Circular citizenship behaviours to promote systemic change: Influences of values, beliefs, norms, and personal agency

Environmental problems arise from our current societal and economic systems and could be alleviated by transforming such systems towards more sustainability. Citizens can engage in behaviours promoting such systemic changes. Based on the Systemic Change through Citizen Action framework, we examine different types of circular citizenship behaviours (CCBs) that reflect actions citizens can take to influence other citizens, governments, and businesses to instigate societal change towards sustainability, and more specifically, a circular economy. Specifically, we aim to study to what extent people engage in these actions and which factors increase the likelihood of engagement. A cross-sectional survey with a representative Dutch sample shows that people rarely engage in CCBs aimed at other citizens, and very rarely in CCBs aimed at governments or businesses. Our findings further indicate that an extended value-belief-norm theory is successful in explaining engagement in CCBs, especially CCBs aimed at other citizens. Besides stronger personal norms, stronger biospheric values and higher outcome efficacy also directly relate to more engagement in most CCBs, while stronger hedonic values relate to less engagement. Interestingly, egoistic values are positively related to CCBs, suggesting that CCBs have different qualities from many other pro-environmental behaviours. Our findings highlight much untapped potential for systemic change through citizen action and offer insights into how engagement in CCBs might be promoted.