Factual information on the environmental impacts of consumption abroad increases citizens' problem awareness, but not support for mitigating such impacts

Abstract

Vastly increased international trade over the past few decades has resulted in an ever larger geographical spread in the environmental impacts of local consumption. Particularly in the case of high-income countries, a large share of their total environmental footprint of local consumption now materializes in places far beyond the respective national border. On the presumption that democratic policy-makers should, and often do, act in line with prevailing public opinion we examine whether currently weak policies addressing consumption-based environmental impacts abroad may reflect a knowledge gap amongst citizens, and how closing this knowledge gap would affect policy preferences concerning the greening of international supply chains. We do so based on an experiment, embedded in a large representative survey (N=8’000) in Switzerland, a high-income country with a very large extraterritorial environmental footprint. The main finding is that there is a major knowledge gap amongst the mass public in this area, and that this gap can be closed. However, closing the knowledge gap does not lead to a significant change in policy preferences in favor of reducing the global environmental footprint of local consumption. This points to major policy challenges in trying to mitigate problems of environmental impact shifting in the global economy.

Public Demand for Extraterritorial Environmental and Social Public Goods Provision

“…However, for this expectation to hold, we also need to understand why citizens support specific policy configurations, in particular, whether citizens perceive the economic costs and extraterritorial benefits of policy configurations as argued earlier. Such validation of perceived consequences is essential, as foreign policy has a high potential for biased and non-rational public policy perceptions (Charillon 2017;Rho and Tomz 2017) due to its distance to the quotidian information environments of citizens (Presberger et al 2022). Thus, in the second step of our argument, we investigate whether the mechanisms entailed in the proposed utility function of citizens actually hold.…”

Do Eco-Labels Enhance International Nimbyism within Consumer Preferences?

“…We used several items in the survey to assess the robustness of respondent preferences. First, recent research suggests that consumers have very limited knowledge of where, geographically, the environmental impacts of their consumption materialize and often underestimate the impact of domestic consumption abroad (Presberger et al, 2022). Hence, to control for knowledge effects we included an informational vignette experiment (before the conjoint experiment) in which the treatment group received a text and graph illustrating the impact of domestic consumption abroad.…”

Do eco-labels enhance international NIMBYism within consumer preferences?

“…We used several items in the survey to assess the robustness of respondent preferences. First, recent research suggests that consumers have very limited knowledge of where, geographically, the environmental impacts of their consumption materialize and often underestimate the impact of domestic consumption abroad (Presberger et al, 2022;Rudolph et al, 2022). Hence, to control for knowledge effects we included an informational vignette experiment (before the conjoint experiment) in which the treatment group received a text and graph illustrating the impact of domestic consumption abroad.…”