Do Personal Norms Predict Citizens’ Acceptance of Green Transport Policies in China

• Main Authors: Leibao Zhang, Liming Sheng, Wenyu Zhang, Shuai Zhang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: pull policies; push policies; personal norms; structural equation model; value belief norm theory
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/12/5090

In order to solve the environmental problems caused by the increasing private car use in China, such as transport energy consumption, traffic congestion, and air pollution, many policy measures including car purchase taxes, restrictions on car use in the city center, and incentives to promote electric vehicles have been developed. By taking Hangzhou, a low-carbon metropolitan city in China, as an illustrative example, green transport policies have been proactively implemented in order to turn the metropolitan city into an ecologically livable city. However, citizens’ acceptance of comprehensive green transport policies has seldom been studied and explored, which is actually quite valuable information for implementing and assessing the effectiveness of green transport policies. This study presents a new integrated framework by extending the value belief norm (VBN) theory in order to explore the internal factors for predicting citizens’ acceptance of comprehensive green transport policies and other pro-environmental behaviors in the transport field. A survey on car use reduction was conducted among citizens in Hangzhou and a quantitative analysis was performed using a structural equation model (SEM) method. Results show that personal norms can successfully predict citizens’ acceptance of pull policies for reducing car use, while is less capable of predicting that of push ones. The theoretical implications of different pro-environmental behaviors are explained. This analysis may inspire policy makers to implement appropriate policies to encourage the public to use low-carbon transport in daily life.