Behavioral Intentions And Their Factors In The Situation Of NIMBY Environmental Risks

In the special social environment of China, with the accumulation of environmental risks, occasionally pollution of NIMBY facilities, diversification of information source, imperfectness of political system, decline of public trust, ineffectiveness of legal right channels, “vitories” of environment-centered group events in many places and local governments’ inappropriate crack-down of group events taking in place in people’s life, more and more environment-centered group events happened in recent years. Nevertheless, group events are lack of inclusiveness in the context of our political system, and urban residents’ vested interests may be an obstacle on their ways of defending. The trends and factors of group events in the situation of NIMBY environmental risks are worth concerning.“Behavioral intentions and their factors in the situation of NIMBY environmental risks” is chosed as the research topic in this paper. The research was done in the form of a questionnaire survey in Shanghai. The research is mainly about the relationship between people’s perceptions of environmental risks, NIMBY facilities, the reliability of NIMBY environmental risk information channels, the effects of laws and regulations in the situation of NIMBY environmental risks and legal environmental right channels, the number of legal environmental right channels, communities or collectives, the environment-centered group events happened before as well as the daily work of governments and people’s behavioral intentions. The data collected by the survey will be analyzed with the method of cross-analysis and Logistic regression.According to the data, most of the respondents chose “action behavioral intention”. Among all the respondents who had chosen the action behavioral intention, nearly half of them chose “covert action behavioral intention”, which was mostly chosen. Among all the respondents who had chosen “non-behavioral intention, most of them chose “silent behavioral intention”. Data analysis showed that the factors of the nature of work, “Party member or not”, family income per capita, the perceptions of environmental risks, the perceptions of the pros and cons of NIMBY facilities, the reliability of the information from the experts hired by governments, the reliability of the information from public media, the reliability of the information from the Internet, the perceptions of the effects of laws and regulations in the situation of NIMBY environmental risks, the perceptions of effects of appeal, the perceptions of effects of petition, the perceptions of effects of lawsuit, the perceptions of the number of legal environmental right channels, the perceptions of the possibility of the initiation and success of the collective action in the respondents’ own community, and the perceptions the pros and cons of environment-centered group events all can explain people’s behavioral intentions in a certain extent. These factors reflect the malpractice of our country’s social structure of “powerful government and weak society”, political system, the government’s credibility and the ability of risk response of the whole society. Accordingly, suggestions are put forward from five aspects: the legal construction, the environmental risk assessment and technical knowledge popularization of NIMBY facilities, the information dissemination, the environmental rights demand and the environmental risk response.