Pathways to Environmental Activism: A CROSS-National Study

What are the key factors that lead individuals to engage in environmentally significant behaviors like activism, and are these the same in different places? To answer these questions, this paper tests a model of pathways to environmental activism across thirty-seven countries spanning three regions of the globe (high income/former socialist/developing) using 2010 data from the International Social Survey Program. Given extant work, we investigate how a core set of predictors including individual contexts, environmental risk perception, pro-environmental attitudes, willingness to contribute, self-efficacy and environmental knowledge affect environmental activism across nations. Results from structural equation modelng with latent variables (SEMLV) reveal that the model is robust across regions and nations, with education, knowledge, attitudes, and willingness to contribute having consistent effects on environmental activism. We discuss the performance of the model across multiple comparisons—the full sample of countries, regions, and individual countries—to provide a comprehensive empirical investigation of pathways to activism. Our study also highlights cross-national variations in the factors shaping activism related to efficacy and institutional structures, yielding insights for future comparative work.