Local Diversity Under Pressure: How Centralization Affects Sustainable Development Vectors and Initiatives

This study investigates how centralized governance structures undermine the achievement of sustainable development by systematically eliminating local grassroot territorial development vectors and initiatives. It examines how centralization reduces the representation of diverse sustainability strategies as systems transition from local to regional/national level. Using Belarus as a case study, this research discovers the effects of this transition. The study thoroughly explored 47 sustainable development planning documents from Belarus, spanning from 2005 to 2020, and encompassing diverse levels of governance, including Local Agenda 21 plans, municipal strategies, and regional planning documents. The SWOT indicators extracted during the analysis were systematically categorized within the advanced sustainability framework into the following four categories: social, environmental, economic, and institutional/participatory. A quantitative analysis of local development vectors loss was conducted using a novel evaluation tool designed to measure indicator diversity across various planning scales. The findings show that approximately 85% of the diversity of local sustainability vectors is lost due to aggregation/in hierarchical planning processes. This phenomenon can be explained by reference to three mechanisms: administrative inertia (institutional resistance to novel approaches), funding constraints (central budgets default to standardized territorial development vectors), and structural barriers (limited local autonomy despite formal decentralization policies). Social and environmental development vectors demonstrate greater losses than economic ones, indicating that context-specific local solutions are systematically ignored at higher scales. The results indicate that the formal decentralization approach is ineffective in preserving local sustainability without complementary institutional reforms. The study enhances existing knowledge of sustainability science by demonstrating how central governance restricts the implementation of localized solutions to environmental and social challenges. This demonstrates that formal decentralization policies, without institutional reforms, do not lead to sustainable development. The methodology developed here can also be applied to other highly centralized systems.