Environmental Culture and Household Willingness to Pay for Urban Waste Governance

The growing pressure of municipal waste generation and its associated environmental consequences has turned household participation into a central challenge for sustainable waste governance and circular-economy transition. This study adopts Cultural Additivity Theory and employs Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics to examine how interactions between environmental–cultural and governance value bundles shape household willingness to pay (WTP) for improved urban waste management services, using survey data from 352 households in Hai Phong City, Vietnam. The results show that both the perceived importance of Commune Authorities and Women’s Unions are positively associated with WTP. More importantly, environmental perception and behavior further strengthen these governance–WTP associations, indicating that household financial support for improved waste management is greater when governance values interact with stronger environmental–cultural values. In contrast, higher environmental service satisfaction tends to weaken the positive association between governance importance and WTP. These findings suggest that household WTP is better understood as a relational outcome of interacting value bundles rather than as the product of isolated determinants operating independently. This study makes three contributions. First, it extends Cultural Additivity Theory into the field of urban environmental governance by demonstrating how interactions among value bundles shape household environmental decision-making. Second, it advances the waste-management literature by showing that environmental perception and environmental behavior become more influential when embedded within supportive governance and community structures. Third, it provides empirical evidence for developing community-based urban waste-management policies that integrate environmental communication, source-separation initiatives, local governance, and women-led community engagement to strengthen public participation and support sustainable urban waste-management systems.