Why “Say One Thing and Do Another” a Study on the Contradiction between Farmers’ Intention and Behavior of Garbage Classification

Abstract

How to protect the ecological environment is an important international issue for achieving the sustainable development goals. Using survey data of 2628 farmers in 52 administrative villages in 13 prefecture-level cities of the China Land Economic Survey in 2020, probit and multinomial logistic regression models were used to explore the influence of social capital on farmers’ willingness, behavior and the transformation between willingness and behavior. The results show that: (1) The consistency between farmers’ willingness and behavior is low; 90.25% of farmers had the willingness to separate waste, but only 48.49% of farmers had actually classified waste, and only 48.22% of farmers had transformed willingness into behavior. (2) Among the three dimensions of social capital, social network, social norm and social trust, all had positive and significant effects on farmers’ willingness and behavior to separate waste. (3) Social network and social norm had a positive and significant impact on the transformation of farmers’ willingness to separate waste into behavior, but social trust was not significant. The research results confirm that the contradiction between farmers’ intention and behavior of waste separation were generally inconsistent in rural areas. At the same time, the results showed that social capital can promote farmers’ willingness and behavior of waste separation and the transformation from a willingness to behavior, which can provide decision-making reference for how to improve farmers’ high willingness and behavior.

Deviation between willingness and actual behavior regarding community participation in protected areas: A case study in Shengjin lake national nature reserve in China

“…Our study results indicate that the awareness by community residents of the necessity of establishing SJLNNR and the environmental improvement effect of SJLNNR are two factors that would both increase the deviation, which is different from previous research on pro-environmental behaviors (Vodouhê et al, 2010;Kuang and Lin, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Zhou et al, 2022), These unexpected results can be attributed to inadequate ecological compensation. During this survey, we found that the feelings of community residents regarding SJLNNR were complex.…”

“…Awareness of the necessity of establishing SJLNNR by community residents is a direct influencing factor at the surface level. Furthermore, the deep- The results from our study show that the number of resident members is a deep-rooted influencing factor that significantly decreases the deviation, which varies from the research finding of Zhou et al (2022). This may be closely linked to the rural hollowing, which means that numerous educated young and middle-aged agricultural laborers in traditional agricultural areas transfer to non-agricultural sectors in urban areas during the process of rapid urbanization and industrialization in China (Cui et al, 2011).…”

“…Generally, willingness predicts and leads to the realization of the corresponding actual behavior of an individual; however, many previous studies have confirmed that there is a deviation between willingness and behavior in real life, such as in commodity consumption , services purchases (Qu et al, 2022), e-commerce adoption (Li et al, 2020), and land transfer (Zhang et al, 2020a). This deviation has been further identified in the field of pro-environmental behaviors such as green consumption (Rausch and Kopplin, 2021;Wang et al, 2021;Ma et al, 2022;Qiu et al, 2022), green agriculture (Guo et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021), garbage classification (Kuang and Lin, 2021;Zhang et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022), bird conservation donation (Eylering et al, 2022), and renewable energy development support (Fang et al, 2021). All these studies concluded that the willingness of an individual is higher than the actual behavior demonstrates.…”

Can Internet Use Narrow the Gap between Farmers’ Willingness and Behavior in Waste Classification? Empirical Evidence from Rural Areas in Jiangsu Province, China

“…For example, Liu et al [31] found that using the Internet can positively influence farmers' willingness to classify garbage, though different Internet types on farmers' willingness to classify garbage is heterogeneous. Zhou et al [32] and Xu et al [22] also found that the use of the Internet has significantly improved farmers' willingness and action on waste classification.…”

How does digital governance affect the level of domestic waste separation for rural residents? Empirical evidence from rural areas in Jiangsu Province, China

“…With the rapid development of digital technologies such as the internet, big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain, they are profoundly influencing and changing the way humans produce, live and govern ( 18 – 20 ). From the perspective of digitally empowered governance approaches, digital governance is a governance model in which the government applies digital technology between the government and residents, enterprises and other subjects, as well as in the internal operation of the government to achieve the purpose of simplifying the process of handling public affairs and achieving democratic governance ( 21 ).…”