2.1. Government Communication
Communication is a kind of organizational behavior to convey information between the various internal and external stakeholders and thus help organizations to achieve their goals. In government organizations, Howlett [
14,
15] suggests that: “communication is an instrument to assist government to reach policy goals and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between government and the various publics on whom policy success or failure depends”. Therefore, government communication is a process of providing or withholding information or knowledge-based resources from policy target group to influence and direct their attitudes and actions regarding the policy [
16].
Scholarly attention on government communication is few in the field of policy making and implementation [
13]. As Ho and Cho [
17] put it: “because of legal restrictions, political pressures or fiscal constraints, many governments prefer to invest their limited resources in service delivery rather than [government] communication”. As a result, scholars paid less attention on government communication. Studies on communication in the public sector tend to focus on internal organizational concerns [
18,
19] or on the communication mechanisms between multiple governmental organizations in disaster or crisis management situations [
20,
21]. Few empirical researches have explored the impacts and value-added benefits of government communication with policy target group that are critical for achieving policy goals.
Nevertheless, a few scholars have formulated some government communication activities with the target group that can affect policy performance [
14]. In general, two types of government communication activities can be distinguished. The first type concentrates on communication activities before policy implementation, including the stages of policy design and policy release. The function of this type of communication lies in better designing the policy by incorporating the practical situations of the target group and giving more useful information and assistance to the target group to help them understand the policy before implementation. The second type deals with government communication activities after policy implementation. The purpose is to collect feedback data on policy performance, conduct policy evaluation, and thus promote policy learning and adaptation. In this article, our aim is to explore the effectiveness of government communication on policy understanding of the target group, so we focus on the first type of communication, i.e., government communication activities before policy implementation.
In this regard, we formulate three categories of government communication activities before policy implementation. The first category is “prior consultation”, which refers to opinion communication to gather attitudes, perceptions, judgements, feelings, ideas, and situations of the target group on a proposed government initiative [
22]. These attitudes, perceptions, and situations are important, early evidence for policy-makers to understand problem situations of the target group and formulate more rational, understandable solutions [
23,
24,
25,
26]. Policy-makers design and formulate proposals that are then considered for adoption on certain target groups. Policy-makers’ preferences often differ from those of target groups (not necessarily that they are at odds) [
27]. This is especially true in our case. Decision-makers of energy conservation policy are at various levels of governments, which have goals of achieving energy-saving targets that are imposed by higher authority. Industrial enterprises as the target group have goals of maximizing profits by lowing production costs; and, the renewal of less energy efficient production processes necessities extra operational and administrative costs. In this situation, the government is better to consult the enterprises via the use of meetings, phone calls, and emails about the enterprises’ situations of energy usage, willingness of energy-saving, and potential difficulties of adopting energy-saving policies. Therefore, this prior consultation is critically helpful for the government to recognize/diagnose the practical situations of the policy issue and to make the policy more evidence-based, inclusive, and easier to understand. At the enterprise side, prior consultation may enable the enterprises to know beforehand what the government is planning. This will facilitate the enterprises’ policy understanding when the policy is released.
The second category is “policy marketing”. According to Menon and Menon [
28]: “marketing in business management refers to activities and processes of creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large”. In government communication, policy marketing means the activities, strategies, and processes of promoting governments’ policy initiatives, programs, and services to the public or certain target groups in support of government policies [
29]. There are a variety of concrete policy marketing activities. For instance, governments may organize public events to inform the public or certain target groups about significant government initiatives or programs. Governments may also use strategies of publishing or spokesmanship for policy marketing [
22]. The former refers to governments that are producing information materials associated with policy initiatives for mass distribution; the later refers to the presentation and explanation of policy initiatives to the public or certain target groups by designated communication personnel. In addition, policy marketing is usually combined with policy advertising [
30]. That is, governments may use media channels to send persuasive messages to the public. The purpose of policy advertising is to increase public awareness of the existence of government policies and to advocate the benefits of the policies. Scholars have demonstrated that persuasive messages sent through media channels have a strong role in forming and changing public attitudes toward a policy [
31,
32].
The third category is “policy training”. Kroll and Moynihan [
33] in their research on the impact of training on organizational performance state that: “training is a default solution to all manner of managerial challenges ranging from ethical problems and rule violations to employees acquiring skills”. Given the assumption that “individual preferences and capacities are mutable and subject to external influence” [
34], the role of training lies in: “communicating organizational norms and new ideas and reinforcing organizational culture” [
35]. In the public sector, researches on training are associated with reform implementation or the adoption of new policies [
35]. If we acknowledge that new policy adoption will bring about administrative or procedural changes in organizations, we can use theories of organizational change to demonstrate the fact that acceptance of change (e.g., adopting a new policy) requires learning new technologies and skills, and building up new standard operating procedures, routines, and administrative systems. In light of this, the government must facilitate and help the target group to overcome practical difficulties and obstacles during policy implementation, and address specific doubts and concerns with organizational and technical changes [
35]. This suggests that training is important because implementing reforms and new policies require the target group to face new tasks or ways of behaving. For instance, during training the target group may express to the government concerning the problems and difficulties with adopting the new policy, while the government may persuade the target group by presenting the policy’s potential benefits. More importantly, training can also improve the target group’s technical and management capacities to achieve the mandated actions and changes [
36]. After obtaining necessary skills and expertise, the target group can reduce their uncertain feeling and fear about the new policy, and thus understand, accept, and feel comfortable with the managerial and technical changes [
33].
2.2. Policy Understanding
Understanding is a cognitive process by which people are able to think about an object, give an explanation of its structure, qualities, and features. Policy understanding is thus a cognitive process related to a policy whereby “one can consciously reproduce the information content conveyed by the policy”, such as the policy’s goals, contents, rules, and more importantly, “what one needs to do in order to comply with the policy” [
11,
12].
Policy understanding can be interpreted by two dimensions, objective understanding and subjective understanding [
37]. Based on the definition that was provided by Porumbescu et al. [
12], objective understanding means that the policy target group “objectively understand the benefits of a policy, the need for the policy, its associated costs and the procedures (things to do) of implementing the policy”. If the target group has objective understanding of a policy, they are believed to generate rational/proper behavior and know how to act on it [
38]. Subjective understanding is also called perceived understanding, which means that the target group has a sense of self-efficacy to act upon the policy. That being said, subjective understanding measures the target group’s belief about to what extent they are able to perform on the policy. Thus, subjective understanding constitutes a motivational basis for voluntary policy compliance [
39].
Objective understanding and subjective understanding are interrelated to yield the overall policy understanding. Objective understanding is important, but there will be no actions upon the policy if the target group does not believe they are able to, or they have the capacity to act on the policy. Therefore, a better subjective understanding is also important because it can help to translate an objective understanding into concrete actions upon the policy. Accordingly, the overall policy understanding is an outcome of the interactive process between subjective and objective policy understanding, and it can tell the general level of policy understanding of the policy target.