Social Capital, Environment and Water Sustainability: Essential Ingredients Prompting Community Action on Conservation Challenges?

This paper investigates the determinants of awareness of local community action to address environmental issues and water conservation in a drought-prone Australian community. With researchers arguing that social capital, broadly defined as the social connectedness of a community, may foster sustainable communities that collaborate to solve community issues, the paper examines the extent to which levels of social capital in a community predict environmental sustainability. Postal surveys of 168 residents living on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia investigated the extent to which eight distinct elements of social capital, individual feelings of environmental responsibility, outdoor activities and key demographic characteristics predicted awareness of community level environmental and water conservation. The majority of participants believed that their community had taken action to address environmental issues, with logistic regression analyses demonstrating that the best predictor of community action was the neighbourhood connections element of social capital. These findings, linking sustainable environmental action at a community level to social capital, suggest that a focus on building social capital may be an effective strategy that facilitates both social and environmental sustainability. As the first study to directly examine the relationship among social, environmental and community sustainability in Australia, the findings, implications and limitations are discussed in detail.