Beyond Risk Fatigue and Desensitization: How Public Risk Perception Stabilizes Under Prolonged PM2.5 Governance in China

ABSTRACT In China, PM2.5 air pollution has remained a salient environmental risk, yet public concern has gradually declined over the past decade, a trend often attributed to risk fatigue, desensitization, or adaptation. Such explanations, however, provide limited insight into how the public understands environmental risks under long‐term governance and how sustained risk communication should be carried out. Drawing on a grounded theory analysis of semi‐structured interviews with residents in China's Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region who were highly attentive to PM2.5 risks ( N = 20 ), this study examines how public risk perception evolves after more than a decade of intensive PM2.5 governance. The findings identify a two‐stage transformation of risk perception. An initial stage of heightened risk awareness is driven by sensory experience, media exposure, and risk information seeking. In the normalization stage, although emotional intensity and routine attention declined on the surface, the public developed a dynamically risk steady state through risk meaning reconstruction, trust reconfiguration, and identity reconciliation, shaped by governance experience. Therefore, this study argues that long‐term environmental governance reshapes public risk perception not simply through fatigue or desensitization, but through a new structure in which surface‐level attenuation coexists with deeper, experience‐based, and reflexive risk understanding. In doing so, it advances understanding of the dynamic relationships among public trust, risk governance, and risk communication.