Liu Xianbing: nvironmental Activisms of Firm’s Neighboring Residents: An Empirical Study in China

As the largest developing economy, China faces various pressures on the environment. The environmental policies of China in the past, which highly relied on the command and control measures, have been confirmed to be insufficient due to the feasibilities of the policies themselves or relatively weak enforcement capacities. It is encouraging that Chinese government has recognized the problem and started to modify its environmental policy framework.The basic philosophy of adding alternative approaches for industrial pollution control is to make use of the power of a firm's stakeholders which may be translated into pressures or incentives for the firm to pursue better environmental performance. It is believed that providing the public better accesses of corporate environmental information would help their active participate in environmental activisms. However, it is unclear so far to what extent the public actually concerns corporate environmental information, and what variables are working as the predictors of public environmental protest. With aims to close these research gaps, this paper develops an analytical framework based on the reasoned action theory and discusses the environmental activisms of residents living close to the manufacturing companies. The necessary data is collected by a questionnaire survey conducted in August of 2009 in a selected study area: Suzhou city in Jiangsu Province of China. A total of 343 valid responses was obtained successfully, with most of them (around 80%) being 18-40 years old and having educational level over senior middle school. The individual income and gender of the respondents are evenly distributed with 62.4% of them having monthly income of CNY1000-3000. The survey indicates that nearly 60% of company neighboring residents worry about the impacts of emissions to surrounding environment and corresponding risks to people's health. Their concerns of firm's other process-based environmental information are quite marginal. Our study confirms that the people are still reluctant to act against their neighboring polluters. Nearly 10% respondents have never taken actions against the polluting companies and the occasional participators account for 66.2% of the total. An interesting observation is that the people prefer to practice the activities under their own control. As examples, about half of the respondents would refuse to buy the products of polluting companies, and 40.5% of them would not go to work for the bad performing companies. The other items of environmental activism, which require the residents to directly communicate with government or even the polluters, achieve very low ratio of participation (with a range of 5% to 25%). The path analysis by various steps of multivariate regressions figures out the cause and effect linkages between the classified predicting factors and resident's environmental activisms. It shows that there are strong influences of certain attitudinal components on environmental activisms. Perception of corporate environmental information (weighting at 0.117) directly and significantly determines the formation of resident's protest intention. However, providing the information does not necessarily generate practical environmental activisms. The residents have a strong tendency to act collectively against their neighboring polluters. The essential messages provided by this study may direct the policy makers in China to choose effective policy interventions. The disclosure of corporate environmental information shall be continuously enhanced to fill up the resident's concerns of firm's environmental performance. The accurate understanding of firm's environmental management will help the increase of resident's readiness for practical environmental activisms. The governments shall show their strong support to environmental activism efforts. The successful cases of protest in environmental protection will greatly convince the residents to jointly fight against their neighboring polluters.