Abstract
Sustainable development aims for a viable interaction between human and physical nature. However, how do we perceive the social and natural world, rationalize our behavior, and modify our ways of life? Here, we apply the idea of worldviews to cognition and rationality in transport since a transition to sustainable mobility is crucial in dealing with global climate change. We utilize Cultural Theory and the British Social Attitudes survey (N = 1,120) to study how three worldviews-egalitarianism, hierarchy, and individualism-relate to people's attitudes to sustainable mobility. First, we use factor analysis to extract the three worldviews or ways of life in Great Britain. Second, we construct hypotheses concerning the correlations between the worldviews and social attitudes to sustainable mobility. Our statistical analysis of 11 mobility issues in the survey confirms our hypotheses, elucidating the cultural cognition or rationality that underlies people's transport decision-making. Egalitarianism favors demand control, environmental friendliness, and action driven by inner conviction; hierarchy privileges conformity, order, and security; and individualism embraces freedom, speed, and external incentives. The findings show that the worldviews have a systematic and comprehensive impact on how people assess sustainable mobility debates. Moreover, we perform regression analysis to investigate how these cultural styles are associated with British people's sociodemographics and political party identification, which can help identify the characteristics of stakeholders in sustainability planning and engagement. We conclude that the worldviews form the bedrock of individual decisions on sustainable mobility and have a wider significance for holistic sustainability governance.
Highlights
Sustainable development aims for a viable interaction between human and physical nature
Addressing the problem of sustainable mobility or contemporary sustainability issues requires a strategy of postnormal science [5]: that is, in addition to “hard,” objective scientific facts, “soft,” subjective value judgments have to be integrated into sustainability assessments and decision-making [6,7,8]
How do people perceive the interaction between the social and the natural worlds? How can this perception have an impact on their attitudes to urban environmental and transport issues? What are the possible solutions to sustainable mobility planning and urban governance in general? Here, we measure the prevalence of different worldviews in Great Britain using Cultural Theory and the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey [15]
Summary
Sustainable development aims for a viable interaction between human and physical nature. Addressing the problem of sustainable mobility or contemporary sustainability issues requires a strategy of postnormal science [5]: that is, in addition to “hard,” objective scientific facts, “soft,” subjective value judgments have to be integrated into sustainability assessments and decision-making [6,7,8] This is because different people have distinct needs, definitions of good quality of life, and expectations of the future [8, 9]. To analyze complex ideas of how people interpret reality, develop value orientations, and define needs and the good life, the notion of worldviews proved to be useful. Through exploring three worldviews (egalitarianism, hierarchy, and individualism), our results map across British people’s attitudes to mobility debates in terms of the economic, environmental, social, and political dimensions. Our study demonstrates a framework for identifying what behavioral and institutional barriers hinder the transformations needed to achieve better cities and societies
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