The Impact Of Government Trust On Urban Residents’ Participation In Environmental Governance

Modernization has not only promoted the growth of the world economy,but also brought increasingly serious challenges to human ecological environment.In the process of rapid urbanization,China’s environmental governance is still facing many problems and difficulties.For example,in promoting public participation in comprehensive ecological improvement,people generally believes that China’s environmental problems are very serious,but they tend to participate less in environmental protection practices.The environment is public,and protecting and governing the environment is a collective action that requires the participation of multiple governance entities.However,as a collective action,environmental protection and governance often face the "dilemma of collective action" because of the individual’s "free rider" psychology.According to various solutions proposed by scholars to solve the dilemma of collective action,government trust may be a key element.Therefore,this research is devoted to exploring the influence of government trust on urban residents’ participation in environmental governance and its internal mechanism,with a view to promoting public participation in current environmental governance and urban environmental governance performance.Current research on the factors affecting public environmental governance participation mainly focuses on individual sociodemographic factors,psychological factors,or macroscopic social structural factors.However,starting from the government-public relations,the analysis of the relationship between urban residents’ participation in environmental governance and their government trust with a dynamic microscopic perspective is still lacking.Therefore,based on the theoretical support of public governance theory,principal-agent theory and planned behavior theory and related existing researches of predecessors,this article proposes a series of specific questions and research hypotheses.Firstly,does government trust have an impact on urban residents’ participation in environmental governance? Secondly,whether there will be an intermediary effect of government satisfaction between urban residents’ participation in environmental governance and their trust on government ? And thirdly,will the level of government environmental information disclosure affect the relationship between urban residents’ participation in environmental governance and government trust? How does it affect?In the specific argumentation process,this study uses an empirical analysis method that combines quantitative and qualitative research.On the one hand,the study is based on the first-hand survey data of Shanghai to conduct a quantitative analysis of the impact of government trust on urban residents’ participation in environmental governance,and verify related hypotheses.On the other hand,the study further conducted a qualitative analysis based on interview data.The empirical analysis mainly has the following findings.First,the improvement of urban residents’ trust in the government can help promote urban residents’ participation in environmental governance.Second,government trust can improve the government satisfaction of urban residents and further promote urban residents’ participation in environmental governance.Third,the disclosure of government environmental information can partly strengthen the correlation between urban residents’ participation in environmental governance and government trust.Based on the above empirical findings,this study believes that we should focus on three aspects to mobilize the activity of urban residents to participate in environmental governance.The first is to promote the construction of government trust and enhance the sense of equal participation of urban residents.The second is to optimize the performance of environmental governance and improve the urban residents’ government satisfaction.And the last is to consummate the environmental information disclosure and protect the urban residents’ environmental right to know.