Factors Affecting Community Support Of Large-scale Project

With the development of Chinese large-scale project, the social conflicts increase by years. Community residents’ attitudes can reflect social impacts of large-scale project, so community support is the key to prevent social conflict. The research of social impact assessment in China starts rather late, one of the most serious deficiencies is the ignorance of community support of large-scale project development.Based on the social exchange theory and literature review, the paper applies the vested interests model to local people’s attitudes toward large-scale project that has been constructed in their community. The vested interests model suggests that the independent variables would be perceived benefits and costs, attitude toward the development agency and community involvement, as well as personal characteristics included age, education level, income and sense of belonging, with the dependent variable for this study being attitudes of local people toward a large-scale project.With questionnaires and interview used to collect data, variables found to be significantly related to community support of large-scale project are:high level of education and income, low sense of belonging, high number of perceived benefits and low number of perceived costs, and positive attitude toward the development agency. In addition, the results show that age, level of resettlement and community involvement is not related to community support.The practical implications of large-scale project development are:(1) assess the project in earlier stage to decrease the number of resettlement as far as possible; (2) be fair, reasonable and keep the system transparent when granting land and house compensation; (3) put the political propaganda into practice; (4) create employment opportunities to increase residents’income; (5) increase the community cohesion and residents’ sense of belonging to prevent backmoving.