Abstract
Environmental and social sustainability continues to pose relevant challenges in industry, prompting a proliferation of public policies aimed at supporting companies in facing these issues. This evolving condition has increasingly attracted scholarly attention to the policymaking of industrial sustainability policies. Nevertheless, existing studies remain fragmented, and a holistic, up-to-date map of research integrating current knowledge from the definition of the agenda setting and policy design to policy evaluation, still lacks. Besides, literature offers limited reviews concerning the practical implementation of sustainability policies. Hence, recognizing the importance of integrating academic knowledge with real-world application to foster firms’ social and environmental sustainability, the first research question of the Thesis relates to the current status of research and practice in the field. To this end, a dual-method approach was adopted, comprising a systematic literature review and a review of climate and energy policies. More in depth, as concerns the literature review, 175 peer-reviewed papers on the topic were identified and analyzed by relying on Elsevier’s Scopus and Web of Science, and combining appropriate keywords related to sustainability, policy and industry. These papers were then classified and summarized in detail, according to five stages of the policymaking process. Instead, as for the policy review, the policy context was defined as the European Union (EU) strategies for reducing industrial Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions and therefore focused specifically on climate and energy policies targeting industry. Particularly, the analysis first involved the EU directives, regulations and decisions, and subsequently a sample of 142 domestic policies implemented between 1990 and 2022 by 16 EU Member States. These policies were classified and compared at country level in terms of policy dimensions (instruments, goals and settings). While the analysis on the current status of research into industrial sustainability policies revealed that a part of literature needs a deeper investigation into policy design, the study on the current status of practice in EU climate and energy policy mixes suggested the potential key role of policy design for policy effectiveness. Hence, the second research question of the Thesis regards how environmental policies can be effectively designed. This question was answered from a dual perspective involving both policy mixes and single policies. Specifically, policy mixes were analyzed to determine effective configurations of policy dimensions to achieve a national policy outcome; single policies were studied in terms of success factors to obtain an effective implementation of the policy by companies. These two investigations required the application of two diverse methodological approaches. First, the effective configuration of policy dimensions was assessed through a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), using the same sample of policies adopted for the policy review. The analysis showed that public decisions on the policy instrument are more relevant for industrial GHG emissions reduction, than those on goals and settings. Second, success factors in environmental policy design were explored for the single case study of the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where the local government has been demonstrating a strong commitment to environmental sustainability. For this research, primary data were collected through interviews with representatives from both public administration and private firms. The identified key policy-related drivers were associated with different typologies of policy instruments and interpreted under the lens of Agency Theory, in order to identify how these success factors might mitigate limitations in the relationship between firms and government and therefore enhance the effectiveness of the policy. With this multi-method investigation, the Thesis advances research on industrial sustainability policies, and especially on environmental policy design. Additionally, it offers practical insights into more effective sustainability policymaking, as well as suggestions for firm managers.