Sustainable Emergency Response Strategies and Public Compliance Behavior of Urban Smart Grids Under Extreme Weather Conditions: A Survey Experiment in China

Abstract

Extreme weather events increasingly threaten urban smart grids, where sudden power outages constitute not merely technical failures but socio-technical crises that test the very fabric of sustainable emergency governance. Drawing on framing theory, this study uses a 2 × 2 experiment with 1195 participants to examine how information content and timing affect public compliance. Results show action framing outperforms interpretive framing, with trust and safety mediating 46.9% and 34.7% of the effect. Timing moderates these pathways: action framing boosts compliance via trust and safety during crisis, while interpretive framing sustains compliance via safety and trust repair after restoration. This temporal asymmetry advances crisis communication theory and offers guidance for sustainable governance, turning crisis communication into a stage-matching process that bridges short-term recovery and long-term resilience.