Uncertainty or trust? Political trust, perceived uncertainty and public acceptance of personal carbon trading policy.

Abstract

Achieving carbon neutrality has become a global consensus, and plenty of measures and policies have been proposed in various industries to obtain this ambitious goal. As an innovative and radical environmental policy tool, personal carbon trading (PCT) policy which aims to reduce carbon emissions from the private consumption sector has aroused the attention. For a new policy tool, public support and acceptance is critical to obtain policy legitimacy and policy implementation. To implement PCT policy smoothly, the current research aims to explore the antecedents of public acceptance. From the emotional reaction perspective, this research mainly evaluated how political trust, perceived uncertainty and associated emotions matter for public acceptance of PCT policy. Based on the survey data, this research revealed that political trust has a direct positive impact on public acceptance of PCT policy. Meanwhile, political trust also has an indirect impact on public acceptance of PCT policy via emotions. Specifically, political trust is positively associated with positive emotions and negatively associated with negative emotions. Positive emotions promote public to accept PCT policy, while negative emotions inhibit public to accept PCT policy. The negative emotions exert a more powerful impact on public acceptance than positive emotions. Additionally, we found that perceived uncertainty exerts a negative effect on public acceptance and negatively regulates the relationship between political trust and public acceptance. That is, perceived uncertainty has a significant substitution effect on political trust. According to the research findings, policy implications to improve public acceptance of PCT policy were explored.