An environmental psychological study of the determinants ` of residents' consensus building for wastes reduction policy

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The purpose of our study was to clarify the determinants of residents' consensus building for waste reduction policy and to examine the effect of citizen participation on public acceptance of waste reduction policy and plan.We conducted analyses on the surveys of public acceptance of waste reduction plan and other environmental policies we conducted in Tsushima and other cities. The results of theses surveys revealed that the citizens evaluated the policies of waste reduction not only from the aspect of expected outcomes of the policy, but also from the aspect of perceived fairness of the participatory procedure. The perceived procedural fairness consisted of four factors as information disclosure, access to discourse, representative participant, and decision control. The results of surveys also indicated that the citizen participation projects enhanced citizens' trust for their authorities. We also conducted analyses on the surveys in Nagoya and other cities in order to clarify the facilitating factors of citizens' participation on waste reduction planning. The results of surveys revealed that main determinant of citizens' participation was not the expected social outcomes of the plan but the expected private empowerment obtained from their own participation. The expected empowerment consisted of three factors as social effectiveness, self efficacy, and solidarity. Furthermore, we conducted gaming-simulations of waste reduction and environmental issues in order to examine that citizens and students can improve their motivation to participate on environmental activities through their experiences of the gaming-simulation. The results indicated that the gaming method was effective for students to attain higher motivation toward tackling environmental issues.