Abstract
As the Chinese economy grows, Chinese people’s environmental behavior enormously affects the environment of neighboring countries as well as China. Many studies have related environmental behavior to personal characteristics such as environmental knowledge and attitude or to national policies such as environmental taxes and regulations. Few studies have looked at how regional factors affect residents’ environmental behaviors, particularly for China. This is a substantive gap in the literature regarding the effects of regional governments on resident behavior at a closer distance via different mechanisms than the national government. This paper examines determinants of individual pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in terms of regional attributes as well as personal characteristics in China. For this purpose, we applied a multi-level regression model that regresses the degree of PEB on both individual and regional level factors, using Chinese General Social Survey data and the China Environment Yearbook data for the year 2010. The analysis shows that environmental attitude, willingness to pay for the environment, objective and subjective environmental knowledge, and environmental risk perception all promote PEB at the individual level. These results are in line with the existing literature on environmental behavior. In addition, at the regional level, environmental budgets, administrative enforcement, and economic development have positive impacts on resident PEB, while environmental pollution has a negative effect. Specifically, the levels of regional economic development and administrative enforcement not only directly affect behavior, but also indirectly affect behavior by controlling the influence of individual level variables. This means that the relationships between individual level variables and environmental behavior can be changed by regional contextual factors. These results suggest that regional government efforts for the environment can effectively promote PEB.
Highlights
More and more studies on pro-environmental behavior (PEB) are examining multi-level factors influencing individual PEB, looking at personal factors such as environmental consciousness, interest, norms, intentions, and values and external factors such as economic and environmental conditions, culture characteristics, government regulations, and environmental NGOs [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
Where Yij is the degree of PEB for person i in region j; Xij is a vector composed of individual level variables, including environmental attitudes, environmental knowledge, sex, age, education, income, ethnicity, and so on; θj and β are the regression coefficient vectors including the constant term for Levels 1 and 2, respectively; Zj is a matrix of row vectors created by repeatedly stacking regional level variables, including environmental pollution, economic development, and public urban facility, and additional variables; and εij is the error term for Level 1 and uj the error vector for Level 2
The analysis shows that regional governments can play an important role in inducing individual PEB
Summary
More and more studies on pro-environmental behavior (PEB) are examining multi-level factors influencing individual PEB, looking at personal factors such as environmental consciousness, interest, norms, intentions, and values and external factors such as economic and environmental conditions, culture characteristics, government regulations, and environmental NGOs [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. They note that variations in external factors lead to differences in PEB across countries mainly using data for the Western world. The existing studies focus on national policies such as taxation and regulations but do not focus on the impacts of regional government attributes and policies on PEB. What will be the effects of regional factors? Regional governments are entrusted with the task of environmental enforcement from the central government and interface with residents. They play a mediating role between the central government and residents. The same national policy may have different impacts on residents’ behavior depending on regional government policies. It is important to examine the effects of regional characteristics separately
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