| dc.description.abstract | Community initiatives have an indispensable role to play in tackling climate adaptation, by their
ability to increase the uptake of climate adaptation measures among households. This study
focuses on increasing the uptake of green roofs among households specifically. Despite the
potential of community initiatives in increasing this uptake, they often reach only a small
portion of a neighborhood. Arguably, by enhancing membership numbers of green roof
community initiatives, the overall success of green roof implementation in the Netherlands may
be enhanced as an effective no-regrets adaptation measure. A novel framework of individual
conditions has created a holistic overview of the relevant individual conditions that move
people to participate in pro-environmental community initiatives. This study applies this
framework to a case study in the Dutch city of Deventer. In doing so, this study takes a multimethod in-depth approach that has not been applied to this framework before. This results in an
understanding of which individual conditions are most important in driving people to join a
climate adaptation community initiative. The results show that all individual conditions of the
framework were relevant and led to green roof initiative membership when all present. Yet, the
most important individual conditions were found to be peer pressure, objective capacity, and
sense of own responsibility. Accordingly the following aspects were highly influential in this
case for driving green roof initiative membership: (1) citizens will need to have (access to) the
required skills, competencies, information and knowledge, and resources to install a green roof,
(2) citizens will have to feel like participating in such an initiative is part of the social norm of
the group that they identify themselves with, and (3) they need to believe that they are
responsible for addressing the issues caused by climate change. These findings were discussed
with a selection of practitioners to assess their validity and generalizability, and were placed
within the broader scope of environmental behavior literature. Recommendations for future
research are provided, as well as recommendations for practitioners that aim to stimulate
citizens to participate in climate adaptive neighborhood initiatives. | |
