Shaping pro-environmental attitudes among public service trainees: an experimental study

Abstract

Public managers play a critical role in making and implementing environmental policies. Pre-service training provides an important opportunity to influence the environmental attitudes of public managers. Nevertheless, we know little about this influence. This research employs a classic experiment to examine the effects of a pre-service training program that exposes trainees to ecological decline in a national training program in Taiwan. There are three major findings. First, exposure to ecological decline increases trainees’ pro-environmental attitudes. Second, visual presentation modes sustain the effect. Third, trainees highly motivated for public services demonstrate greater and longer-lasting pro-environmental attitudes due to ecological exposure. These findings can be used to develop and improve environmental education programs in governments.

Keywords:

• Experimental evidence of environmental training
• pre-service environmental training
• environmental attitudes of public managers
• mere ecological exposure effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Do pro-environmental attitudes lead to intentions to take pro-environmental actions? In the research we designed questions (1) to allow participants making budget allocation decision on a hypothetical environmental project, (2) to ask participants’ intents to take environmental leadership actions as specified by Portugal and Yukl (1994). The result shows that there is no experimental evidence demonstrating the direct effect of mere ecological exposure on pro-environmental behavioral intentions. However, there is correlational evidence linking pro-environmental attitudes and the pro-environmental behavioral intents in budgetary allocation decision and leadership actions. Participants with higher NEP scores demonstrate greater intentions to spend on the environment and take leadership actions to protect the environment. This relationship, ranging from .268 to .324 on the correlation coefficient measure, occurs in all three settings of the pretest and two posttests, indicating that the attitudinal improvement is associated with behavioral intention improvement.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology Research Grant: NSC-102-2410-H-004-124-MY2(TGBS-III), and the Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR).