Sustainable development depends not only on economic, social,and environmental objectives, but on the systemic capacity of societies to anticipate uncertainty, absorb shocks, and adapt through purposeful reform. This dissertation advances a unifying conceptual framework,the dynamic triad of readiness, risk, and reform, to explain how systemic capacity contributes to sustainable outcomes, how its effectiveness is conditioned by uncertainty, and how it is reshaped through reform across levels of analysis. Readiness denotes the accumulated institutional, technological, financial, and social capacities that enable anticipation and response. Risk captures multidimensional uncertainty and vulnerability that condition their effectiveness. Reform represents structural interventions triggered by revealed weaknesses. Their interaction forms a continuous feedback loop shaping resilience and long-term sustainability outcomes.
Adopting a multi-scalar perspective, the dissertation examines these dynamics at the micro (firm), meso (industry and market), and macro (national) levels across five empirical studies. Using diverse econometric approaches, including survival analysis, regimeswitching VAR models, threshold regressions, triple-difference designs, mediation and moderation analysis, and panel Granger causality tests; the research investigates renewable energy innovation,climate finance and clean water investment, firm survival during COVID-19, and post-crisis safety reforms in global value chains.
The findings demonstrate that readiness is multidimensional and context dependent. At the firm level, innovation capabilities significantly increase survival probabilities during systemic shocks. At the market level, climate policy uncertainty exhibits nonlinear and regime-dependent effects: risk constrains investment under high volatility but enables strategic positioning under stable conditions. At the national level, systemic readiness promotes renewable energy innovation by reducing socio-economic vulnerability and strengthening R&D investment. These effects are strongest among innovation leaders, with R&D serving as the dominant channel in middle-income countries. However, these benefits are regime dependent: overall, economic, and social readiness promote renewable energy innovation under low uncertainty, but their positive influence weakens beyond the uncertainty threshold. In contrast, governance readiness exerts a negative effect that intensifies as uncertainty increases. Bidirectional dynamics between core and enabling technologies confirm their co-evolution within national innovation systems and highlight the risk of widening global innovation disparities if readiness accumulation remains uneven. Crisis-induced reforms can strengthen institutional capacity but may also impose adjustment burdens that reshape market entry and dynamics.
Overall, the dissertation shows that sustainable development hinges on proactive capacity building, strategic risk management, and carefully designed reform processes. By integrating insights from institutional economics, sustainability transitions, and financial instability theory; the study contributes an analytical framework for understanding resilience in an increasingly uncertain world.
Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2026. , p. 19