The Impact Of Cultural Worldviews On Public Acceptability Of Land Use Zoning Policy

Public acceptability is vital for the effective implementation of sustainable land use policies and information delivery is an important aspect of enhancing public acceptability.In particular,information that is tailored to peoples’ values and beliefs is found to be more persuasive to change peoples’ behaviors such as environmental policy acceptability.However,research explicitly focusing on the interaction between cultural worldviews and information attributes and how this interaction influences the effectiveness of the information is limited to the best of my understanding.This study explored the effect of cultural worldviews and information provision on the public acceptability of sustainable land use policy.In particular,this study examined the effectiveness of tailoring persuasive messages with people’s cultural worldviews in enhancing public acceptability of land use zoning policy by drawing insights from message framing and cultural theory of risk.This experimental study employed an online survey questionnaire as the primary source of data collection.A total of 538 participants successfully responded to the survey questionnaire.The participants were randomly divided into three groups.Two groups received information that promoted the benefits of the proposed policy,while one group was designated as a control and did not receive any information.The results show that cultural worldviews have an important role to play in the acceptability of land use zoning policy and that information provision is associated with higher public acceptability of land use zoning policy.Furthermore,the message that matches with participants’ cultural worldviews generated higher acceptability than the message that does not match with people’s cultural worldviews.This means that egalitarianism and hierarchy(collectivized cultural worldviews)are more susceptible to collectivized arguments than individualized arguments while individualists and fatalists(individualized cultural worldviews)are more susceptible to individualized arguments than collectivized arguments.Collectivized arguments are message frames that highlight collective societal and environmental aspects of the policy benefits while individualized arguments are message frames that highlight personal aspects of the policy benefits.The study suggests that when providing information about the benefits of land use zoning policy to the general public,policy advocates should be aware that people with different cultural worldviews are susceptible to different arguments.This suggestion highlights the importance of framing policy communications effectively and avoiding the "one-size-fits-all" approach to better persuade the people.Since a single argument may appeal only to a specific group,different arguments can be used when communicating policy with large populations such as the general public.Tailoring these different arguments to peoples’ cultural worldviews is a more efficient means to trigger higher acceptability of land use zoning policy.This requires identifying the context-specific cultural worldviews and preferences.