ETD

• education
• environmental behaviour
• institutional quality
• italy regional heterogeneity
• recycling rate
• social capital
• state society synergy

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the social and institutional determinants of regional recycling rate in Italy. Using a balanced panel of Italian regions over the period 2005–2019, the analysis examines how education, social capital, and institutional quality jointly shape recycling outcomes. At the national level, the results show that education exerts a positive and robust effect on recycling performance, highlighting the role of human capital in fostering environmentally responsible behaviour. Social capital and institutional quality also play a central role, but primarily through their interaction. The two factors are complementary and reinforce one another, with higher recycling rates observed only in regions where civic cooperation and institutional capacity are jointly strong. This finding is consistent with the notion of state–society synergy in collective environmental action. The analysis further reveals substantial heterogeneity across macro-areas. In Northern Italy, recycling outcomes are strongly driven by institutional quality and by its interaction with social capital, reflecting a mature institutional–civic equilibrium in which administrative capacity and civic cooperation mutually reinforce one another. The Centre largely mirrors this pattern, sharing similar underlying social and institutional mechanisms, though with differences in the relative weight of individual factors. In the South, by contrast, education and social capital exhibit stronger positive associations with recycling relative to the North, while institutional quality and its interaction with social capital are significantly weaker, signaling a markedly different institutional–civic configuration.