With the ecological environment deteriorating and rapid growth of world population, sustainable issue becomes a hot issue all over the world. All the state, industry and consumer levels pay more attention to the sustainable filed. Even Kotler (2011) in his study mentioned that the need for sustainable issue means new challenges to the scholars and practitioners.
This research aim to the sustainable consumption filed in China. Based on the previous studies, sustainable consumption can be summarized including clothing, food, housing and travelling is an important way to cope with the deteriorating ecological environment and the rapid growth of world population. The Chinese government attaches great importance to sustainable consumption, at the same time the government has issued many sustainable policies to promote the development of sustainable consumption concept. Environmental policies consists of three kinds of instruments (regulation instrument, economic instrument, and information instrument), but which instrument is more effective to promote people’s sustainable consumption attitude and behavior, and whether these effects will be changed or not in different context, previous studies have no clear answer.
Based on the literature view, this study organized and established the concept research model. Following the logic of policy-attitude-behavior, the researchers examined the relationship among environmental policy instruments, sustainable consumption attitude and sustainable consumption behavior. Meanwhile, due to long-term orientation was an important variable to explain attitude and behavior, based on time orientation theory, this research also tested the moderating role of long-term orientation between environmental policy instruments and sustainable consumption attitude. Data were collected from Chinese residents in the medium size city, after excluding 67 invalid questionnaires, 325 questionnaires were used to analysis. Through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, this study confirmed that the scales of main variables had good reliability and validity. Researchers adopted SPSS19.0 to conduct multiple regression analysis. Results showed that regulation instrument and economic instrument had significant effects on sustainable consumption attitude, but the effect of information instrument was not significant. Long-term orientation played the positive moderating role between economic instrument and sustainable consumption attitude; consumers’ sustainable consumption attitude was correlated with sustainable consumption behavior, and was as a mediator between regulation instrument, economic instrument and sustainable consumption behavior.
Finally, based on the research results we give some suggestions and contributions to both academy and practice. The conclusions of this study can contribute to the enrichment of environment policy theory,time orientation theory and sustainable consumption,and can provide a certain theoretical guidance and reference for the issue of government on how to promote the development of sustainable consumption. We also point out the limitations of this study and some suggestions for further researches.