Informal Institutions and Compliance: The Case of Household Waste Management in Densely Populated Cities

As large cities complete the final stage of industrialization and urbanization, environmentalism begins to catch up with the consumerism in people’s mentality. Household waste management, such as sorting and recycling, is considered as an ultimate solution for waste reduction and more efficient treatment. Built on the theory of target compliance and the concept of the informal institution in New Institutional Economics, this dissertation aims to explain the counterintuitive prevalence of non-compliance in household waste sorting programs in relatively wealthy industrialized societies where people have high environmental awareness. The study compared the situations in Singapore and Shanghai. Different types of narratives about recycling have been generated through q study and the impact of critical institutional variables have been analyzed through multivariate regressions. The study finds that informal institutions have a different magnitude of influence on recycling behavior and suggests future recycling policy options best catered to the two cities.