Biases towards water pollution treatment in Chinese rural areas—A field study in villages at Shandong Province of China

Abstract

Based on field studies in villages in Eastern China Province of Shandong, we identify and highlight two biases from the perspectives of both policy makers and villagers in terms of water management. In specific, policy makers tend to underweight the gravity of water pollution, especially as relative to air pollutions which have been received widespread attention from public. Another layer of bias we report in this paper is villagers’ perception of water pollution: villagers tend to attribute the devastating water pollution more to industrial sources rather than to their own ways of water usage. We aim to present these two important biases so that the situation of water pollution can be improved by making policies and incentivizing villagers accordingly to address these two biases.

Keywords

• Wastewater management
• Policy
• User attitude
• Chinese villages