This study explores ways to protect the environment, important both in terms of an individuals’ quality of life, and essential to community development. Community as an agent of regional development encourages sustainable development by building bus...
This study explores ways to protect the environment, important both in terms of an individuals’ quality of life, and essential to community development. Community as an agent of regional development encourages sustainable development by building business and ecotourism development relevant to the regional environment. Active participation by residents is essential for nurturing eco-friendly business in regions. However, very few studies deal with pro-environmental behavioral intentions in the urban and regional development field.
For this reason, this study examines the issues facing subjects of Pyeongtaek, a transferring city in the suburbs of Seoul, by considering the past and present cultural and environmental development of Pyeongtaek. Because environmental problems are regarded as urgent issues in the region, this study conducted statistical analyses of survey data to find methods to improve pro-environmental behavioral intentions in the citizens. To put it concretely, the study seeks to find the effects of community attachment (CA) and civic consciousness (CC) on pro-environmental behavioral intentions (PBI) of Pyeongtaek citizens through structural equation modeling (SEM). CA and CC are the independent factors in this model. The former is an individual factor while the latter is a public factor. This study determines whether these two factors have effects on PBI and which factor has the biggest impact on PBI.
The results are summarized as follows; First, among the independent variables, CC has the strongest positive effect on PBI. CC is stronger than environmental concerns, and other independent factors in model. Second, CA seems to have a negative effect on PBI contrary to the initial research hypothesis.
These results give the following suggestions for the developmental directions for the city, both theoretically and practically. Firstly, to improve pro-environmental behavioral intentions of citizens, the community should try to encourage a public factor such as civic consciousness, more than an individual factor such as community attachment. But, the community should connect community attachment to pro-environmental behavioral intentions by arousing citizens’ sympathy with the view that it is as important to secure a pleasant living space as, to promote economic growth and industry so as to develop the city in the long-term.
The city has a large number of development projects, and it is expected to rapidly and drastically alter in terms of population, industry, and environment. Generally, rapid changes cause a variety of problems like damage to the sense of community, uneven regional development, and environmental damage. In order to resolve these problems, the community has to provide residents with opportunities to unite and address these issues by themselves. Second, historically the main industry of Pyeongtaek has been agriculture, resulting in a complex urban and rural composite city at the present time. In addition, the city has a plan to develop Pyeongtaek lake resort, based on the availability of native natural water resources. In other words, the effective development of this city requires successful integration with environmental concerns. For theses reasons, this study may have important implications for the way to establish an environmental policy. The community need to care deeply about civic consciousness and offer effective and long-term education in, and promotion of, CC so as to promote pro-environmental behavioral intentions of citizens.