Environmental awareness of nations: the interplay with institutional transformation

The paper aims to investigate the main factors responsible for the acquisition of environmental awareness by societies. We apply the institutional analysis approach that puts in evidence the factors shaping formal and informal rules and their role in the acquisition of environmental concern. The analysis demonstrates how enforcement and flexibility of formal rules and purposeful formation of informal rules may contribute to create a favourable framework for the acquisition of environmental awareness. In particular, rule of law stringency is shown to be positively related to environmental concern of the countries. We, therefore, put forward a generic scheme of the interplay between institutional change and environmental awareness, where a double causality relationship always holds. The analysis may serve as a starting point to understand the origins of the acquisition of environmental awareness over the globe and can be used for an empirical analysis based on the debate on world environmental renascence.