Reformulating the determinants of consumer behaviour : evidence from enforced environmental policies
Αναδιατύπωση των προσδιοριστικών παραγόντων της καταναλωτικής συμπεριφοράς : εμπειρικά ευρήματα από επιβεβλημένες περιβαλλοντικές πολιτικές
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Keywords
Sustainable consumption ; Consumer behaviour ; Sustainability policy ; Regulatory salience ; Adaptive sustainable behaviour ; Habit disruptionAbstract
The transition toward sustainable consumption across Europe is increasingly shaped by binding regulatory measures rather than voluntary behaviour change. Under the EU's Single-Use Plastics Directive and national implementing legislation — including plastic bag levies, straw and cup restrictions, and emerging deposit-return schemes — sustainability regulation formally targets business operators yet structurally reshapes the market environments within which consumers make everyday decisions. This dissertation investigates how consumers perceive, interpret, and adapt their behaviour in response to this restructured regulatory environment, focusing on beverage purchasing and consumption in post-crisis Greece.
The central research question asks: how do sustainability-related regulatory measures influence consumer adaptation in the Greek beverage sector, and through what multidisciplinary mechanisms does this relationship operate?
To address this question, the dissertation develops and empirically tests the Enforced Adaptation Model (EAM) — an integrative theoretical framework synthesising economic, psychological, sociological, and marketing perspectives within a multi-level MACRO-MESO-MICRO architecture. The EAM conceptualises sustainability regulation as a signal transmitted through market actors that restructures consumer choice environments and triggers adaptation through three psychological pathways: loss framing, habit disruption, and normative alignment. Institutional trust, perceived legitimacy, income constraints, and economic context are specified as sociocultural moderators; retailer implementation behaviour is specified as a meso-level mediator.
An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was employed. The qualitative phase comprised fourteen case studies — six Greek and eight international — examining the implementation of sustainability policy instruments. Analysis identified recurring behavioural mechanisms, implementation dynamics, and contextual boundary conditions, providing theoretical grounding for the EAM. The quantitative phase involved a large-scale survey of 614 Greek beverage consumers. Eleven hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression, bootstrapped mediation analysis (PROCESS), moderation analysis, and structural equation modelling.
The findings yield four principal contributions. First, perceived regulatory salience in the retail environment is significantly associated with adaptive sustainable behaviour (β = .358, p < .001), explaining 17.9% of variance — substantially exceeding the contribution of pre-existing environmental values (0.9%). This indicates that visible regulatory and market-level signals are associated with behavioural adaptation above and beyond broad pro-environmental orientation. Second, contrary to prospect theory expectations, loss framing does not emerge as a significant mediating pathway. Instead, habit disruption (73% of the indirect effect) and normative alignment (82%, achieving full mediation) are the dominant pathways through which regulatory salience is associated with adaptive behaviour — suggesting that regulatory change operates primarily by interrupting consumption routines and embedding new behaviours into social expectations. Third, institutional trust moderates these associations in an unexpected direction: the relationship between regulatory salience and adaptive sustainable behaviour is stronger under conditions of lower institutional trust (β = .433) than higher trust (β = .278). This pattern — interpreted here as an adaptation under low-trust salience mechanism — suggests that in post-crisis institutional contexts, the concrete visibility of market-level regulatory change may function as a behavioural cue independently of confidence in governing institutions. Fourth, firm- and retailer-level implementation behaviour mediates the salience–adaptation relationship, confirming that meso-level actors function as active transmission mechanisms in sustainability governance rather than passive channels.
Together, these findings advance sustainable consumption theory by establishing the primacy of normative and habitual over loss-based pathways, offering a contextually grounded account of regulatory adaptation applicable to Southern European and other post-crisis institutional settings, and demonstrating that the behavioural dimensions of sustainability governance may operate effectively even where public institutional trust remains constrained.