Grounding civic engagement in strategic communication for China's public-health programs: Air-quality campaigns as a case study

Member states of the United Nations are committed to formulating post-2015 development agendas in the aftermath of their adopting 17 goals and 169 targets during the Sustainable Development Summit held September 25-27, 2015, in New York City. For China, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 3, 11 and 12 offer it an opportunity to tackle its environmental sustainability challenge, an outcome of a confluence of several behavioral and organizational factors. This article proposes an environmental sustainability campaign in response to haze events-specifically as a guide to China's meeting its public commitment to environmental health. That campaign, which can serve as a road map to other countries' sustainability campaigns, is based on the intersection of air pollution, public health and government action in China; on the involvement of public-interest groups in energizing the grass roots toward playing a major role in environmental health; on the application of the personal influence model to campaign planning and implementation; and on the notion that citizen and public-interest groups, nongovernmental organizations, business organizations, and government agencies can be both partners and co-leaders in a coordinated, strategic communication response to an environmental sustainability crisis.