Readiness, Risk, and Reform : A Dynamic Triad of Sustainability

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 capabilitiesTable of Contents Abstract………………………………………………………..iii-iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………v-vii List of papers…………………………………………………….ix Table of Contents…………………………………………….…..xi Introduction……………………………………………………..