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ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
161Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161-171 (2014)
Environmental information and propensity to help developing countries: An experimental survey of citizens in Kitakyushu,
Japan
1, 2 3Takaaki Kato, *Eri Himeshima, Hai Hoang, Quang Tran and
5Hidenori Nakamura
1Faculty of Environmental Engineering The University of Kitakyushu
808-0135, Japan
3International Cooperation DepartmentThe University of Da NangDa Nang 59000, Vietnam
4Department of Environment Da Nang University of Technology
Da Nang 59000, Vietnam5Graduate School of Environmental Studies
Nagoya University Nagoya 464-8601, Japan
4Van
Kitakyushu2Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency
Kawasaki 212-8554, Japan
Key Words: Environmental cooperation, municipality, citizen, learning
Japanese municipalities have provided significant support for improving environment to devel-oping countries. The motivation behind this study was that the growing requirements for Japanese local governments to gain support from citizens might cause a problem. The problem was the disparity between donor citizens and recipients in the aid envisioned. In our social survey, we investi-gated the views of citizens in Kitakyushu, Japan, within a specific context of helping large Vietnam-ese cities. In particular, we mentioned Da Nang City as an example. Many of our respondents chose “drinking water quality,” “river/sea pollution,” and “waste management” as important environmental problems in the Vietnamese cities. These problems were in line with those officially recognized by the administrators of Da Nang. However, there were sharp differences in perceived environmental problems between the respondents and urban dwellers in Da Nang. Background knowledge of Vietnam, owing to previous visits there, and of Kitakyushu's aid activities in the country clearly affected the choices of the important environmental problems. Provision of information on the environment in Da Nang changed the ranking among the top four problems, but the items within the set remained the same as before. Both knowledge gained as a result of visiting Vietnam and knowl-edge of Kitakyushu's aid activities in the country contributed to maintaining initial views after the presentation of the Da Nang information. The implications of these results in citizen education by municipalities are discussed with reference to the ideas of problem-based learning. .
Japanese municipal governments have played a significant role in the country's environmental aid policy in past decades [1-3]. Mitigation of environ-mental problems in developing countries is vital to
local welfare in those countries and to solving global environmental problems. Japan is one of the major providers of official development aid. It provided a net amount of 11 billion U.S. dollars in 2010 [4]. Traditional roles of municipal governments in Japanese environmental aid policy include providing knowledge
on local environmental controls and training govern-mental officials. Since a lack of proper and efficient local governance is a major source of difficulties in securing environmental improvements in developing countries [5-7], aid by Japanese municipal govern-ments has contributed to development in various parts of the world. The role of municipal governments in Japanese international aid provision is changing, and this change could cause a problem. Recently, some Japanese municipal governments have started more business-oriented activities. They are interested in exporting their skills in the management of local infrastructure, including water supply and wastewater treatment plants. Behind this change are persistent shortages in Japanese municipal budgets and the need to revitalize local industries. Thus, the satisfaction of donor citizens has become more important in cities' foreign aid than before [8]. However, what donor citizens desire to give can be different from what developing countries need. The disparity between donors' interest and recipients' needs is one of the major issues in the international aid [9-11]. The discussion has targeted professional aid organizations and aid workers. Now we need to include donor citizens within the scope of this discussion. We know little about the possible disparity be-tween Japanese citizens' views and actual problems in developing countries. The Japanese government has conducted surveys regarding the views of Japanese citizens toward international aid [1,12]. However, these surveys have not framed their questions in the specific context of international environmental aid by municipalities. Some municipal governments have surveyed their citizens' responses to those govern-mental international environmental aid program [13], but information regarding the aforementioned disparity is not available. To provide information on internation-al aid in an appropriate manner to donor citizens is an important task, but Japanese municipal governments have not systematically implemented this educational task among their foreign aid policies. Thus, we need to accumulate more knowledge in this regard. This case study of citizens in Kitakyushu, Japan, investigates their views on the environmental problems in Vietnam, the disparity between their views and the actual problems, and the effects of providing informa-tion regarding the actual environmental status of recipients. We reference to the ideas of problem-based learning (PBL) in order to draw policy implications from our results. Effects of background knowledge are examined as well. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The second and third sections summarize theoretical issues and the methodology of this study, respectively. The fourth section presents results as well as a discussion, and the final section offers conclusions and policy implications.
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LEARNING BY KNOWING
We propose to view the education of citizens as an extension of PBL. The process of citizens' education has important similarities to that of PBL. First, we need to emphasize learners' own motivation to learn. We cannot make a large number of citizens learn unless they want to do so. Second, the process of learning is different from the one employed in con-ventional subject-based learning (SBL). Students of SBL learn things one by one, starting from fundamen-tal theories and then moving on to their applications [14]. Since most citizens do not belong to schools, SBL is not a feasible form of education. Education of citizens takes the form of providing information on important issues from time to time. Third, there are often no readily available answers to the issues targeted for learning. Disparity between donors' and recipients' ideas of the aid needed is an example. There is a difference between citizen education and PBL as well. PBL emphasizes learning by doing and through interactions among a small group [14]. It is not feasible in many cases for local governments to provide these opportunities for a large number of citizens due to the constraints on teaching resources. Thus, the central approach to citizen education becomes “learning by knowing.” The density of interactions with fellow learners will largely depend on the human network of each learner. Despite this difference, we think that viewing citizens' education as “PBL by knowing” provides useful insights. Local governments can follow the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle to provide policy information appro-priately to their citizens within the process of PBL by knowing. At the beginning of the planning stage, we need to know the actual disparity between donor citizens and recipients regarding the environmental problems in question. Then the local government makes and executes its plan for dissemination of information on the environmental problems. The following stage involves an assessment of the disparity after provision of information. After that, necessary changes are made for the next cycle of dissemination. Throughout the process of PBL by knowing, background knowledge on the targeted issue plays a significant role. Background knowledge often makes learning faster and more efficient. However, back-ground knowledge sometimes prevents learners from discarding old concepts and switching to new ones by accepting new information [15]. The disparity of views between donors and recipients is a complex issue. The same environmental problem looks different if seen from different angles. For example, the solution priority among multiple environmental issues may be different between the recipient government and recipient citizens. Thus, we should synthesize infor-mation from various sources and make a decision, but background knowledge may hamper our doing so. This study examines the following five research questions within the specific context of environmental aid by which Kitakyushu City helps solve environ-
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162 Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
mental problems in large Vietnamese cities.i. Which areas of environmental problems do donor citizens assume are important? ii. Is there any disparity between the assumed and actual problems?iii. What is the background information that affects the choice of important problems?iv. How does providing information on the environ- mental status in Vietnam influence a donor's choice of important problems?v. Does the background knowledge suppress cognitive changes regarding the importance of problems?
METHODOLOGY
We searched for answers to the aforementioned questions in a case study of Kitakyushu citizens. The city is located in western Japan and had a population
2of 976,000 within its 489 km territory at the time of the survey in January 2012. This city is well known for its history of overcoming critical industrial pollu-tion in the 1960s and 1970s. The city has led interna-tional intercity environmental cooperation among Japanese municipalities [16]. Table 1 summarizes our web survey. The number of respondents was 2,125. These respondents were preregistered members of an online survey firm. Of the respondents, 48.9% were female, and the average age was 44.4 yr. As for the overall adult population of Kitakyushu, 53.6% were female and the average age was 53.5 yr in March 2012 [17]. Therefore, our sample represented more males and younger individuals than the population as a whole. This difference in the age distributions was expected, since the individuals tar-geted by our survey were Internet users.
The survey assumed that Kitakyushu City Govern-ment planned to help large Vietnamese cities in solving their environmental problems. Figure 1 shows the structure of the questionnaire. The first section investi-gated attitudes toward environmental problems and background knowledge regarding life in developing countries. The last question in this section required the respondent to checkmark important environmental
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Table 1. Summary of web survey
Item
Survey period
Survey area
Population
Sampling method
Sample size
Gender
Average age
Annual household income less than 5 million yen
Value
January 2012
Kitakyushu city
Kitakyushu citizens aged 20 yr and older
Members of a preregistered panel of an online survey firm
2,125
Female share: 48.9%
44.4 yr
50.2%
problems in large Vietnamese cities. The respondent chose as many options as they thought appropriate from nine options. Then we split the Kitakyushu sample into two groups for the second section. One group (the informed group) obtained information on the status of the environment in Da Nang, Vietnam, while the other (the noninformed group) did not. We will explain the details of the information later. The initial question of the third section asked the respond-ents to choose appropriate areas of environmental aid to large Vietnamese cities. The respondent chose as many options as they wanted from 10 options. We investigated the impact of presenting the information on Da Nang by comparing the answers to this question between the informed and noninformed groups. The rest of the third section asked about the preferable methodology of international aid. The fourth section asked about the respondents' personal attributes.
The informed group obtained information on the status of the environment in Da Nang in the second section. We chose Da Nang as an example of large Vietnamese cities. Da Nang is located in central Vietnam and had a population of 926,000 within its
2489 km land area in 2010. Da Nang's population, the fourth largest in the country, is similar to the popula-tion of Kitakyushu. Da Nang's per capita GDP in 2010 was 1,600 U.S. dollars, while that in Japan was 43,000 U.S. dollars in the same year. We provided two kinds of information in a package. One was the official
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Fig. 1. Structure of survey questionnaire.
163Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Informed group Noninformed group
Background knowledge and attitude
Information on Da Nang
Appropriate environmental aid
Personal attributes
statement of Da Nang's environmental status and administrative targets ([18], see Table 2). The other was perceptions of the environment by urban dwellers in Da Nang (See Fig. 2 and Appendix). The official statement lists “river water quality” as a target. In the subjective evaluations, only a few citizens acknowl-edged “river/sea pollution” as problematic. Thus, problems look different if viewed from different angles. Both the official and subjective statements tell us some truth regarding the environment in Da Nang. We will later see that background information works as a filter in accepting part of this complex information. .
aTable 2. Environmental status and targets in Da Nang
Air pollution
Safe water access
River water quality
Domestic waste
collection rate
Industrial waste recycling
Noise in residential areas
2005 status
SPM: Several times higher than
environmental standard near major
intersections
Urban area: 57% of population
Rural area: 4% of population
E. coli bacteria, nitrogen, heavy metals:
Spots show 10-20 times higher
pollution than environmental standards.
86%
N/A
N/A
2020 target
Levels of SPM, ozone, SO , CO to be below 2
limits established by environmental standards
Urban areas: more than 95%
Rural areas: more than 70%
Domestic: more than 50% treated
Industrial: 100% achievement of
environmental regulations
More than 90%
More than 70%
Less than 60 dBAaThis table is compiled from Da Nang People's Committee [18]. This document mentions soil pollution, but does not state a specific quantitative target
Fig. 2. Perceived environmental problems in Da Nang.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
1. Background Knowledge
We summarize respondents' background knowl-edge and attitudes toward environmental aid, because we consider these factors in our later analysis. Table 3 shows that among the respondents, 7.9% had visited Vietnam and 25.4% had visited other developing countries. Thus, as expected, many of the respondents were unfamiliar with actual life in Vietnam. The level of concern about welfare in developing countries was selected from five answer categories: “yes,” “rather yes,” “neither yes nor no,” “rather no,” and “no.” We assigned numerical values of 5 through 1 to these 5 categories and calculated the average response as 3.03. A similar questioning and quantification procedure was applied to concerns about global warming. Strength of support for Kitakyushu City's future international environmental aid was selected from six answer categories: “supportive,” “rather supportive,” “neither supportive nor negative,” “rather negative,” “negative,” and “do not know” (DK). The DK responsewas chosen by 4.3%. We excluded DK responses, assigned numerical values of 5 through 1 to the re-maining categories, and obtained an average response of 4.12. This average shows that most respondents were supportive of the city's continuous environmental cooperation, since the maximum possible value is 5.00. Figure 3 summarizes the respondents' levels of knowledge of major ongoing or previous projects that the Kitakyushu City government had organized. Answers were chosen from three categories; “do not know,” “heard of the name,” and “know well.” The
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164 Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
Dalian project started in the early 1980s, and interna-tional cooperation through the Kitakyushu Initiative commenced in 2000; the major action phases of these two projects are complete. The remaining three pro-jects are ongoing. The Hai Phong project in Vietnam had the largest publicity among the five projects, as 39.7% had at least heard of this project. Among the respondents, 44.4% did not know of any of the five projects.
2. Assumed Importance of Environmental Problems
Figure 4 summarizes the areas of environmental problems that our respondents thought important be-fore obtaining the Da Nang information. Regarding our first research question, the top three problems selected were “drinking water quality,” “river/sea pollution,” and “waste management.” The reason many respondents chose those three areas cannot be determined from our survey. Curiously enough, the Kitakyushu City government has done most of its recent aid in those three areas. Our second research question was the disparity between donor citizens and recipients. Notes in the right hand side of Fig. 4 summarize the status of the environment in Da Nang. The aforementioned choices by the Kitakyushu respondents are in line with the official statement by the Da Nang City government. We have learned that the official statement counted “safe water access,” “river water quality,” and “waste management” within the environmental problems in Da Nang. However, there was a disparity between the selected problems and problems actually perceived by urban Da Nang citizens. Note that the top three problems among the Da Nang citizens were “noise,”“air pollution,” and “waste management.” Only a few acknowledged “river/sea pollution” as problematic. We then proceeded to our third research question and analyzed the effects of background information onthe choice of important environmental problems. For presentation in Fig. 5, we extracted the respondents who had visited Vietnam and compared their answers with those of the remaining respondents. At the 5% statistical significance level, Vietnam visitors chose “air pollution,” “traffic congestion,” and “noise in residential areas” more with “drinking water quality”
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Table 3. Background knowledge and attitude
Variables
Vietnam visit
Developing countries visit (other than Vietnam)
Concerns about welfare in developing countries
Concerns about global warming
Support for city's future international intercity environmental cooperation
Average
7.9%
25.4%a3.03 pointsa3.79 points
a,b4.12 pointsaCalculated using numerical values assigned to five alternative categoriesb4.3% chose “Do not know” and were excluded from this table
and “global warming” less than those who had not visited Vietnam. Thus, the experience of visiting Vietnam shifted the respondents' answers nearer to those of the dwellers of urban Da Nang. Purpose and length of visits to Vietnam by these respondents are not available, but we can reasonably assume that most visits were short. National statistics show that among Japanese overseas travelers whose stay did not ex-ceeded 6 months, 61.0 and 24.7% returned within 5 and 10 d, respectively [19]. Thus, it is likely that even a short trip to Vietnam affected visitors' views on the environment in the country. .
Fig. 3. Knowledge of Kitakyushu's major environmental aid.
Fig. 4. Important environmental problems before receiving information on Da Nang.
165Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
Fig. 5. Important environmental problems and visiting Vietnam.
We then focus upon the most selected alternative, “drinking water quality,” and explore its relationships with a variety of background knowledge and attitudes. Table 4 shows the results of a logistic regression analysis. The dependent variable was assigned as 1 when a respondent selected “Drinking water quality” (0 otherwise). We tried gender (dummy variable), age, income, experience of visiting Vietnam (dummy variable), experience of visiting a developing country other than Vietnam (dummy variable), concerns about global warming (five-degree scale), concerns about welfare in developing countries (five-degree scale), and knowledge of each of Kitakyushu's five interna-tional aid projects (three-degree scale) as independent variables. We previously presented a summary of these variables. Linear combinations of these variables were used for the regression analysis. Table 4 lists the coefficients of the independent variables that were significant at the 5% statistical significance level. The negative sign of the coefficient for visiting Vietnam shows that Vietnam visitors tended not to choose “drinking water quality.” This result is in accordance with our previous inspection of Fig. 5. Knowledge of Kitakyushu's recent cooperation with Hai Phong increased the probability of selecting “drinking water quality.” Since this project involves an upgrade of the tap water supply network, it would have evoked an impression of a malfunctioning water supply in the country. Two other variables became statistically
significant, but their causality is less clear. Knowledge of the Surabaya/Bangkok project reduced the proba-bility of selecting “drinking water quality,” whereas concerns about global warming raised the probability of selecting it.
3. Impacts of Presenting Da Nang Information
Figure 6 summarizes the answers to our fourth research question, regarding the impacts of the Da Nang information. The figure compares the choice of environmental areas in which Kitakyushu City should aid between the two information treatments. The most selected issue among the informed group was “drink-ing water quality,” followed by “air pollution,” “waste management,” and “river/sea pollution.” Among the noninformed group, the order of the top four choices became “drinking water quality,” “river/sea pollution,” “waste management,” and “air pollution.” Therefore, the four most selected issues were the same, but the order of the issues differed between the two groups. The noninformed group's top three answers were ordered the same way as in their initial evaluations of the environmental issues (see Fig. 4). Selections of “drinking water quality” and “river/sea pollution” were less common in the informed than the noninformed group, at the 5% significance level. Selections of “air pollution” and “noise” were more common among the informed group than the noninformed group, at the
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166 Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
Table 4. Logistic regression analysis of selecting “drinking water quality”
Variable
Vietnam visit
Concern about global warming
Knowledge of Hai Phong project
Knowledge of Surabaya/Bangkok project
Constant
Sample size
Hit ratio2Nagelkerke R
Coefficient
-0.413
0.265
0.376
-0.312
0.256
Wald
4.87
21.42
12.69
5.51
1.18
2,125
79.7%
0.032
P
0.027
0.001
0.001
0.019
0.277
same significance level. Thus, providing the Da Nang information shifted the ideas of our respondents toward the problems recognized by urban dwellers in Da Nang. However, this information disclosure did not change our respondents' strong belief that the biggest problem in large Vietnamese cities was the quality of drinking water. We now answer our final research question, re-garding the effects of background knowledge on the cognitive change. We focus upon “drinking water quality,” since this category earned the largest support. The following sequence of questions enables the analysis: the initial question about important environ-mental problems and the follow-up question of which
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Fig. 6. Comparison between information treatments.
environmental areas should be the targets of Kitakyu-shu's aid. There are four possible patterns of answering in this sequence: selecting “drinking water quality” on both questions, selecting that option on the initial but not the follow-up question, vice versa, and not se-lecting “drinking water quality” throughout the entire question sequence (YY, YN, NY, and NN, respective-ly). We analyze the relationship between background knowledge and answer pattern by using statistical methods. We examine the influence of the experience of visiting Vietnam by using a correspondence analysis. We chose this variable because it clearly affected answers to the initial question in our previous analysis.
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167Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
Table 5 summarizes the relationships between the answer patterns and three personal attributes: gender (male or female), age (20-30s, 40s, or 50-70s), and the experience of visiting Vietnam (Visit or NoVisit) for the informed group. Table 6 shows the corresponding results for the noninformed group. Gender and age are included as basic personal attributes in this analysis. The correspondence analysis can simplify the multi-dimensional relationships among these variables. Figure 7 shows the biplots of the results for each group. In creating the figure, we started from stacked two-way tables, as shown in Tables 5 and 6. We as-sumed three dimensions at the beginning (the maxi-mum in this case) and performed a correspondence analysis. We found that the first two dimensions were sufficient, since those two dimensions explained 95.6 and 92.4%, respectively, of the variation in Tables 4 and 5. Thus, we then employed a two-dimensional structure and obtained the results. We used the corresp [20] command of the R statistical language to perform these calculations. The biplot command visualized the results as shown in Fig. 7. An interpretation of Fig. 7 shows that the back-ground knowledge due to visiting Vietnam suppressedcognitive change during this experimental survey. Panels (a) and (b) of Fig. 7 show the results from the informed and noninformed groups, respectively. Each panel overlays two distributions: answer changing patterns and personal attributes. We focus on the relative position of each item with respect to the origin, investigating panel (a) first. Both Visit and NN are
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Table 5. Personal attributes and answer patterns for citing drinking water quality as a problem (informed group)
Gender
Age
Vietnam visit
Female
Male
20-30s
40s
50-70s
Yes
No
aYY
277
56.4%
353
62.7%
216
56.1%
198
58.8%
216
65.1%
47
55.3%
583
60.2%
bYN
133
27.1%
95
16.9%
95
24.7%
78
23.1%
55
16.6%
14
16.5%
214
22.1%
cNY
43
8.8%
60
10.7%
38
9.9%
31
9.2%
34
10.2%
10
11.8%
93
9.6%
dNN
38
7.7%
55
9.8%
36
9.4%
30
8.9%
27
8.1%
14
16.5%
79
8.2%
Total
491
100.0%
563
100.0%
385
100.0%
337
100.0%
332
100.0%
85
100.0%
969
100.0%aYY: Drinking water quality was chosen in both of two sequential questions.bYN: Drinking water quality was chosen in the first of the two questions but not in the second.cNY: Drinking water quality was chosen in the second of the two questions but not in the first.dNN: Drinking water quality was not chosen.
found north-northeast of the origin, whereas NoVisit and YY are southeast of the origin. Therefore, having visited or not visited Vietnam was a significant factor in choosing either answer sequence YY or NN. This means that having background knowledge due to a previous visit to Vietnam made it likely for respondents to maintain their initial ideas after receiving the Da Nang information. Both YN and Female are located west of the origin. Thus, female rather than male respondents tended to change their answer after obtaining the Da Nang information. Age category is not clearly related to the answer patterns in panel (a). Then, in panel (b), we cannot determine any clear coordination between the answer patterns and personal attributes. Thus, changes in answers in the informed group happened more systematically than in the noninformed group. Another analysis shows that the other type of background knowledge worked to suppress cognitive change, as well. We explored more variables that con-tributed to the distinction between response patterns YN and YY regarding the drinking water issue. We extracted respondents among the informed group who chose drinking water as an important issue in the initial question. Those respondents had response patterns of either YY or YN. We conducted a logistic regression analysis whose dependent variable was assigned as 1 for YY and 0 for YN. The candidate independent variables were the same as those used to create Table 4 in the previous subsection. Table 7 shows that two variables were statistically significant at the 5% level:
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168 Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
Fig. 7. Impacts of information disclosure and personal attributes.
having knowledge of the Hai Phong project and being male are related to continued support for drinking water cooperation after acquiring the information on Da Nang. The former shows that background knowl-edge of the project suppressed cognitive change. The result with respect to gender signifies that female participants have a larger probability of choosing YN.
Table 6. Personal attributes and answer patterns for citing drinking water quality as a problem (noninformed group)
Gender
Age
Vietnam visit
Female
Male
20-30s
40s
50-70s
Yes
No
aYY
388
70.3%
348
67.1%
293
68.8%
217
68.2%
226
69.1%
55
67.1%
681
68.9%
bYN
48
8.7%
51
9.8%
40
9.4%
30
9.4%
29
8.9%
7
8.5%
92
9.3%
cNY
73
13.2%
70
13.5%
56
13.1%
43
13.5%
44
13.5%
11
13.4%
132
13.3%
dNN
43
7.8%
50
9.6%
37
8.7%
28
8.8%
28
8.6%
9
11.0%
84
8.5%
Total
552
100.0%
519
100.0%
426
100.0%
318
100.0%
327
100.0%
82
100.0%
989
100.0%
aYY: Drinking water quality was chosen in both of two sequential questions.bYN: Drinking water quality was chosen in the first of the two questions but not in the second.cNY: Drinking water quality was chosen in the second of the two questions but not in the first.dNN: Drinking water problem was not chosen.
This is consistent with our previous analysis of Fig. 7.
CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
The motivation behind this study was the concern that the growing requirements for Japanese local governments to gain support from their citizens may
169Kato et al., Sustain. Environ. Res., 24(3), 161- 171 (2014)
result in disparity between the international aid that donor citizens desire to give and that actually awaited by recipients. Thus, we surveyed Kitakyushu citizens regarding this possible disparity within the specific context of the city's help solve environmental prob-lems in large Vietnamese cities. We presented Da Nang City as an example. Our focus was on the detection of the disparity, impacts on cognitive change of providing information regarding the environment in Vietnam, and the role of background knowledge. Many of our respondents chose “drinking water quality,” “river/sea pollution,” and “waste manage-ment” as important environmental problems in large Vietnamese cities. These problems were in line with those officially recognized by the administrators of Da Nang. However, there were sharp differences in perceived environmental problems between the respondents and urban dwellers in Da Nang. Back-ground knowledge due to previous visits to Vietnam and awareness of Kitakyushu's aid activities in the country clearly affected choices of the important environmental problems. The latter knowledge led respondents to choose “drinking water quality” as a problem while the former led them not to choose it. Provision of the information on the environment in Da Nang changed the ranking among the top four prob-lems but not the items in the set. Thus, the impact of the Da Nang information was rather limited. Both knowledge gained from visiting Vietnam and knowl-edge of Kitakyushu's aid activities in the country contributed to maintaining initial views after the presentation of the Da Nang information. In other words, respondents with these kinds of knowledge were unable to utilize new information that contra-dicted their previous knowledge. Finally, we can draw from this study some policy implications regarding citizen education. We think that viewing citizen education as “PBL by knowing” provides useful insights. Effectiveness of PBL depends on providing good problems to learners [21]. Within the context of citizen education, this assertion high-lights the importance of providing appropriate infor-mation in an appropriate manner. In PBL, conflicting information can help learners to deepen their thought about the problem in question [22]. This would be truein education regarding the literacy of international aid.
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Table 7. Logistic regression analysis of answer change (informed group)
Variable
Male
Knowledge of Hai Phong project
Constant
Sample size
Hit ratio2Nagelkerke R
Coefficient
0.498
0.464
0.099
Wald
9.81
12.49
0.24
856
73.4%
0.046
P
0.002
0.000
0.628
Partnership between local governments and NGOs throughout the process of international aid is an avenue to creating multiple information channels to facilitate the exchange of diversified information. Our results showed, however, the difficulty in the use of conflict-ing information in citizens' education. Although most citizens had limited knowledge about the environment in developing countries in our study, the knowledge they had worked to maintain their views on interna-tional aid and to discard new information. In a PBL class, development of self-monitoring skills and interactions among fellow learners may eliminate this problem [14]. Thus, we need further research on methods of providing opportunities for interactions among learning citizens under the constraints of budget and limited teaching resources. The methods may include the use of social media and mobilization of volunteer tutors who have experience in interna-tional aid. .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
REFERENCES
The authors are grateful to the Environment Re-search and Technology Development Fund (E-0906), Ministry of the Environment, Japan for providing financial support to our study. This work was inspired by discussions with Profs. Mitsuru Tanaka and Takahiro Nakaguchi. .
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APPENDIX
This appendix explains our survey of the urban dwellers in Da Nang City, Vietnam. We conducted a survey of the perceptions of Da Nang citizens regard-ing environmental problems. Table 8 summarizes methodology and personal attributes of the respond-ents. One of the questions presented six issues and asked whether these issues had affected the respond-ents' lives within the past month. The first five issues were environmental. The sixth issue was “diseases,” the causes of which were not necessarily environ-mental. The respondents were able to choose as many options as they wanted. We used results of this question to create Fig. 2 in the main text. “Drinking water quality,” “air pollution,” “waste management,” and “Noise” disturbed life more than “diseases.” Among those, the top two were “noise” and “air pollution.” .
Table 8. Summary of Da Nang survey
Item
Survey period
Survey area
Population
Sample size
Survey method
Gender
Average age
Value
September 2011
5 urbanized districts in Da Nang City
Adult Da Nang citizens
Random sampling using an
area sampling technique
142 households
Interview
Female share: 80.1%
47.4 yr
Sampling method
Discussions of this paper may appear in the discus-sion section of a future issue. All discussions shouldbe submitted to the Editor-in-Chief within six monthsof publication. .
Manuscript Received: Revision Received:
and Accepted:
April 10, 2013June 10, 2013June 28, 2013
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