Does government environmental governance information disclosure improve residents’ subjective well-being? Evidence from China

Abstract

To deal with environmental deterioration issues, various regulations and laws have been implemented by the Chinese government, including disclosing environmental governance information to the public to increase environmental transparency. This has not only affected the environmental governance performance but also residents’ subjective well-being. This research aims to investigate whether, how and when government environmental governance information disclosure affects residents’ subjective well-being in China. Data were gathered from 537 respondents and the analysis revealed that government environmental governance information disclosure exerts a significantly positive effect on residents’ subjective well-being, mainly by reducing risk perception and improving perceived controllability. Furthermore, the result found that the positive influence of government environmental governance information disclosure on residents’ subjective well-being depends on information credibility. Information credibility strengthens the effect of government environmental governance information disclosure. According to the findings, relevant recommendations to perfect government environmental governance information disclosure and improve residents’ subjective well-being were provided.

Keywords:

• Government environmental governance information disclosure
• information credibility
• risk perception
• perceived controllability
• subjective well-being

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

1 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number 71974177), USTC Research Funds of the Double First-Class Initiative (Grant number YD2160002002), Humanities and Social Science Research Project of the Ministry of Education of China (20YJC630138) and Anhui Natural Science Foundation (2008085QG345).