The contingent effects of environmental concern and ideology: institutional context and people’s willingness to pay environmental taxes

Environmental taxes are often argued to be key to more effective environmental protection. People’s willingness to pay such taxes in contexts with varying levels of quality of government (QoG) is investigated. Applying multilevel analyses on data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the QoG Institute, links between environmental concern, ideology, and QoG are explored. The results show that people who state that they are concerned about environmental issues and live in high QoG countries are more willing than people in low QoG countries to pay environmental taxes. Moreover, people in low QoG countries holding leftist political value orientations are less willing to pay environmental taxes than rightists and other value groups. Environmental concern and leftist political ideology are more important drivers of public support for environmental taxes in high QoG countries than in low QoG countries

Bridging the ideological gap? How fairness perceptions mediate the effect of revenue recycling on public support for carbon taxes in the United States, Canada and Germany

Carbon taxes are frequently advocated as a means of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet their political feasibility remains a challenge. To enhance their political appeal, carbon tax proponents have proposed revenue recycling as a means of alleviating public concern with this instrument's visible costs. Analyzing data from identical survey-experiments administered in the United States, Canada, and Germany, we examine the extent to which returning revenues to the public has the potential to broaden the political acceptability of carbon taxes across ideological and national contexts. While public opinion is sensitive to the cost attributes of carbon taxes, we find that in some cases, opposition to carbon taxes can be offset by a reduction in income taxes. However, these effects tend to be modest in size, limited to some ideological groups, and varied across countries. Moreover, we demonstrate that fairness perceptions are a crucial mechanism linking revenue recycling to carbon tax support in all countries examined

The Impact of Local Participation on Community Support for Natural Resource Management: The Case of Mining in Northern Canada and Northern Sweden

Due to its oftentimes complex, contested, and multi-scale character, natural resource management (NRM) tends to be a challenging task that has been met with various political approaches in order to meet demands for legitimacy. One approach to enhancing the legitimacy of NRM that has gained increased attention within the academic literature is the adoption of local participatory democracy in decision-making processes. Advocates of participatory democracy in NRM propose that local participation achieves the following outcomes: increased legitimacy because it ensures that local needs and priorities are successfully met; decision-making based on more complete information, which helps avoid unexpected negative outcomes; and a sense of belonging and influence among the public, leading to increased perceptions of support and partnership, as opposed to NRM which is imposed on the community. Nevertheless, comprehensive empirical studies that document how public participation affects legitimacy remain rare. Using 2015 data collected on people’s attitudes towards mining in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, and Norrbotten and Västerbotten counties, Sweden, this paper empirically assesses whether and how perceptions of local participation affect the legitimacy of mining development. In turn, this paper finds that perceived public participation does affect the public’s propensity to support mining development and this propensity is mediated by people’s perceptions of the interests present in the decision-making process, their normative beliefs concerning which actors should be allowed to participate in the decision-making process, and certain individual-level and contextual-level factors

On the preconditions for large-scale collective action

The phenomenon of collective action and the origin of collective action problems have been extensively and systematically studied in the social sciences. Yet, while we have substantial knowledge about the factors promoting collective action at the local level, we know far less about how these insights travel to large-scale collective action problems. Such problems, however, are at the heart of humanity’s most pressing challenges, including climate change, large-scale natural resource depletion, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, antibiotic resistance due to overconsumption of antibiotics, and pollution. In this paper, we suggest an analytical framework that captures the theoretical understanding of preconditions for large-scale collective action. This analytical framework aims at supporting future empirical analyses of how to cope with and overcome larger-scale collective action problems. More specifically, we (i) define and describe the main characteristics of a large-scale collective action problem and (ii) explain why voluntary and, in particular, spontaneous large-scale collective action among individual actors becomes more improbable as the collective action problem becomes larger, thus demanding interventions by an external authority (a third party) for such action to be generated. Based on this, we (iii) outline an analytical framework that illustrates the connection between third-party interventions and large-scale collective action. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.</p

Large-scale collective action to avoid an Amazon tipping point - key actors and interventions

The destruction of the Amazon is a major global environmental issue, not only because of greenhouse gas emissions or direct impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods, but also due to the forest\u27s role as a tipping element in the Earth System. With nearly a fifth of the Amazon already lost, there are already signs of an imminent forest dieback process that risks transforming much of the rainforest into a drier ecosystem, with climatic implications across the globe. There is a large body of literature on the underlying drivers of Amazon deforestation. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the behavioral and institutional microfoundations of change. Fundamental issues concerning cooperation, as well as the mechanisms facilitating or hampering such actions, can play a much more central role in attempts to unravel and address Amazon deforestation. We thus present the issue of preventing the Amazon biome from crossing a biophysical tipping point as a large-scale collective action problem. Drawing from collective action theory, we apply a novel analytical framework on Amazon conservation, identifying six variables that synthesize relevant collective action stressors and facilitators: information, accountability, harmony of interests, horizontal trust, knowledge about consequences, and sense of responsibility. Drawing upon literature and data, we assess Amazon deforestation and conservation through our heuristic lens, showing that while growing transparency has made information availability a collective action facilitator, lack of accountability, distrust among actors, and little sense of responsibility for halting deforestation remain key stressors. We finalize by discussing interventions that can help break the gridlock

Environmental commitments in different types of democracies: The role of liberal, social-liberal, and deliberative politics

Ever since the recognition of ongoing, human-induced, large-scale environmental degradation, from the early 1960s onwards, the scholarly community has looked at democracy with mixed feelings. Some assert, quite openly, that democracy is devastating for the environmental performance of countries, some claim the opposite, while yet other scholars suggest that democratic models other than liberal democracy may offer a route forwards, towards a sustainable society. Both political theorists and empirical social scientists add fuel to this debate, and neither side has of yet settled the argument. For obvious reasons, political theorists typically lack empirical evidence for most of their assertions as to whether democracy per se, or different variants of democracy, are more or less pro-environmental. In parallel, empirically oriented scholarship has been impaired with poor data, often obstructing them from properly evaluating democracy’s actual environmental pros and cons. In this paper we make use of recently collected unique data, enabling us to better address both these literatures. Using the data gathered by the Varieties of Democracy project on different conceptions of democracy, we empirically test whether different features of democracy, such as liberal in its thinner understanding, social- liberal, and deliberative, are beneficial for countries’ commitment to environmental improvements. In particular, we investigate which of these distinct features make democracies more prone to deliver environmental policy outputs, i.e., adopt climate laws, develop stricter environmental policies and incorporate sustainability into economic policies.This research project was supported by the Center for Collective Action Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Intergenerational Responsibility: Historical Emissions and Climate Change Adaptation

It is widely held that climate change requires that we engage in strategies of adaptation as well as mitigation, but the normative questions surrounding justice in adaptation remains insufficiently investigated. This paper asks, from a presumption that climate change adaptation presents burdens which needs to be fairly distributed between states, what a fair way of allocating remedial responsibility for adaptation would look like. A number of principles are analyzed, some of which attach normative weight to causal contribution to the problem and others not. The conclusion is that none of the suggestions prevalent in the literature is without profound problems, but a promising path for the future is to construct pluralistic models of justice which are sensitive to both a state’s level of pollution and its ability to pay. The paper ends, however, by predicting that while adaptation from a normative standpoint is an other-regarding duty, actual future adaptations regimes are likely to be market-based. Particularly likely is an insurance-based regime, according to which each state is expected to fend for its own protection