Cultural change and environmentalism: a cross-national approach of mass publics and decision makers

Abstract

The main focus of this study - the Global Environmental Survey (GOES) - is the impact of cultural influences on environmental attitudes. GOES examines the cultural impact from a basic cross-national perspective, investigating the impact of cultural change and value shifts on environmental concern, attitudes, and behavior in both Western and non-Western societies. This study provides cross-national insights in how mass publics and decision makers in both developed and developing countries frame environmental problems and solutions. In addition, the project has shown how leading environmental decision makers and opinion leaders assess the environmental beliefs and attitudes of the public. Apparently, citizens are not yet ready to translate pro-environmental concerns into acceptance of far-reaching environmental policy measures. Citizens in both developed and developing countries seem to prefer voluntary lifestyle changes. Moving from environmental concern via policy support to actual (reported) environmental behavior, we can conclude that persistent pro-environmental behavior does not describe citizens' environmental involvement and commitment. Our data indicate that environmentally relevant behaviors (e.g., transportation, energy use, recycling, household purchases, political activism) do not form a consistent and coherent pattern. Practice of one type of ecologically conscious behavior does not predict engagement in another. It is not that people reserve a distinctive spot in their mental software for judging the environmental impact of habitual behaviors. Their mental mapping probably consists of manifold decisional heuristics, including comfort, health, safety, price, efficiency, effectiveness, and social responsibility, which are likely to be hierarchically ordered and in competition with environmental heuristics. A focus on specific behaviors, though, reveals that citizens may be deeply involved in "green" behavior. This is related in part to differences in opportunity structures, social situation and, arguably, cultural differences in exposure to green ideas. The policy lesson from this is not to prompt "general" environmentally friendly consumer behavior, but to promote single citizen actions having positive environmental impacts and, certainly, to create appropriate opportunity structures. In addition to the general national sample GOES study, an additional decision makers' module addressed the following questions, among others: Is there a systematic bias in environmental decision makers' estimates of environmental attitudes and environmental policy preferences of the general public? How do decision makers value a number of policies that are direct implementations of international environmental treaties, and how do they judge their own national performance in this respect? The new module enabled us to study differences between environmental decision makers and general public attitudes and policy preferences in the environmental policy arena, and we did find some remarkable and systematic cross-national biases in decision makers' competence of estimating the general public's environmental beliefs and policy support. These biases, interestingly, are related to issues at the core of the sustainability debate.