Classification and dynamic evolution of public's environmental risk coping actions in China

Abstract

Existing studies on public attitudes and actions towards sites elections of projects with existing environmental risk usually make simple binary partition and mostly focus on public confrontational actions. Whereas, no attention has been paid to the complexity and dynamic convertibility of public's risk coping actions. This paper constructs an integrated framework for environmental risk coping actions referring to risk social amplification theory and risk protective theory. Through the comparative analysis with three typical projects of nuclear facilities in China, it has been found that there are four different types of risk coping action based on dual dimensions of risk perception and risk communication, namely, acquiescence–support and acquiescence–adaption, belonging to low‐grade risk coping actions, and two high‐grade risk coping actions, prevention–mobilization and prevention–protest. Under specific conditions, the dynamic conversions from low grade to high grade among the four action choice models also existed. Findings of this paper try to provide a theoretical interpretation for getting a better understanding of the public action choices in relation to environment risk. In the meanwhile, policy enlightenment to risk governance for government has also been discussed.