RISULTATI RICERCA

The new paradigm of the Circular Economy-CE appeared in the last decades as a response to the growing demand for sustainability, understood as a way to balance both economic, and environmental and societal aspects. Circular Economy, indeed, could change the traditional economic model, typically called Linear Economy. Within this transition, Green Public Procurement could help the developed economy worldwide to reach this goal. The paper is an international comparison on the main features of GPP policies within the CE framework of a sample of EU countries, China, Japan, and USA. The research was carried on combining interviews with experts and desk research. The main evidence is that EU and Eastern countries are leading countries in CE policies. Regarding GPP implementation, differences emerge within Europe, especially in federal states. Besides this, China, and USA suffer a not-organic regulation approach. Concluding, authors suggest to deep the barriers and drivers on GPP by international comparison with different regional contexts with a higher number of informants. This could help both policymakers and academia for further development of public policies.

Due to climate change and energy price volatility, companies are tackling an energy transition entailing the reconfiguration of energy and material flows within their production processes. In this context, interfirm energy cooperation among two or more companies presents an effective and innovative option for exploiting the benefits associated with the exchange of energy- related products and services. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate and categorize replicable mechanisms and solutions in terms of sustainable business models for reaching an effective and long-lasting interfirm energy cooperation in industrial parks. By assuming a park manager’ s perspective and developing a framework based on sustainable business model archetypes, three types of business models for implementing interfirm energy cooperation from mainly service-based to mainly product-based value propositions are identified and described. This paper provides indications for developing value proposition, value creation and delivery, and value capture in each type of business model, by discussing specific technical and organizational capabilities to be possessed and improved by park managers and park companies. Moreover, this study contributes to the literature on sustainable business models by exploring their systemic dimensions and provides managerial implications concerning the role of park managers.

The paper makes use of a recently developed total cost of ownership (TCO) methodology to assess the cost competitiveness of the best-selling battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), diesel and petrol cars in Norway and Italy, two countries at the antipodes for BEV uptake in Europe. The results of the TCO study show that in Norway BEVs are the most competitive amongst the four propulsion systems since they have the lowest average value for the annualized TCO/km, whereas in Italy BEVs are the least cost-competitive. In Norway the government encourages the purchase of BEVs by imposing much lower registration taxes than the very high applied to internal combustion engine vehicles, whilst in Italy BEV uptake is mostly supported by a decrease in the purchase price. The paper also unveils a negative relationship between the volume of each model sales and the corresponding annualized TCO/km, both for the joint database and, separately, for each country. Yet, looking at Norway, we show that the volume of car sales is positively associated with the purely electric propulsion system, but not with the annualized TCO/km, pointing to possible non-monetary motives leading consumers’ choices. The authors provide policy recommendations on fiscal and non-fiscal measures to support BEVs diffusion in countries such as Italy, where BEV uptake is low but with relevant potential.

This study explores the issues of equity oil development strategy for augmenting energy security and attempts to analyse the factors influencing cross border equity oil development. India’s multi-pronged energy policy strategies comprise enhancing domestic exploration, supply diversification, demand side management, and securing long term fossil fuel supplies through overseas equity oil development. Any one of the strategies shall not work in isolation and therefore the component of equity oil development assumes significance to India’s energy security ecosystem. This paper employs a quantitative approach taking into account the output of literature review and questionnaire survey to analyse the determinants influencing equity oil development from theoretical and practical perspectives. The study concludes that equity oil development in the Indian energy security context are influenced by long term stable policy, concessional state funding, resource pooling, decentralisation, and knowledge and technology transfer. The findings in this paper and analysis would assist policy makers to understand the key determinants for geo-strategic planning for securing energy resources in the long term towards augmenting energy security of India.

Regional governments represent an increasingly relevant component in climate change policies, which showcase a high interest in the climate change sphere and provide several benefits connected with their governance. This study aims to shed light on this scale of governance by describing the climate change policies of 61 regions from all over the world and by analysing the possible connections between the regional environmental policy instruments and the level of mitigation and adaptation commitment. The results show that the regional governments of this work appear to be an active component in climate policy, since they all have their own GHG emission reduction targets, devise their own climate policies and instruments and participate in international climate networks. All regions have reported mitigation and adaptation commitments, with different levels of ambition. In addition, it is observable that while some regions (mainly the North) focus mostly on mitigation targets, other (the South) focus on adaptation. Finally, there does not seem to be a connection between the level of climate commitment and the preference for some policy instruments.

In this paper we present a pragmatic basis for a multilateral cooperation to deal with climate change problem after accounting for the interests of both developed and developing economies. We develop our argument for such a cooperation based on the principle of affordability of developed countries and accessibility of developing countries. Towards this, we have estimated a panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model using data pertaining to groups of countries classified based on region and income from 1960 to 2014. Results show that countries with high Gross Domestic Product (GDP) percapita emit more volume of hazardous Greenhouse Gases (GHG) than their developing counterparts and more importantly, the coefficient of elasticity of emission to the growth rate of GDP is substantially lower for highincome countries. Therefore, we argue that developed countries may lead the world in the climate change mitigation efforts through emission reduction and promotion of efficient use of energy resources.

The increasing role of renewables, together with the escalation of digital technologies and the pressure for a more active role of consumers and prosumers, are the natural basis for the development of Local Electricity Markets (LEM). The goal of this paper is to contribute to the current debate on LEM, drafting several proposals about key issues to be considered in outlining the LEM business model and market design. We take advantage of the ongoing project "NEMoGrid", which aims at defining and validating a prototype of LEM by integrating local PVs generation into the grid and with a peer-to-peer trading scheme. Transactions are settled on the Ethereum blockchain and the LEM is validated through onsite tests in Switzerland. Such tests are still running, therefore we use preliminary findings to make our suggestions, also highlighting several caveats and policy complexities. Keywords: local energy markets, peer-to-peer, renewable energy sources, electricity market design, electricity business models.