Substitution or complementary effects: The impact of neighborhood effects and policy interventions on farmers’ pesticide packaging waste recycling behavior

How to encourage farmers to recycle pesticide packaging waste (PPW) is key to improving rural habitat. Previous literature has focused more on the role of policy interventions from a formal system perspective. Based on the perspective of combining informal and formal systems, this study empirically explores the impact of neighborhood effects and policy interventions on farmers’ PPW recycling behavior by using data from the China Rural Revitalization Survey (CRRS) and constructing an ordered probit model. The results show that neighborhood effects and policy interventions have a significant positive impact on farmers’ PPW recycling behavior, respectively, and the conclusion still holds after robustness test. In addition, neighborhood effects and policy interventions have substitution effects on farmers’ PPW recycling behavior. Finally, the heterogeneity analysis show that neighborhood effects generate significant incentive advantages for high-income farmers, elite farmers, and less-developed regions, whereas policy interventions are the opposite of it. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of rural neighborhoods and implement policies that varied by people and regions, thereby improving farmers’ PPW recycling behaviors.