More than two decades after the Rio-conference on environment and development in 1992, sustainable development remains a big challenge. Politics and administration, especially in democratic societies, have a specific responsibility in coordinating sustainable development. In order to fulfill this role, the regulative idea of sustainability needs to be integrated into decision-making in politics and administration at all levels, from local to global. Taking this into account, we have analyzed the institutionalization of sustainability as a crosscutting and long-term challenge at the federal level in Germany. Based on a theoretical-conceptual framework deriving from democracy, bureaucracy and political steering/governance theory, we have employed qualitative methods to understand, in depth, how sustainability is integrated into political-administrative practice. In the present paper, we present key results and show that sustainability is not a routine practice at the federal level in Germany. We will conclude by giving an outlook on the structural and procedural options and argue for the need to develop a “sustainability state”.

In this paper we argue that if social constructivism theory is to be taken seriously, the distinction between reportive journalism and advocacy journalism cannot hold anymore. We propose to use another working distinction between progressive (and also regressive) advocacy journalism, postulating forms of social change, and status quo advocacy journalism, which, directly or indirectly, postulates lack of change. To illustrate this distinction, we use two different examples that may seem unrelated. However, as we try to show, they are overlapping and intermingled. These examples are the different notions of sustainability and the coverage of the Sanders campaign during US primaries in 2016.