Governing sustainability or sustainable governance? Semantic constellations on the sustainability-governance intersection in academic literature

The concepts of sustainability and governance share an implicit relationship: sustainability has often been asserted to require suitable governance arrangements, which should, in turn, be sustainable. However, this semantic intersection requires more study. To contribute to this gap, this paper aims at: 1) identifying the meanings and interests that are mobilized when the two terms of sustainability and governance intersect within academic communication; and 2) observe semantic structures allowing for the sustainability-governance intersection to translate meanings between different academic communities. To pursue this aim, the study employed a computer-aided algorithm, called Latent Dirichlet Analysis, to produce and examine a topic model of 7.358 Web of Science-indexed papers published between 1992 and 2017. The analysis output 29 topics condensing key themes, concepts, and approaches in academic literature associating sustainability and governance. These were subsequently grouped into four semantic constellations of transversal meanings providing coherence to the heterogeneity of the field: a) governance of State-level sustainable development; b) governance of the sustainable use of natural resources; c) sustainable governance of integration and autonomy in a globalized world; and d) sustainable corporate governance. These results led to the conclusion that the growingly differentiated literature on sustainability and governance has tended to organize in a tightly-knit field, articulating distinct methodological and theoretical perspectives within a shared set of value commitments-the promotion of a sustainable future. Arguably, this has been made possible by the 'hybrid' character of the concept of sustainability, as much a description of the world as it is as a prescription of the world-to-be. Additionally, the study unveiled that the implicit relationship linking sustainability and governance has been running both ways, i.e. that governance may be framed as a way to achieve sustainability as much as sustainability can be depicted as a way to achieve governance. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.