Designing for Evaluability in Recycling and Waste Governance: A Review of Intervention Traditions and Socio-Technical Architecture

Research on recycling and waste governance has produced extensive knowledge about the factors influencing environmentally responsible behavior. Studies examine strategies—including feedback systems, incentives, social norms, gamification, and certification schemes—to encourage recycling and waste reduction. Although these approaches differ in their theoretical foundations and intervention designs, many seek to make environmental actions visible, measurable, and feasible. Less attention has been devoted to how such actions acquire social meaning and become recognizable as worthy of evaluation, distinction, and acknowledgment. This study addresses that gap through a configurative review of 37 documents selected to represent diverse recycling and waste-governance intervention traditions. A comparative analysis reconstructed the recurring explanatory mechanisms through which environmental actions become evaluable. The findings show that intervention traditions commonly treated as distinct repeatedly rely on an evaluative architecture comprising five interacting components: visibility, evaluation, credibility, distinction, and embedding. These components constitute recognition infrastructures—governance arrangements that produce evaluability by rendering environmental actions observable, publicly meaningful, and sustainable over time. The framework identifies similarities across intervention traditions often studied separately and shifts attention from individual intervention tools to the broader arrangements that make environmental actions significant, while providing a practical lens for designing more durable recycling and waste-governance interventions.