Behavioural and institutional drivers of green technology adoption: an extended technology acceptance model for sustainability transitions

The adoption of green technologies is a central component of sustainability transitions, yet it cannot be fully understood through individual cognitive evaluations alone. Increasing evidence suggests that citizens’ acceptance of environmentally oriented technologies is shaped by institutional and normative contexts that influence behavioural decision-making. In response to this challenge, this study develops a conceptual extension of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to examine green technology acceptance from an integrative perspective grounded in environmental psychology and behavioural public policy. The analysis is based on a structured conceptual synthesis informed by bibliometric and semantic evidence from 789 Scopus-indexed articles published between 2021 and 2025, including early-indexed records from 2025 available at the time of data retrieval. Recurrent patterns within this corpus link technology acceptance research with institutional constructs such as trust, legitimacy, transparency, and community support. These insights are complemented by a structured expert elicitation exercise using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), applied in an exploratory manner to examine the relative salience of institutional dimensions within the proposed framework. Rather than offering empirical validation of behavioural relationships, the study advances a theoretically grounded conceptual model in which institutional trust and legitimacy operate as contextual conditions shaping the relationship between perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and behavioural intention in sustainability-related adoption contexts. Institutional transparency and community support further reinforce perceptions of fairness, credibility, and social endorsement. Overall, the resulting framework conceptualises green technology adoption as a socially and institutionally embedded process, providing a coherent analytical foundation for future empirical research and for the design of behavioural public policies aimed at supporting sustainability transitions.