being environmentally friendly, participants identified bundles with more items as being less sustainable than those with fewer. “This means that people do indeed correctly associate ‘addition with ‘less environmentally friendly.’”

But when the question of sustainability comes into play, people seem to use visible components as indicators of companies’ effort. The more items, the more effort, and the more effort, the more sustainability—at least, according to our imperfect brains.

Several of the experiments suggest sustainable additive bias can be counteracted when companies prioritize highly recognizable items as sustainability signals (that is, a refillable water bottle counts more than biodegradable glitter). One hints that explaining when items have been removed for environmental reasons might help, too.

But accomplishing this in the real world could be tricky, Lemarié says. “The question our research leaves open is how to effectively demonstrate, without appearing hypocritical or making people skeptical, that reducing elements of a product offering, and thus offering less, is a genuine effort in favor of the environment.”

Source: Lemarié L. et al. “The more, the better? The sustainable additive bias.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine. AI-generated.

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Strategic Sustainability Regimes: Key Findings and Trends

Strategic Sustainability Regimes: Key Findings and Trends

Oct 26, 2026

A hand holding an antique key. by Mikhail Nilov via Pexels

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Strategic Sustainability Regimes: Configurations of National Sustainability Conditions

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WILEY Online Library / First published: 26 October 2026
https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.71824Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

ABSTRACT

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Sustainable development is increasingly recognized as a complex strategic challenge requiring the coordination of social, environmental, and institutional dimensions. This study adopts a configurational perspective to identify distinct strategic sustainability regimes across countries. A country-only balanced panel of 166 countries covering 2000–2023 (3984 country-year observations) was reconstructed from two Sustainable Development Report files. Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering was applied to long-run country averages for Goals 1, 3, 13, and 16 in a 150-country clustering sample. Fixed-effects panel models provided complementary longitudinal evidence, and robustness tests included alternative clustering methods, repeated 80% subsampling, and an extended sensitivity specification for Goals 8, 9, and 12. Four strategic sustainability regimes were identified: Capacity-Constrained, Emerging Transitional, Balanced Transitional, and High-Capability. Broader sustainability performance rises monotonically across these regimes, revealing a pronounced social–institutional development gradient alongside compositionally distinct profiles. Goal 13 follows an inverse cross-regime pattern and remains statistically non-significant in the fixed-effects models, indicating that climate-related SDG performance captures a structurally distinct dimension whose meaning depends in part on emissions, consumption, energy use, industrial structure, and development stage. The four-regime solution is reasonably stable but not invariant to method or construct specification. The study contributes to the strategic management and sustainability literature by extending configuration theory to the national level and identifying heterogeneous national sustainability profiles. For firms and MSMEs, these regimes are interpreted as macro-level opportunity and constraint environments; extended Goal 12 sensitivity analysis acknowledges the responsible-consumption dimension, although green consumer behavior is not directly measured.

1 Introduction

Sustainable development has become one of the most complex strategic challenges facing countries in the twenty-first century. Since the adoption of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, governments have been expected not only to improve performance on individual Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but also to coordinate multiple social, environmental, and institutional priorities simultaneously (United Nations 2015; Breuer et al. 2019; Fu et al. 2019). The SDGs also represent a novel governance mechanism that seeks to coordinate multiple policy domains through integrated goal-setting processes (Biermann et al. 2017). Countries must align diverse development priorities amid uncertainty, resource constraints, institutional heterogeneity, and competing policy demands (Bejaković 2019). As a result, sustainability performance is increasingly related to how countries combine multiple observed development conditions, rather than to improvements in isolated indicators.

Despite the growing importance of sustainability, much of the existing literature continues to evaluate national performance through ranking systems, composite indices, dashboard approaches, or analyses of pairwise SDG interactions (Le Blanc 2015; Nilsson et al. 2016; Swain and Ranganathan 2021). Although these approaches have generated valuable insights into progress toward the SDGs and the interdependencies among development goals, they remain largely variable-centered and provide a limited understanding of recurrent combinations of multiple development dimensions. Consequently, countries are typically positioned along a single performance continuum despite substantial differences in governance quality, social development, environmental performance, and policy implementation capacity. Consistent with configuration theory, coherent combinations of interdependent factors provide a useful lens for examining such multidimensional differences (Fiss 2011; Ault and Spicer 2021). However, clustering alone does not establish equifinality, complementarity, or configurational causation.

This argument reveals an important gap in the existing literature. Although sustainability transitions research recognizes the existence of multiple transition pathways and long-term systemic change processes (Markard et al. 2012; Köhler et al. 2019), and institutional scholarship emphasizes the role of governance quality in shaping development outcomes (Gupta and Vegelin 2016; Kern and Rogge 2019), relatively few studies have integrated these perspectives within a configuration-based strategic management framework. Existing research has documented the importance of institutions, poverty reduction, health performance, and environmental conditions for sustainable development (Barbier and Burgess 2017; Sachs et al. 2023). However, the literature still offers a limited understanding of how these dimensions combine to form distinct sustainability regimes and how such configurations shape broader sustainability performance across countries.

Addressing this gap is important for both theory and practice. From a theoretical perspective, sustainability research risks remaining fragmented across isolated indicators and disconnected policy dimensions if profile heterogeneity is ignored (Heinrichs and Biermann 2016). Accordingly, this study contributes to the strategic management and sustainability literature in three ways. It introduces a configurational perspective to national sustainability research, examines recurrent combinations of observed sustainability conditions, and combines Gaussian Mixture Model clustering with longitudinal panel analysis within a unified empirical framework. At the micro level, national institutional and social conditions may shape the regulatory pressures, financing, infrastructure, skills, and market demand that firms and MSMEs encounter, while eco-literacy and sustainability education remain plausible mechanisms that warrant direct testing (Madhavaram and Nirjar 2025; Suwono et al. 2026). Development and industrialization can also improve social and institutional foundations while affecting emissions, consumption, and energy use, creating a development–climate tension that simple rankings may obscure (Sachs et al. 2024).

Based on this logic, the study addresses the following research questions:

  1. Do countries exhibit distinct strategic sustainability regimes based on their observed social, environmental, and institutional profiles?
  2. What combinations of social development, environmental performance, and institutional capacity characterize these regimes?
  3. How are the dimensions used to identify strategic sustainability regimes associated with broader sustainability performance over time?

Unlike previous SDG studies that primarily classify countries by overall sustainability performance, this study combines Gaussian Mixture Model clustering with a complementary fixed-effects panel analysis. This integrated design provides profile-based and longitudinal evidence to understand heterogeneous sustainability patterns, without treating cluster membership as evidence of equifinality or causal configurations.

Read more on the original publication  WILEY Online Library

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