HOW WILL RURAL HOUSES GO GREEN? EXPLORING INFLUENCING FACTORS OF VILLAGERS' PARTICIPATION IN GREEN HOUSING CONSTRUCTION IN RURAL COMMUNITIES

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traditional rural houses are characterized by high energy consumption, low energy efficiency, waste of energy resources, and high carbon emissions, which are detrimental to China's energy consumption as well as to the environment. It is therefore important to promote green rural housing construction. However, rural villagers' low level of participation has led to a dearth of successfully implemented green rural housing projects, a situation that a lack of relevant research has no doubt contributed to. This paper therefore studies the factors influencing villagers' participation in green rural housing projects based on Bourdieu's theory of practice. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted in Yancheng, China, and descriptive analysis, analysis of variance and multivariate ordered logistic regression analysis were performed to understand the participation behavior of villagers and influencing factors of villagers' participation in green rural housing construction. Results indicate that participation of the surveyed villagers is generally not high, and most villagers participated superficially. No differences were detected in villagers' total participation in terms of gender, leisure time, housing type, government propaganda, government management, and government role orientation. Moreover, social network, social economy, construction cost, interest appeals, attention to current affairs, awareness of green environmental protection and total family population are found to affect villagers' total participation. The findings will help the government devise measures to encourage villagers to actively participate in the construction of green rural housing, and thereby realize the goal of low carbon sustainable development of rural communities.