{"title":"Environmental identity and perceived salience of policy issues in coastal communities: a moderated-mediation analysis","authors":"Pallavi Rachel George, Vishal Gupta","doi":"10.1007/s11077-024-09547-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Risk perception influences the perceived salience of various policy issues. In this study, we examine the pathways through which environmental identity influences the perceived salience of two kinds of policy issues—climate change (climate mitigation and climate adaptation) and development (economic growth and infrastructure). Based on a dataset of 503 respondents from coastal communities along the east coast of the United States, our findings indicate that environmental identity is associated with a greater perceived salience of climate mitigation, and that this relationship is mediated by hydrometeorological disaster risk perception. While we found no significant total effect of environmental identity on the perceived salience of climate adaptation, perceived salience of infrastructure development, and perceived salience of economic growth, hydrometeorological disaster risk perception was found to fully mediate all three relationships. Also, the mediated relationships were found to be significantly moderated by gender identity, but not by age (except for the perceived salience of infrastructure development). The study highlights the pivotal role of hydrometeorological risk perception in modifying the perceived importance of different policy issues among environmentalists and has implications for policy and planning in coastal regions.</p>","PeriodicalId":51433,"journal":{"name":"Policy Sciences","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Policy Sciences","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-024-09547-4","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Risk perception influences the perceived salience of various policy issues. In this study, we examine the pathways through which environmental identity influences the perceived salience of two kinds of policy issues—climate change (climate mitigation and climate adaptation) and development (economic growth and infrastructure). Based on a dataset of 503 respondents from coastal communities along the east coast of the United States, our findings indicate that environmental identity is associated with a greater perceived salience of climate mitigation, and that this relationship is mediated by hydrometeorological disaster risk perception. While we found no significant total effect of environmental identity on the perceived salience of climate adaptation, perceived salience of infrastructure development, and perceived salience of economic growth, hydrometeorological disaster risk perception was found to fully mediate all three relationships. Also, the mediated relationships were found to be significantly moderated by gender identity, but not by age (except for the perceived salience of infrastructure development). The study highlights the pivotal role of hydrometeorological risk perception in modifying the perceived importance of different policy issues among environmentalists and has implications for policy and planning in coastal regions.
期刊介绍:
The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual pieces that address key challenges, opportunities, or approaches in ways congruent with the perspective that this journal strives to maintain and extend.Officially cited as: Policy Sci