Conference Agenda

Vulnerable populations are often underrepresented in climate change adaptation planning, despite being disproportionately affected by its health impacts. One effective adaptation strategy with public health benefits is the provision of urban green spaces. However, policies primarily focus on physical accessibility, overlooking social and psychological barriers such as a lack of quiet zones, insufficient signage, and limited shaded areas. These barriers hinder usage, preventing vulnerable groups from fully benefiting from green spaces’ positive effects on psychosocial well-being, such as positive emotions, social interaction, or relaxation.

The Restorative Cities Framework (Roe & McCay, 2021) integrates established theories like the Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989), emphasizing the role of public space design in promoting mental health. This study builds on this framework to explore how urban green spaces should be designed to enhance accessi-bility and psychosocial well-being, with a focus on individuals with mental illnesses. This group is particularly affected by climate change—especially extreme heat events—and would benefit from accessible, cost-free interventions that promote mental well-being.

A mixed-methods approach will be applied, combining a workshop and an experi-mental survey. Workshop participants will assess existing urban green spaces, co-create an ideal restorative space, and evaluate its psychosocial effects. Renderings of these co-designed spaces will then be tested in an experimental survey. Individuals with mental illnesses will evaluate either a standard urban green space (control) or a version incorporating restorative elements (experimental). Standardized measures will assess perceptions and usage intentions, with additional feedback collected at the end.

This study aims to validate workshop findings on a larger scale and test how specific green space designs influence psychosocial well-being. Results will inform evidence-based recommendations for designing inclusive green spaces that support mental health in the context of climate change.

Cities are responsible for 70% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions (United Nations 2019) and often experience the direct consequences of climate change. Yet, local politicians do not always commit to implementing climate change policies (Pereira et al. 2023), partly due to challenges in effectively communicating existing scientific solutions. Research suggests that politicians may be cognitively immune to scientific evidence on climate change – a behavioral phenomenon described as cognitive immunization, where individuals ‘become immune to disconfirming evidence’ (Kube 2023, 2). However, this resistance can be mitigated by enhancing the perceived credibility of scientific evidence, a strategy known as cognitive immunization-inhibition (Kube 2023). Credible information strengthens persuasion about climate policies and fosters learning among ambivalent decision-makers.

This study employs an audit experiment involving 12,500 local politicians in Belgium to investigate whether emphasizing the credibility of scientific evidence reduces politicians’ cognitive immunization. Using a between-subject design clustered at the municipal level, we send different versions of an invitation email – manipulating the credibility of scientific evidence along dimensions of reputation, endorsement and consistency heuristics – to evaluate its impact on politicians’ willingness to engage in a climate change workshop. At the conference, we will present the pre-registration of the theoretical expectations, experimental design and analysis plan.

References

Kube, Tobias. 2023. “Factors Influencing the Update of Beliefs Regarding Controversial Political Issues.” The Journal of Social Psychology 0 (0): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2023.2253981.

Pereira, Miguel M, Nathalie Giger, Maria D Perez, and Kaya Axelsson. 2023. “Encouraging Politicians to Act on Climate. A Field Experiment With Local Officials in Six Countries.” https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/937hc.

United Nations. 2019. “Cities: A ‘cause of and Solution to’ Climate Change | UN News.” 2019. https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1046662.

Environmental sustainability is considered one of the most relevant concerns for policymakers and public sector managers in the contemporary era (Azhar & Yang, 2019). In the public administration literature, studies concerning this issue have generally centered around the adoption of single or multiple practices (Seifert & Guenther, 2020) or on factors that motivate public sector employees to engage in eco-friendly initiatives (Stritch & Christensen, 2016; Yuriev et al., 2022). Less attention has been paid to the role of public sector managers, who play a critical role in evaluating the benefits and costs of resource allocation and capacity building to support their organization's adoption of sustainability practices (Lee, 2024).

To fill this gap, building on insights from the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) and the Neo-Institutional Perspective (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), this article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it seeks to determine whether and to what extent pressures exerted by different institutional actors influence the intentions to adop environmentally responsible behaviors by public sector managers. On the other hand, it aims to analyze the moderating role of managers’ Public Service Motivation (PSM) in this relationship, with the expectation that higher levels of PSM will reduce the impact of institutional pressures.

To achieve these objectives, after conducting a pilot test composed of 144 participants, we will administer a pre-registered survey experiment on a sample of 1800 European and American public managers. Here, we manipulate the type of institutional pressures from key stakeholders, i.e., governmental institutions, comparable best-performing organizational units, and professional standard-setting bodies, and test the average effect of these manipulations on our main outcome of interest: managers’ environmentally responsible behavior. Furthermore, we investigate how this effect is moderated by levels of PSM in managers, measured in the survey. Relevant control variables include general environmental attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and personal demographics. We will analyze the data using hypothesis testing and regression analyses. The results of the analysis will be discussed in relation to theory, research, and practice.

References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211.

Azhar, A., & Yang, K. (2019). Workplace and Non-workplace Pro-environmental Behaviors: Empirical Evidence from Florida City Governments. Public Administration Review, 79(3), 399–410.

Lee, H. (2024). Strategic types, implementation, and capabilities: Sustainability policies of local governments. Public Administration, 102(1), 264–284.

Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363.

Seifert, C., & Guenther, E. (2020). Who cares?—Stakeholder relevance for voluntary environmental management in hospitals. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 27(4), 1786–1799.

Stritch, J. M., & Christensen, R. K. (2016). Going Green in Public Organizations: Linking Organizational Commitment and Public Service Motives to Public Employees’ Workplace Eco-Initiatives. The American Review of Public Administration, 46(3), 337–355.

Yuriev, A., Boiral, O., & Talbot, D. (2022). Is there a place for employee-driven pro-environmental innovations? The case of public organizations. Public Management Review, 24(9), 1383–1410.

The paper is a systematic literature review of the array of environmental policy tools that base their workings on behavioural assumptions. The peculiar focus is on green nudges and interventions in the field of behavioural public administration (BPA). Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 protocol, this work maps out existing literature (up to 2024) to explore the interplay between intrinsic motivation, incentives, and nudges in promoting sustainable consumption and pro-environmental behaviours in various policy domains. Findings suggest that (i) a proper behavioural turn has indeed concretised within public policy scholarship, (ii) waste management practices are the most studied ones, and (iii) within that policy field, different and recurrent tool categories can be identified, together with the motivational levers that they trigger. It is also worth noting that some dimensions remain underexplored: theoretical elaborations or reviews are nearly absent, the local implementation of these strategies receives limited attention and hardly any study under scrutiny takes the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into account. Further research may well be useful for gaining insights into these issues.