Received vs. given: Willingness to pay for sponge city program from a perceived value perspective

Abstract

Rapid urbanization and global climate change have led to urban flooding on the one hand and water shortages on the other hand, which presents a global issue. To deal with the urban flooding and water quality issues, China has introduced the sponge city initiative to optimize urban water ecosystem. As a large-scale public project addressing environmental issues, the sponge city initiative is subject to public financial support and perception. Willingness to pay (WTP) is an effective tool to explore public behavioral intention and evaluate integrated benefits of project. This study aims to investigate the pathway to improve WTP from a ‘perceived value’ perspective based on Theory of Planned Behavior. Guyuan city, one of the pilot sponge cities in China, is chosen as a case study, and a questionnaire survey was administered in the affected communities with 656 respondents. Under the framework of planned behavior, the results showed that: (1) Perceived behavioral control had the strongest effect on WTP, especially the obstacle from perceived economic capacity was highlighted; (2) The consistency of attitude-intention relationship was identified, while subjective norm was not critical to WTP; (3) Perceived value was highlighted as the antecedent to predict WTP indirectly via the dual frameworks from value to behavior; (4) A 8.3% surcharge of domestic water tariff was accepted as reasonable for the sponge city development. These findings provide practical implications for government and developers to optimize financing and operation of sponge city developments. As a result, the sustainable performance of sponge city could be improved.