Local communities and their opinion on shale gas exploitation (SGE) play an essential role in the implementation of energy policies, while little is known about the reasoning process underpinning the acceptance of SGE. The present study develops a conceptual framework to examine the psychological process of residents' acceptance of local SGE, in which the impacts of trust, knowledge, and fairness are mediated by risk and benefit perceptions. Structural equation modeling has been applied to analyze the hypothesized relationships based on a dataset of 825 households in China's largest shale gas field. Our results indicate that residents' perceived fairness and trust positively affect their benefit perceptions and negatively affect their risk perceptions, which results in positive influences on acceptance, and knowledge of SGE's environmental impacts positively affects perceived risks, which results in a negative influence on acceptance. Moreover, residents' acceptance is primarily determined by their benefit perception, followed by perceived fairness, and knowledge is the least important determinant. Thus, our study contributes to the literature by exploring the structural relationships between various psychological predictors and the acceptance toward SGE, and the results from our empirical survey provide insight into designing appropriate strategies in the process of generating and communicating shale policies.
Keywords: acceptance; benefit perception; risk perception; shale gas; structural equation modeling.