Monitoring and evaluation of regional industrial sustainability: Evidence from Italian regions

Abstract Industrial sustainability now appears to be moving up the management agenda in many organizations and thus countries, mainly focused on performance achieved at regional level. In this context, government becomes a significant driver of both environmental policy and technology innovation for firms, which are actually innovating their processes for improving the global sustainability of territories. However, these processes exhibit many difficulties linked to the presence of different guidelines, involved stakeholders and objectives in order to ensure a more sustainable territorial development. In order to evaluate industrial sustainability achieved at regional level, we propose a new approach based on a reappraisal of the classical SWOT analysis. By using multivariate analysis methodologies and a wider battery of indicators, this approach identifies homogeneous groups of regions and describes points of strength and weakness points for each one. The results obtained, as well as evaluating the achievements of regional sustainable industrial policy, provide a guide for the establishment of regional policies, according to European directives.