The behave pro-environmentally intention of Villagers in Rural Tourist Destinations under China's Environmental Remediation Policy

Abstract

Background: The study examined the villagers' intention of pro-environmental behaviour while supporting the Fallow Remediation Policy in China, research team conducted field surveys on some villagers in four famous scenic spots of Cili county where near the world natural heritage Zhangjiajie natural landscape core area, it has developed rural tourism, many local villagers rely on rural tourism to obtain livelihood income, but it is now affected by the new environmental restoration policy called Fallow Policy, some cultivated land near the tourist area needs to be repaired, which affects the tourism livelihood income of some local villagers. So the local villagers are facing the contradiction between tourism development and environmental protection; Methods: The study chose the change of local villagers' pro-environmental intention as the research content and adopted an empirically validated norm activation model (NAM) of Schwartz, then merged NAM with the Expectancy theory of Vroom. Based on 511 valid responses from the field questionnaire surveys, we aim to develop a theoretical framework for researchers to understand the influence change of villagers' pro-environmental behaviours when it comes to the sustainable development of rural tourism and tourism livelihood benefits; Results: The sample data of 511 responses including seven latent variables and 25 observational items were from villagers in the Cili county. The structural equation modeling of each index of the responses was carried out, and the findings showed that the merged model has a 76.46% better predictive accuracy of villager's pro-environmental intentions than the original NAM alone; and Conclusions: This study discovered that the motivational force of the newly discovered theory significantly influences the environmental personal norms, which comes from the joint impact of valence, instrumentality, and expectancy. It can be safely explained that villagers with a positive pro-environmental behaviour intention usually expect to have good tourism benefits and living environmental conditions under the impact of the Fallow Policy in rural tourism destination near the famous world natural heritage.