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

Abstract

To facilitate an understanding of why some environmental policies are acceptable to private citizens and why some are not, we review individual factors that influence the acceptability of environmental policy measures. The factors are categorized in demographic factors, such as age and gender, personal factors such as values and ideology, and policy specific beliefs such as perceptions of how fair or effective a policy is. The reviewed studies indicate that demographic factors generally have small effects on acceptability, that ideology seems to be a consistent predictor among personal factors, and that policy specific beliefs may be effective in explaining acceptability but that the relative importance of the specific beliefs may vary between policy contexts. However, we note methodological concerns in the field of environmental policy acceptability that limit the conclusions that can be drawn from reviews or meta-analyses. We end by giving suggestions for how this field can move forward to provide policy makers with more detailed tools on how to design acceptable environmental policies, for example by introducing more experimental designs, and the standardization of targeting factors, as well as acceptability measures and the improved categorizations of policy tools.

Individual-Level Determinants of the Public Acceptance of Policy Measures to Improve Urban Air Quality: The Case of the Barcelona Low Emission Zone

“…Second, and in line with previous expectations [19,22,39], the results of the bivariate analysis showed that the acceptance of the LEZ was significantly associated with policyspecific beliefs, affect, perceived process legitimacy and trust and, to a lesser extent, with individuals' prior attitudes, such as the attitude towards the use of a car, problem perception, pro-environmental self-identity or the attitude towards pedestrianisation as well as to sociodemographics, mainly car ownership and political ideology. Clearly, all these factors deserve a place in conceptual models that try to explain the acceptability of environmental policies [22].…”

“…Although not considered extensively in previous research, our data also showed that feelings towards the policy measure had a relevant role in acceptance. As indicated by recent reviews [22], the role of emotions such as interest, worry, anger and hope clearly requires more attention in future research. Interestingly, institutional trust had, according to our data, a very limited explanatory power.…”

“…This research, primarily consisting of survey studies on public attitudes towards road pricing schemes, has described public acceptance of these policy measures and investigated their individual-level and contextual determinants. In this section, we review some of these studies following a categorization of the factors influencing the acceptance of environmental, climate and transport policies [19,22,23], as suggested in Figure 2.…”

“…Often, the attitudes towards specific policies are grounded in emotional and value-related motives, rather than the more specific expected outcomes of the scheme [20]. In this sense, there is a need to consider the role of specific and general emotions and feelings in policy acceptability [22].…”

Determinants for Accepting Climate Change Mitigation Policies: A Meta-Analysis

“…Research on determinants for accepting climate mitigation policies has generated numerous studies across various academic disciplines (4)(5)(6)(7)(8). This research has applied models proposing that policyspeci c beliefs, climate change beliefs, and psychological factors determine acceptance (9,10).…”