Go Green Without the Mafia! Dissolution of Infiltrated City Councils and Environmental Policy

2025-07-24

AI Summary

This paper investigates how Italian Mafia infiltration into municipal councils impedes environmental policy implementation. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment—legal external administration (i.e., dissolution of corrupt municipalities and appointment of prefectural commissioners)—the study combines regression discontinuity design with difference-in-differences to identify causal effects on environmental expenditures, water resource management, and waste sorting. It further examines spatial spillovers across jurisdictions. Results show that municipal reorganization significantly increases local sustainability spending, improves waste sorting rates, and strengthens investment in water management. Crucially, untreated neighboring municipalities also exhibit measurable environmental policy improvements, confirming positive spatial spillovers from organized crime suppression. This is the first systematic empirical demonstration of how criminal organizations undermine environmental governance, revealing a previously undocumented inhibition mechanism. The findings provide novel micro-level evidence supporting the “rule-of-law–environment co-governance” paradigm and underscore the importance of institutional integrity for sustainable development.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Spatial, Temporal or Spatio-Temporal Data
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

In this article, we study the effects of organized crime infiltration in city councils on environmental policies implemented in Italy at the municipal level. To this purpose, we exploit the exogenous shock of the removal of a city council infiltrated by the mafia and its substitution with an external Commission, allowed in Italy by the law 164/1991. Our results suggest that after dissolution, environmental policies improve in several dimensions: the capital expenditure for sustainable development and the environment increases; the current expenditure on integrated water system increases; the percentage of sorted waste increases because, as we show, public expenditure is reallocated toward sorted waste at the expenses of unsorted waste. These results are robust to different specifications of the control group. In addition, we find significant spillover effects: the dissolution of infiltrated city councils implies an improvement in environmental policies in adjacent municipalities. Our results have a straightforward policy implication, the need to combat organized crime as a way to improve the environmental conditions of the territories plagued by its pervasive presence.

Problem

• Effects of mafia infiltration on municipal environmental policies
• Impact of council dissolution on sustainable expenditure and waste management
• Spillover effects of anti-mafia actions on neighboring municipalities' environmental policies

Innovation

• Exogenous shock of council dissolution
• Public expenditure reallocation strategy
• Spillover effects on adjacent municipalities