Strategic Sustainability Regimes: Configurations of National Sustainability Conditions

ABSTRACT Sustainable development is increasingly recognized as a complex strategic challenge requiring the coordination of social, environmental, and institutional dimensions. This study adopts a configurational perspective to identify distinct strategic sustainability regimes across countries. A country‐only balanced panel of 166 countries covering 2000–2023 (3984 country‐year observations) was reconstructed from two Sustainable Development Report files. Gaussian mixture model (GMM) clustering was applied to long‐run country averages for Goals 1, 3, 13, and 16 in a 150‐country clustering sample. Fixed‐effects panel models provided complementary longitudinal evidence, and robustness tests included alternative clustering methods, repeated 80% subsampling, and an extended sensitivity specification for Goals 8, 9, and 12. Four strategic sustainability regimes were identified: Capacity‐Constrained, Emerging Transitional, Balanced Transitional, and High‐Capability. Broader sustainability performance rises monotonically across these regimes, revealing a pronounced social–institutional development gradient alongside compositionally distinct profiles. Goal 13 follows an inverse cross‐regime pattern and remains statistically non‐significant in the fixed‐effects models, indicating that climate‐related SDG performance captures a structurally distinct dimension whose meaning depends in part on emissions, consumption, energy use, industrial structure, and development stage. The four‐regime solution is reasonably stable but not invariant to method or construct specification. The study contributes to the strategic management and sustainability literature by extending configuration theory to the national level and identifying heterogeneous national sustainability profiles. For firms and MSMEs, these regimes are interpreted as macro‐level opportunity and constraint environments; extended Goal 12 sensitivity analysis acknowledges the responsible‐consumption dimension, although green consumer behavior is not directly measured.