Environmental information transparency and public behaviour

Abstract

Environmental information disclosure (EID) has the potential to mobilise citizens’ pro-environmental behaviours, via intermediate factors such as enhancing social trust in governmental authorities and reducing protest attitudes towards governmental initiatives focusing on environmental protection and ecological restoration. However, there is a paucity of empirical studies in the area, which calls for the investigation on the theoretical linkages between EID, trust, attitudes, and behaviour. Deeply rooted in the democratic context, EID satisfying citizens’ right to be informed has been widely adopted and become matured in terms of legal regulations, disclosure content, and disclosure modes. In the non-democratic context, the last decade has witnessed a remarkable progress in EID. Despite the prevalence of EID worldwide as a new wave of environmental governance, it is understudied whether EID could steer people’s supportive environmental decisions in democratic and non-democratic contexts alike. This thesis reports the findings of a comparative study between Belgium (as a representative of democratic context) and China (as a representative of non-democratic context) focusing on the pathways linking EID, intermediate variables, and environmental decisions using urban river restoration as an empirical case. Three key research questions have been investigated: (1) Can EID encourage supportive environmental decisions in different institutional contexts? (2) Can EID enhance people’s trust in environmental agencies in different contexts? and (3) What is the relationship between EID, attitudes, and environmental decisions in different institutional contexts? Two parallel social surveys using discrete choice experiment were administered in Belgium and China. Citizens’ environmental decisions in urban river restoration have been solicited together with their socioeconomic characteristics, environmental information sources, trust in environmental authorities, and perceived EID effectiveness. Survey responses were analysed through the Latent Class Model, the Generalised Structural Equation Model, and the Hybrid Mixed Logit Model to associate EID with citizens’ environmental decisions and explore the intermediating role of public trust and protest attitude. The results confirmed positive association between citizens’ access to trusted environmental information sources and their support for the proposed urban river restoration projects, regardless of the institutional contexts. The linkage of information accessibility-attitude-environmental behaviours is also validated in both democratic and non-democratic contexts. However, the causal relationship between the availability of multiple environmental information outlets and citizens’ trust in governmental agencies cannot be established in either democratic or non-democratic contexts. This research has extended the classical theory of planned behaviour to establish and shed new light on the pathway between EID and environmental behaviours, with public trust and latent protest attitude as intermediate variables. The comparative analyses between Belgium and China adds institutional contexts into the theoretical framework. The analytical findings of this comparative study have several policy implications (including increasing the adequacy, reliability and trustfulness of environmental information provided by different outlets; aligning citizens’ information demand with information provision; and strengthening social trust towards various information provided by different sources) for governmental authorities to refine EID policies and improve the effectiveness of EID implementation, so that the intended outcomes of EID (such as mobilizing supportive environmental decisions) can be successfully achieved.