Que fatores podem melhor explicar o engajamento ambiental das pessoas em ações de participação e liderança?

Abstract

Pro-environmental behaviors, which aim to have a positive impact on the environment and biodiversity, are considered fundamental to promote a sustainable society because seek to solve environmental problems such as the loss of biodiversity, deforestation and climate changes. Among the various types of pro-environmental behaviors, environmental engagement or environmental activism can be considered one of the most effective, as it acts directly on the systemic causes of environmental problems through collective efforts in conservation, including participation and leadership actions. However, it remains unclear how the process of environmental engagement occurs in which people stop being apathetic to participate in the environmental cause and even become active leaders, thus managing to influence other people's attitudes, knowledge, perceptions and behaviors. As well, there is a gap in which educational programs can be important in promoting environmental engagement. Therefore, we hypothesize that academic training in courses in the environmental area influences environmental engagement. In this perspective, we conducted a survey of 364 university students in order to understand which variables best explain people's participation and leadership in environmental causes. Our hypothesis was corroborated where academic training in the environmental area increased the frequency of participation actions and leadership actions in environmental engagement. Our results showed that the feeling of moral obligation, biospheric values, identity with environmental causes and subjective norms better explain the actions of participation. However, for people to become active leaders in environmental causes they need to believe that behaviors related to environmental engagement are easy to be carried out (perceived behavioral control). Thus, we believe that these findings are aligned with different types of motivation based on the theory of self-determination: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation as a predictor of participation behaviors and intrinsic motivation as a predictor of leadership behaviors, given that leadership behaviors are more difficult to achieve and require skills to mobilize people.