Unpacking landscape pressures on socio-technical regimes: Insights on the urban waste management system

• Building on MLP we develop a new conceptual framework to assess landscape sources of pressure upon the socio-technical regime.
• We present a pressure matrix and apply it to a case-study conducted in the province of Foggia south-east of Italy).
• We perform a stakeholders’ analysis, aimed at identifying the key stakeholders acting at the socio-technical landscape .
• We assess sources of pressure exploring economic and political pressures exerted at both local and global level.
• We assessed and classify the key sources of pressure, identify weak and strong areas of pressure.
• A low pressure effort can trigger a ‘combined pressure mechanism’ by stimulating competitiveness and leading to a cascade effect.

In the last decades, the problem of waste management has gained momentum because of its associated environmental and health risks. This fosters a paradigm shift towards more sustainable regimes. This paper assesses the sources of pressure at the landscape level that are able to trigger a transition towards a sustainable innovative waste-management system. The paper carries out (i) a stakeholder’s analysis, aimed at identifying the key stakeholders acting at the socio-technical landscape; and (ii) an assessment of sources of pressure, which explores economic and political pressures exerted at both local and global levels. Our findings suggest that the transition towards a sustainable waste-management regime is associated with a ‘combined pressure mechanism’, which is based on the concerted action of different actors. In particular, it was observed that the combination of economic and political pressure triggered a competition/imitation mechanism among the receivers, activating a web of indirect sources of pressure.