View article

A comprehensive understanding of the reasons for over-fertilisation is critical to agro-environment sustainability, especially for the fast-growing farming areas under urbanisation. Previous studies are more quantitatively biased and in most cases, merely focus on demographical, economic and political factors whilst excluding in-depth qualitative and holistic investigation. To address this gap, this paper attempts to construct a conceptual framework to investigate the hidden mechanism of chemical fertiliser overuse through an empirical study in the Dancheng county of China. Such a framework is based on Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002), and Blake's (1999) works, but incorporates demographical factors and external barriers for explaining the awareness-behaviour gap. Results indicate that environmental awareness is not necessarily related with chemical fertiliser overuse as the reasons for farmers' inappropriate …