Social Capital, Environmental Knowledge, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

Qinyuan Wan and Wencui Du
Additional contact information
Qinyuan Wan: School of Economics, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing 100070, China
Wencui Du: School of Economics, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing 100070, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 3, 1-17

Abstract: As the value form of public access to environmental information, the impact of social capital on pro-environmental behavior cannot be ignored. Based on the data of the Chinese General Social Survey 2013 (CGSS2013), this study measures social capital from four aspects—social trust, social norms, social network, and social participation—and it empirically tests the impact of social capital on private and public pro-environmental behavior. The study finds that social capital helps promote pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, the more the public abides by social norms, the higher the degree of social participation, and the stronger the willingness to adopt private and public pro-environmental behaviors. However, the improvement of social trust only has a significant impact on the private environmental behaviors, and the expansion of the social network scale only has a significant impact on the public pro-environmental behaviors. The enhancement of social capital enriches environmental knowledge and promotes pro-environmental behaviors. The mechanism test shows that environmental knowledge plays an intermediary role in the path of social capital affecting individual pro-environmental behavior. The improvement of social capital has a significant impact on the environmental knowledge of individuals with high subjective social class. The gender heterogeneity of social capital affecting environmental knowledge mainly stems from social trust and social network. The stronger the degree of social trust, the richer the environmental knowledge of women, and the social network mainly affects the knowledge level of men. In addition, the publics in the southern region are more likely to be affected by social trust and improve environmental knowledge. Based on the above research conclusions, this paper puts forward policy suggestions on institutional aspects, such as increasing support for informal environmental organizations, carrying out differentiated sustainable development education, and improving the mechanism of environmental information communication.

Keywords: social capital; public domain environmental behavior; private domain environmental behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1443/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1443/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:3:p:1443-:d:735743

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().