Why Responsibility, Not Participation, Drives Green Behavior in Centralized Cities

When it comes to convincing city dwellers to recycle, conserve energy, or cut down on car use, policymakers have long assumed that getting citizens involved in decision-making is the key. A new study from Tehran challenges that assumption in a striking way. Research published in the journal Discover Sustainability by Arman Hamidi of the University of Guilan finds that, in a centralized urban governance system, a sense of civic and social responsibility is what actually drives pro-environmental behavior, while opportunities for citizen participation appear to have little measurable effect at all. The finding carries implications far beyond one metropolis, because it suggests that the behavioral theories urban planners rely on may not travel well across different political and administrative contexts.

The study set out to answer a question that has lingered in environmental psychology and urban policy circles: do participation and responsibility work together to produce greener citizens, or do they operate on separate tracks? Most prior research has treated these two constructs separately. A large body of work built on the Theory of Planned Behavior, one of the most widely used frameworks in environmental psychology, holds that behavior flows from intentions, which in turn are shaped by attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Participation has often been assumed to strengthen these ingredients by giving people a stake in outcomes. Responsibility, meanwhile, has been studied mostly in the context of prosocial behavior, where a felt obligation to others motivates action even when personal benefit is absent.

Hamidi’s approach was to bring both constructs into a single theoretical framework and test them simultaneously. The research adopted a quantitative design centered on a survey of 385 citizens in Tehran, a metropolis governed through a highly centralized urban management structure in which major environmental decisions are made by municipal and state authorities rather than through deliberative local processes. Respondents answered questionnaire items measuring their levels of citizen participation, civic responsibility, and social responsibility, alongside measures of their pro-environmental behavior. The data were then analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test whether hypothesized causal pathways between multiple variables are supported by observed data.

Structural equation modeling works by estimating latent variables, which are constructs such as responsibility or participation that cannot be observed directly but are inferred from multiple survey responses. The model then evaluates the strength and statistical significance of paths linking these latent variables to one another. In this study, the model tested both direct effects, such as the path from civic responsibility to pro-environmental behavior, and indirect effects, in which one variable might influence behavior through another. This dual testing matters, because a variable can fail to influence behavior directly while still shaping it indirectly through mediating factors. If participation mattered at all, even indirectly, the model should have detected it.

The results were unambiguous on one side and surprising on the other. Both civic responsibility, which refers to a person’s sense of duty toward their community and its shared spaces, and social responsibility, the broader felt obligation toward society and collective welfare, exerted significant positive effects on pro-environmental behavior. Citizens who felt responsible for the wellbeing of their city and their fellow residents were measurably more likely to act in environmentally friendly ways. Citizen participation, by contrast, showed no meaningful direct or indirect influence on behavior. In other words, it was not simply that participation failed to act on behavior directly while working through responsibility; the analysis found no significant pathway from participation to behavior at all.

Why would participation prove so inert in this context? The author’s interpretation points to the governance environment itself. In centralized systems, participatory opportunities often exist in form but carry little substantive weight. Public consultations may occur after decisions have effectively been made, and residents may perceive that their input does not alter outcomes. Under such conditions, the psychological mechanism that participation is supposed to activate, a sense of ownership and control over collective decisions, never engages. The study’s conclusion is that the behavioral relevance of participation is context-dependent rather than universally positive, a claim that directly challenges the tendency to export participation-based interventions from decentralized democracies to cities with very different administrative structures.

The theoretical contribution lies in how the study extends the Theory of Planned Behavior. Rather than discarding the framework, the research positions civic and social responsibility as complementary motivational mechanisms that operate alongside the conventional pathways of attitude, norm, and perceived control. This matters because the TPB has been criticized for explaining intentions better than actual behavior, and for performing inconsistently across cultures. By demonstrating that responsibility-based constructs can carry substantial explanatory weight in a centralized governance context, the study suggests that behavioral models of environmental action need to be calibrated to institutional realities. A theory validated in participatory settings may systematically misidentify the levers that matter in settings where citizens have limited decision-making power.

For policymakers, the practical message is a reframing of priorities rather than a rejection of participation. The study does not argue that participatory initiatives are worthless; it argues that, on their own and under centralized governance, they do not translate into environmental action. Instead, the findings indicate that governments and urban managers should complement participatory programs with strategies that actively cultivate civic and social responsibility. That could mean educational campaigns that frame environmental action as a duty to neighbors and future residents, neighborhood-level recognition of stewardship, or communication strategies that emphasize collective obligation rather than individual choice. The underlying logic is that motivation must be built where the behavioral leverage actually lies.

The choice of Tehran gives the findings particular weight. Megacities in centralized governance systems face some of the world’s most severe environmental pressures, from air pollution to water stress, and their governments often lack the fiscal and institutional capacity to solve these problems top-down. If individual behavior change is to contribute at all, understanding what motivates it becomes essential. A survey of 385 residents, analyzed with a method designed to test competing causal pathways, offers a template for how such questions can be answered empirically rather than ideologically. The same design could be replicated in other centralized cities to test whether the responsibility effect is a general feature of such systems or specific to Tehran’s circumstances.

There are, of course, limits to what a single cross-sectional survey can establish. Structural equation modeling tests whether data are consistent with a hypothesized causal structure, but it cannot prove causation in the way an experiment can, and self-reported behavior may diverge from what people actually do. The study also received no external funding, and the author declares no competing interests, which strengthens confidence in its independence. Even with these caveats, the central result stands as a provocative datapoint in a debate that usually assumes more participation means more environmental action. In Tehran at least, the greener citizen is not the one who shows up to meetings, but the one who feels personally responsible for the city they share. For urban managers everywhere, that distinction may be the most important finding of all.

Subject of Research: The roles of citizen participation and civic and social responsibility in explaining pro-environmental behavior under centralized urban management in Tehran

Article Title: Responsibility over participation in explaining pro-environmental behavior in centralized urban management

Article References: Hamidi, A. (2026). Responsibility over participation in explaining pro-environmental behavior in centralized urban management. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04828-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04828-9

Keywords: pro-environmental behavior, citizen participation, civic responsibility, social responsibility, centralized urban management, Theory of Planned Behavior, structural equation modeling, Tehran, urban governance, environmental psychology, sustainability, urban policy