Waste management performances beyond the Italian North-South Divide: Spatial Analyses of Geographical, Economic and Institutional Dimensions

Many advanced countries have been experiencing waste crises, namely a failure to properly collect and separate urban waste, difficulties regarding both the management landfill sites close to or beyond their full capacity, and the collocation of landfills and incinerators in the territory. These crises appear to be primarily driven by policy failures that include delays in introducing more economically-oriented instruments and a lack of new and diversified tools in waste management and disposal facilities. Italy has been and is a premier case study, with major crises appearing in its less-developed South. Though the North-South divide is a core part of the history of waste and other ‘convergence failures’ and belongs to a typical economic development analysis – it has received attention within ‘Waste Kuznets curves’ literature - we believe nevertheless that other forces and dynamics play an important role. For instance, the process of policy decentralisation that has characterised many good public provisions, which delegates competencies to regions and provinces, is a key aspect behind waste management performance. Within larger autonomous spaces, different provinces can achieve different performances, either by imitating or differentiating themselves from neighbouring agents. The main research question is to assess whether it is truly just a North-South divide that largely explains the heterogeneous waste management and disposal performances inside Italy, or whether, as we believe, a different type of geo-clustering becomes apparent, which depends more on the quality of waste policy and idiosyncratic socio-economic factors. On the basis of a 2000-2008 dataset that covers 103 provinces over a wide range of information on waste management, socio-economic, structural and policy features, we aim at identifying ‘economic and institutional waste models’ by grouping the performances of provinces over time and space. The dynamic evolution of clusters allows for an analysis of how the system performance has evolved, as well as what weaknesses and strengths in terms of ‘waste management/policy models’ may exist.