How strong is public support for unilateral climate policy and what drives it?

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that climate change poses a global public goods problem, thus requiring a global solution that reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide through some form of centralized target setting and burden-sharing arrangement among countries. Yet, the 2015 Paris Agreement has essentially given up on this approach, on which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was based, and now relies on policies that are adopted unilaterally and voluntarily by individual countries. Since ambitious climate policies are very unlikely to be enacted and effectively implemented without strong public support, research is beginning to explore how strong public support is for unilateral climate policy and what its determinants are. Recent research has developed useful survey instruments to gauge public support for unilateral climate policy. Results from surveys and survey-embedded experiments show that when respondents are confronted with cost implications and free-riding problems associated with unilateral climate policy, public support tends to drop to some extent, but still remains quite high. Current research thus shows that people are-the hitherto strong global public goods framing of climate policy notwithstandingsurprisingly nonreciprocal in their climate policy preferences. Preferences concerning climate policy tend to be driven primarily by a range of personal predispositions and cost considerations, which existing research has already explored quite extensively, rather than by considerations of what other countries do.

Individual Factors Influencing Acceptability for Environmental Policies: A Review and Research Agenda

“…Much research has been conducted measuring peoples' attitudes to existing policies (i.e., acceptance), but in order to implement new policies, research has to be able to provide decision makers with an understanding of how and why citizens are likely to respond to these implementations, that is, attitudes prior to implementation. Previous reviews on attitudes toward environmental policy have either focused exclusively on a single environmental domain, like climate or congestion policies [3][4][5], or focused on a specific set of determinants, like political factors [6]. In this narrative review, we aim to describe the effects of a range of individual level factors, such as sociodemographic variables, personal factors and policy-specific beliefs, over a range of environmental policy domains, to serve as a resource for both researchers and policymakers.…”

Beliefs About Consequences from Climate Action Under Weak Climate Institutions: Sectors, Home Bias, and International Embeddedness

“…According to Tingley and Tomz (2014) there is no appetite among the general public for intrinsic reciprocity to cut back emissions if other states do so as well. Other studies come to a similar conclusion as public support for unilateral climate policy is generally high (Bernauer and Gampfer, 2015;McGrath and Bernauer, 2017). 4…”

Institutional and environmental effectiveness: Will the Paris Agreement work?

“…Given the primacy of domestic politics under the Paris architecture, Keohane and Victor (2016) argue that whether negotiations lead to substantial mitigation will depend less on the PA's text than on domestic politics. It is therefore noteworthy that surveys of public opinion in major emitter countries reveal surprisingly strong support for domestic emissions reductions, regardless of whether other countries reciprocate (Bernauer, Dong, McGrath, Shaymerdenova, & Zhang, 2016;Bernauer & Gampfer, 2015;McEvoy & Cherry, 2016;McGrath & Bernauer, 2017). Furthermore, according to a survey covering Australia, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, there is majority support for a domestic carbon tax, assuming that revenues are redistributed to citizens or earmarked for mitigation and that all other countries implement the tax (Carattini, Kallbekken, & Orlov, 2019).…”