Ecological governance and population subjective wellbeing: the mediating role of social trust.

Authors

Mengxia Wen, Rongqing Lu, Wenyuan Sun

Published in

Frontiers in psychology. Volume 17. Pages 1843998. Epub Aug 03, 2026.

Abstract

Although previous research has shown that governance quality is associated with subjective wellbeing, two gaps remain. First, governance is usually treated as an institutional performance construct, with limited attention to whether governance contexts that combine institutional quality and ecological performance are linked to population wellbeing. Second, the psychosocial pathway underlying this relationship remains underexplored, especially from an environmental psychology perspective that treats social and ecological contexts as conditions of lived wellbeing. This study addresses these gaps by examining ecological-philosophy-oriented governance, defined here as a composite macro-level governance orientation integrating governance quality and ecological performance. Using cross-national secondary data from 312 country-wave observations across 86 countries from 2005 to 2022, drawn from the WVS/EVS, WGI, and EPI, we tested whether social trust mediates the association between ecological-philosophy-oriented governance and population subjective wellbeing. The results showed that ecological-philosophy-oriented governance was positively associated with subjective wellbeing (β = 0.287, p < 0.001) and social trust (β = 0.341, p < 0.001). Social trust was also positively associated with subjective wellbeing when governance was controlled (β = 0.326, p < 0.001), while the governance coefficient was reduced (β = 0.176, p < 0.01), a pattern consistent with partial mediation. The indirect effect was significant (0.111, 95% CI [0.063, 0.168]), accounting for about 39% of the total effect. These findings suggest that governance functions not only as an institutional arrangement but also as a socio-environmental context relevant to public wellbeing, with social trust serving as an important linking pathway. The study contributes to environmental psychology by showing that governance quality and ecological performance can be interpreted as macro-level features of the human environment that shape collective subjective wellbeing.

PMID:
42609351
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 18 Aug 2026.

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