Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 112, October 2020, Pages 330-339
Environmental Science & Policy

Pathways to urban sustainability through individual behaviors: The role of social capital

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Social trust correlates with environmental concern and environmentally responsible behavior.

  • Structural and cognitive dimensions of social capital influence private-sphere environmentalism.

  • Urban policy that supports community cohesion and social trust will have environmental benefits.

Abstract

Given the available scientific understanding regarding the environmental impacts of everyday behaviors, individuals should be both concerned and motivated to act in environmentally responsible ways. Yet, the connection between environmental awareness, concern, attitude, and behavior is neither direct nor clear. Various factors have been demonstrated to influence environmentally responsible behavior (ERB), including: attitudes, values, knowledge, affect, context, and social capital. We contribute to this conversation by exploring the mechanisms that community participation, social trust, and strong ties influence ERB in an urban context. Our results indicate that dimensions of social capital effect environmentally responsible behavior through environmental concern. Specifically, we find that social trust is a significant predictor of both environmental concern and locus of control. These results provide insight into the small but growing literature on environmental concern, social capital, and ERB and suggest that policies and practices that increase social trust can lead to more environmentally responsible behavior and advance urban sustainability.

Introduction

There is increasing recognition that individual decisions directly contribute to contemporary environmental problems and that environmentally-responsible behavior can underpin urban sustainability. Individual environmental decisions are complex and multiply determined, yet solving urban environmental problems must include increasing individual actions to mitigate or prevent those problems (Newell et al., 2014). Pro-environmental behavior or environmentally responsible behavior (ERB), has therefore been the focus of many researchers (Bamberg and Moser, 2007; Gifford and Nilsson, 2014; Jin, 2013).

Within the ERB literature, attention has been on the demographic, socio-economic, socio-spatial, and socio-psychological causal properties that help explain pro-environmental behavior. Perhaps the most extensively studied factor is environmental attitude and environmental concern (Dunlap et al., 2000). Several studies have revealed that higher environmental concern is associated with acting more pro-environmentally, although the strength of effect is mixed (e.g., Poortinga et al., 2004; Schultz and Zelezny, 1998; Vining and Ebreo, 1992). Other studies have focused on situational variables that include behavioral context (for example, the availability of recycling facilities and the quality of public transport), individual characteristics (such as sociodemographic) and individual knowledge and habitual behavior of the practices in question (Steg and Vlek, 2009).

One line of research focuses on the effect of social capital on environmental decisions and behaviors, which theorizes that actions are best contextualized by the social features in which actors exist (Newell et al., 2014). Social capital is typically conceptualized as including components such as “networks, norms, and social trust” (Putnam, 1995 p.67) and has been linked to environmentally beneficial outcomes through prompting collective action from the actors (Ostrom, 2007; Videras, 2013). For example, Pretty and Ward (2001) established the concept of social capital for public environmental behavior by considering social capital as a resource generated by the structural property of relationships between actors in a network, and demonstrating how this resource facilitates cooperation and lowers costs of collective action. Building on previous descriptions of social capital which incorporate trust, common rules, norms, measures of reciprocity, and connectedness, they claim that actors in communities with higher social capital have more confidence in collective environmental activities. Similar research links social capital and collective action necessary for dealing with climate change and ownership enforcement of common property (Adger, 2003; Katz, 2000).

What about the effect of social capital on beneficial environmental outcomes through behaviors that do not necessarily require collective action, or their placement in the “collective action” category is less clear? Particularly, private environmental behavior or what Stern (2000) refers to as “Private-Sphere Environmentalism”? Evidence suggests that social capital operationalized as strong community ties make people more likely to engage in private environmental actions (Macias and Williams, 2016). Similarly, Miller and Buys (2008) demonstrate that greater connection to neighbors versus friends and families is associated with greater willingness to participate in water conservation. Social capital operationalized as social trust has been associated with the willingness to sacrifice for the environment (Macias and Williams, 2016) and higher rates of recycling and organic food consumption (Sønderskov and Daugbjerg, 2011).

Despite these studies, the mechanisms linking social capital and ERB are not well established (Thoyre, 2011). The focus of this study is to better understand these mechanisms. Using data obtained from a metropolitan-scale survey of residents in Austin, Texas, we explore the causal pathways of social capital on ERB. The article will proceed as follows: first, the various theoretical lenses that guide conceptualizing ERB are presented, followed by literature on ERB and social capital. Next, we present the methods for this study, including how the measures were constructed and our approach to structural equation modeling. In the results, we present findings that link social capital to environmental concern to ERB. Specifically, we find that social trust is a significant predictor of both environmental concern and locus of control. The conclusion will address the implications of this for future research and policy.

Section snippets

Environmentally responsible behavior and social capital

ERBs constitute practices that generally contribute to environmental well-being. This definition builds on the definition of environmental behavior as “broadly all types of behavior that change the availability of materials or energy from the environment or alter the structure and dynamics of ecosystems or the biosphere” (Steg and Vlek, 2009; Stern, 2000). ERB research seeks to identify and understand the factors that are predictive of ERB. Such factors, in turn, offer leverage points for

The study context

The Austin Area Community Survey is an IRB-approved telephone survey conducted across six waves (2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2018) as part of the Austin Area Sustainability Indicators project (www.austinindicators.org). Data collection is cross-sectional, rather than panel, with different respondents in each wave of data collection. The geographic focus of the survey is the 6-county region including and surrounding Austin, Texas: Travis County, Bastrop County, Burnet County, Caldwell

Results

Two models were fit with different subsamples. The first model includes willingness to commute using alternative means of transportation as five outcome variables, while the second model includes the two ERBs (acting on OADs, and environmental boycotting). The two remaining ERBs (commuting with other than personal cars and driving a hybrid) were ultimately not included in the models because there were not enough responses across the response categories for these items. Factor loadings for all

Discussion and conclusion

Results from both models show that social trust was the most important social capital dimension with respect to effects on ERB. Community participation and strong ties exhibited anticipated relationships on one ERB, each of which is in line with findings in the literature on the positive and negative respective effect of bridging and bonding relationships on ERB (Cho and Kang, 2017; Macias and Williams, 2016). Yet, social trust exhibited significant relationships on two ERBs - environmental

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Samer Atshan: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Project administration. R. Patrick Bixler: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition, Data curation, Supervision. Varun Rai: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision. David W. Springer: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

The data for this research comes from the Austin Area Sustainability Indicators project. Financial supporters of the Austin Area Sustainability Indicators project include the Austin Community Foundation, St. David’s Foundation, and the City of Austin. All financial supporting entities located in Austin, Texas, United States.

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