Measuring Toyota Citizens' Eco-awareness: Is the City’s Eco-policy More Recognized?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24102/ijes.v4i2.482

Abstract

In 2009, Toyota City was selected as an environmental model city by the Japanese government. The city has been working on addressing environmental issues and raising citizens’ awareness of its eco-policy focusing on five relevant themes: transportation, forests, the urban center, industry, and public welfare and livelihood. In 2012, surveys were conducted in Toyota City to examine how much citizens recognized the eco-policy. The study showed that less than 40% of Toyota City citizens were aware of the fact that the city was designated as an environmental model city. Using the same research method as the 2012 study, a similar survey was conducted in 2014 to examine how the citizen’s awareness of the eco-policy had shifted. The findings show little sign of improvement in citizens’ eco-awareness: the recognition rate of most topics had dropped in the 2014 findings compared to those of 2012. This paper explores possible reasons for the results and makes suggestions for improving eco-awareness.

Author Biography

  • Hiroshi Ito, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business
    Dr. Hiroshi Ito is an Associate Professor in Management at the Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (NUCB). Before coming to NUCB, he had worked as an education expert for UNESCO’s Education for All Global Partnerships Team in Paris, France. He also worked for UNICEF (Manila, the Philippines), JICA (Quito, Ecuador & Caaguazu, Paraguay), an educational NGO (Santa Rosa, Guatemala), and an educational service company (New Jersey, USA). His research interests lie in Nonprofit Management and Marketing, International Development, Education for All, First-Year Experience, Sustainable Ecology, Language Policy, and Monitoring & Evaluation.

 Dr. Ito received his M.A. in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University and his Ph. D. in International and Comparative Education from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as well as MBA from Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is fluent in Japanese, English, Spanish, Guarani and is currently learning French.

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Published

2015-08-11

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2015)

Section

Articles

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.