Applying a Grass-Root Approach to Empowering Change Agents to Transform Pro-Conservation Attitudes and Behaviors in Over-Populated China

Abstract

Accompanied China's stellar economic developments in past decades, over-population has worsened the negative impacts of rapid industrialization and urbanization upon China's already fragile environment. Rare, a U.S.-based social marketing non-profit organization on global environmental conservation efforts, has expanded to China to train 120 local campaign managers at 2,400 remote areas. This book chapter aims to examine how Rare's grass-root approach in its PRIDE campaigns has helped alleviate the effects of over-population on environmental causalities in China. This multi-campaign case study explores whether cultural norms can be used by local campaign managers as a change agent and a transformative practice tool. Results found that recurrent appearance of family values in the PRIDE campaigns that generate message relevance with the target audiences. This study supported that a family-oriented message is able to frame the campaign to generate message relevance and subsequent behavioral changes among Chinese stakeholders.