Urban sustainability commitment in Germany – attempts to nail a pudding to the wall

Knowledge about urban sustainability policies seems highly relevant regarding the ability to govern sustainable development actively. Based on this assumption, this paper reports on a new dataset in which the sustainability policies of 189 German cities are collected and aggregated into an index measuring the city’s overall sustainability commitment in 2021. This is the first attempt to collect the sustainability policies of a high number of German cities based on a multidimensional understanding of sustainability and from a policy-analytical perspective using the concept of policy density. The analysis shows that 80% of the cities are engaged with sustainability but to a significantly varying degree: ‘Beginner’ cities with a low index value do not only use less binding or symbolic policies and not all ‘leading’ cities have formulated overarching strategies. These findings fit the assumption that dichotomous operationalization of sustainability commitment, which is mainly found in the literature, might fall short of capturing the actual extent of cities’ sustainability efforts, while the developed index allows for a more differentiated operationalization. The index can be used for future analyses aimed at examining the impact of policies on sustainable development or investigating why some cities actively commit to sustainability, and others do not.