Promoting and maintaining public participation in waste separation policies — A comparative study in Shanghai, China

Waste management is an evolutionary system, but few studies have explored how and why public willingness to participate in waste separation changes, or explored possible paths to increase residents’ willingness to participate. This paper took Shanghai as a case study of a city that has experienced recent environmental policy change to embrace an evolutionary feedback perspective. The results showed that after the policy implementation, resident’s satisfaction with waste management increased by only 5.3%, and participation willingness actually decreased by 5.4%. A Geodetector model showed that both separation attitude and knowledge are highly important both before and after policy implementation. Residents’ satisfaction with community waste management showed the largest increase soon after the policy implementation while the importance of time occupied by waste separation dropped significantly. Policy simulation by a system dynamics model showed that the community-driven scenario was able to achieve 95% participation 2 years earlier than baseline scenario. Improving community satisfaction by improving waste management infrastructure can offset the adverse effects of an increased number of waste categories. The study helps to quantify the interaction between institutional change and public participation and find effective measures to maintain public participation in environmentally-friendly behaviors.