CROSS-SECTOR GOVERNANCE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: INSTITUTIONAL SYNTHESIS OF THE POLICY-PRACTICE GAP AND GOVERNANCE INNOVATION

Abstract

This academic article has three objectives: 1) To synthesize and critically examine existing knowledge on the policy–practice gap in cross-sector contexts; 2) To develop a conceptual framework explaining the relationships among institutional pressures, the policy-practice gap, governance innovation, and sustainable development outcomes; and 3) To propose how this framework can be developed into a preliminary self-assessment approach for public and private organizations. An integrative literature review was employed, drawing on works published between 2015 and 2026 from the ScienceDirect and Thai JO databases, supplemented by Google Scholar, seminal theoretical works, and backward citation chaining. The synthesis identifies three issues that remain unresolved in the literature: whether the gap arises from symbolic impression management or from structural constraints; which types of institutional pressure drive substantive implementation; and whether cross-sector governance narrows the gap or adds complexity to coordination. The findings indicate that decoupling is associated with organizational capacity, accountability mechanisms, conflicting institutional pressures, and constraints on coordination, rather than with symbolic response alone. Diagnosing the source of a gap therefore matters as much as closing it, since capacity problems and conflicting pressures call for different remedies. The proposed framework comprises six interrelated components: institutional pressures in coercive, normative, and mimetic forms; sustainability policy adoption; the policy–practice gap; governance innovation; sustainable development outcomes; and contextual factors. Governance innovation is positioned as the linking mechanism, operating through the assignment of roles and accountability, shared information and indicator systems, resource allocation, and joint decision-making arenas. Its effect on sustainable development outcomes is indirect, working through the reduction of the gap, and every relationship in the framework is conditioned by context. The framework and its propositions remain empirically untested; indicators should therefore be developed and their validity examined in actual public and private organizational settings before the framework is applied more widely.