Linking Perceived Policy Effectiveness and Proenvironmental Behavior: The Influence of Attitude, Implementation Intention, and Knowledge

Residents’ behavior is the result of the combined effect of external environment factors and internal psychological factors. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the attitude–behavior–condition (ABC) theory, this study aims to explore the impact of policy support on residents’ psychological factors and proenvironmental behavior. This study developed an extended TPB and ABC model and replaced the behavioral intention in the TPB model with implementation intentions to enhance the ability of the variables to explain and predict proenvironmental behavior. The longitudinal research method was adopted to collect data through a two-stage questionnaire survey of 1145 Shanghai residents. Results demonstrated that perceived policy effectiveness has a significant and positive impact on attitude, implementation intention, and proenvironmental behavior. This means that proenvironmental behavior tends to appear in people with a high perception of policy effectiveness, positive attitude, and strong implementation intention. Moreover, this study points out for the first time that high waste management knowledge weakens the relationship between perceived policy effectiveness and attitude. For residents with high waste management knowledge, the effect of simple policy publicity is limited. The findings suggest that the government should increase the breadth and depth of policy support and policy publicity to cover the entire waste management process.