Environmental Awareness,Environmental Self-efficacy And Environmental Governance:Influencing Factors For The Individual Environmental Behavior

With the advancing process of industrialization in our country,environmental problems increasingly prominent.Environmental problems are not only the products of industrialization,but also the result of the disorder of individual environmental behavior.As a public welfare cause,environmental protection needs widespread support and participation from people.Compared with western countries,China's environmental protection work is in its infancy,and is most led by government.Environmental protection work nowadays lacks public participation.Individual environmental behaviors can be the key to make environmental protection work effective,the study of which has become a focus in academia.The existing researches mainly focused on the relationship between environmental awareness and environmental behavior,but are lack of the discussion about environmental self-efficacy's effect on environmental behaviors.What's more,the existing researches mainly focused on the individual level factors,ignoring the macro structural factors' influence on shaping the environmental behavior,especially the effect of environmental governance.Therefore,this paper will discuss the role of the environmental self-efficacy and environmental awareness,and add regional macro variables,for example,environmental pollution situation,environmental governance and the level of economic development,to the model,which help us explain the features of our residents' individual environmental behavior.This paper will use the Chinese General Social Survey's individual data of 2010,as well as China City Statistical Yearbook's city-level data of 2010 to carry on the comprehensive analysis of individual environmental behavior.This paper will divided the individual environmental behavior into two types,the one is "daily environmental protective behavior" and the other one is "environmental protective public participation".According to the difference performance of the two types of environmental behaviors in regional level,this paper will use the hierarchical linear model to explore the affecting factors of individual daily environmental protective behavior,and will use the binary multinomial logistical regression to explore the affecting factors of environmental protective public participation.The results show that,for the "daily environmental protective behavior",individual level's main affecting factors is personal income,place of residence,age,environmental self-efficacy,environmental knowledge,environmental values and the impulsive and emotional factors of environmental attitude.Among them,if a person has the higher level of personal subjective environmental factors,he or she will has the higher level of individual daily environmental protective behaviors.Regional level's main affecting factors are the average industrial dust exposure level and the level of pollution governance.These two factors can both have the positive influence on daily environmental protective behavior.Through exploratory analysis,we found that the level of pollution governance will promote the positive effect of environmental self-efficacy on daily environmental protective behavior.And the positive interaction between environmental self-efficacy and environmental knowledge is also found.For the "environmental protective public participation",whether exist the public participation in environmental protection or not has little difference between districts,and it is only under the influence of individual level variables as follows:age,place of residence,political status,environmental self-efficacy and impulsive and emotional factors of environmental attitude.Among them,with a higher level of environmental attitude and environmental self-efficacy,people will have a higher probability to take public participation in environmental protection.On the basis of the above conclusions,this paper put forward a few views as follows:First,the environmental behavior of residents in our country generally performs the shallow level environmental protective participation with low-cost preferences.Second,environmental self-efficacy,impulsive and emotional factors in environmental attitude play the key roles in promoting both "daily environmental protective behavior" and "environmental protective public participation"Third,individual environmental behavior would easily be promoted by perceptual pollution.Therefore,the government should make pollution data more accessible to public.Fourth,the improvement of environmental governance will help promote individual environmental behavior.It is necessary to strengthen environmental governance,and carry out more targeted environmental education.Fifth,government should pay attention to individual environmental education as it plays an important role in enhancing individual environmental behavior.