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Taming plastic pollution—a systematic mapping of the literature on plastic policies between 2009 and 2024
Summary
This systematic review mapped 15 years of academic literature on plastic pollution policy and politics, finding that research has focused heavily on policy inventories, impact assessments, and global governance architecture, while systematic evaluations of policy effectiveness and actor-level political analyses remain scarce. The authors argue that future research must shift toward understanding the politics of compliance and country-level performance to inform the effectiveness of an emerging multilateral plastics agreement.
Abstract This review article systematically maps the literature on the policy and politics of plastic pollution since 2009 and identifies future avenues for research. The conceptualization of wicked problems guides the structure of this review along two dimensions of policymaking: the policy dimension, which concerns problem definitions and objectives, and policy solutions. The politics dimension reflects stakeholders and their perception of problems and interests. We show that the respective research has gained momentum in the past 15 years, but it still has a strong focus on inventorying policies or policy instruments, policy evaluations or impact assessments, and behavioural analyses, as well as investigations of the global governance architecture and the need for a new multilateral environmental agreement (MEA). In contrast, systematic assessments of policy efficacy or country-level plastic policy performance are still rare. Likewise, studies about the politics dimension, i.e. on actors involved in policymaking and their policy beliefs and preferences, are still scant. However, both aspects are crucial in the light of a new MEA, as its success and effectiveness strongly hinge on the capacity and willingness of countries to comply with MEA obligations, i.e. adopt and implement respective policies at the national and local levels. Hence, future research should focus more on politics instead of policy to provide new insights into the feasibility of the different policy options, and it should work more on systematic evaluations of policy instruments along the life cycle of plastics and country performances.