Towards a Sustainable Environment: Understanding Chinese Farmers’ Adoption of Renewable Energy Sources Through Green Intentions

Abstract

Renewable energy is absolutely necessary in order to stop the deterioration of the environment and to guarantee reliable access to environmentally friendly energy sources. Based on the conformity theory, logistic regression, propensity score matching, and stepwise regression are all used in the current study to investigate the mediating role of green intentions in the conformity tendencies of Chinese farmers’ adoption of renewable energy sources. This research was motivated by the notion of the dissemination of innovations as well as the technological adoption model, and it aims to shed light on how individuals are socialized and how green intentions mediate their conformity tendencies to adopt renewable energy sources. The results revealed that the average age of the farmers was 42 years, and they were primary school graduates. More than 50% were male. Almost 26% of farmers reported that they use renewable energy sources on their farms. Generally, the farmers were green intended and would like to adopt renewable energy sources. The regression results disclosed a significant impact of socially inspired peer adoption (p<0.01) on the farmers’ adoption of renewable energy sources. Renewable energy adoption is impacted more by the adoption of strong connections than by the adoption of renewable energy by weak relations, which means that farmers are more likely to adopt renewable energy if their peers also do so. Nevertheless, the extent to which farmers have green intentions regarding the use of renewable energy technology had a significant influence on the farmers’ conformity tendencies, influenced by the different intensities of their social networks.