SURVEY BASED ASSESSMENT PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY FOR A GREEN UZBEKISTAN. A THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR VALIDATION

Abstract

With environmental issues deteriorating and the pursuit for sustainable development continuing, Uzbekistan began to experience a definite direction towards an economically more sustainably powered economy. While the government has tried hard and put policy strategies in place for using solar, wind, and other renewable technologies, success of such programs is heavily bottle necked by the trend of the common people to accept and become part of these programs. The purpose of the present study is to test the public acceptability of Uzbekistan's renewable energy projects using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which is a prominent theory in social psychology that predicts people's behavior intention by applying the critical determinants of attitude, subjective reference group approval, and perceived control of behavior. The study employs the quantitative approach assisted by a self-administered survey questionnaire to gather the attitudes of various populations from rural and urban settings with a sample size of 500 participants across various districts of Uzbekistan