Behavioural climate policy

Linden, Sander van der; Pearson, Adam R.; Boven, Leaf Van

doi:10.1017/bpp.2020.44

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Moreover, I selected these two cases because effective climate policy packages in the food and transport sector typically require complex policy solutions along supply chains (Bajželj et al, 2014;Poore and Nemecek, 2018;Springmann et al, 2018). It is especially climate policies that target the behavior that can successfully trigger sociotechnical transformation to meet climate change mitigation targets which are characterized by a high level of policy design complexity, and also interfere substantially with citizens' consumption behaviors (Sparkman et al, 2021;van der Linden et al, 2020). This makes the two sectors particularly prone to public scrutiny and increases the relevance of making reliable and accurate evaluations of public opinion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of policy design complexity on public support for climate policy

Fesenfeld

2022

Behav. Public Policy

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Important challenges like climate change require transformative policy responses. According to a growing public policy literature, such transformative responses typically require complex policy packages that bundle various individual policy instruments to complement each other, compensate transition losers, and create positive synergies. Nevertheless, while adding new instruments to a package can increase policy effectiveness, it comes at a price: increased policy design complexity. Increased complexity potentially leads to fundamental public misperceptions that undermine policy legitimacy and feasibility. Here, I argue that complex policy packages affect public opinion through a compensation, policy perception, and design complexity mechanism. To test this argument, this study assesses if citizens evaluate proposals for isolated climate policies related to food and mobility behaviors differently to complex policy packages. Employing a novel two-stage conjoint-experimental approach with 9115 respondents from the USA and Germany, the study shows that policy packaging increases citizens’ perceived policy effectiveness to reduce climate pollutants, but also perceived restrictions on citizens’ lifestyles. Moreover, increased design complexity can lead citizens to pay special attention to salient costly parts of policy packages. However, increased design complexity does not fundamentally reverse preferences. Through packaging desired and undesired policy instruments, policymakers can increase public support for transformative climate policies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of policy design complexity on public support for climate policy

Fesenfeld

2022

Behav. Public Policy

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“…There is no doubt, as pointed out in [22], that consumer behaviour is embedded in social, economic and institutional contexts that need to be thoroughly understood and taken into account at all stages of the policy process and the timing is ripe for behavioral climate policy. Behavioral interventions are more likely to be effective when both cognitive and contextual barriers to decision-making are reduced [39].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they often prove ineffective in motivating people to engage in voluntary sustainable behaviour, or they may act too slowly to achieve key adaptation and mitigation objectives [19]. In contrast, many empirical studies show that the use of insights from behavioral economics on human judgement and decision-making contributes to improving information, financial and legal instruments and allows the development of new tools and behavioral intervention strategies, leading to desired sustainable and durable changes in actors' behaviour [2,[20][21][22][23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Survey Results on Using Nudges for Choice of Green-Energy Supplier

Miłaszewicz

2022

Energies

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One of the most important climate change mitigation strategies is to exploit the potential of individual behavioral changes in order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the insights of behavioral economics are proving helpful in this regard. This contributes to improving traditional instruments, developing new ones related to choice architecture (nudges), and combining them within behavioral decarbonization intervention strategies. It is important, in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency, whether the instruments of such interventions are supported by citizens. This paper presents the results of a survey of Polish respondents’ (n = 1064) reactions to hypothetical nudges regarding the choice of a “green energy” supplier. The main research questions of the study are: how much civic support do these behavioral intervention tools have, and what is the importance of selected factors for their acceptance? The aim of the study is to present nudges as one of the strategies of pro-environmental behavioral change and to analyze selected factors of acceptance of these instruments by the Polish society. There are two main conclusions of the research: (1) Poles’ support for the green nudges analyzed is comparatively high, like in other European countries; (2) statistically significant differences in support for one of them are age and individual political party preferences.

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“…Given the usefulness of behavioral policy in combating climate change through large-scale alignment of individual behavior with the societal mitigation goal, it is important to understand the factors that shape public support for such policy (e.g., [ 12 , 13 ]). That is, under which circumstances do individuals support (vs. oppose) government regulation of individual environmentally relevant behavior?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate policy support as a tool to control others’ (but not own) environmental behavior?

Kukowski

Bernecker²,

Heyde³

et al. 2022

PLoS ONE

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Drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to successfully mitigate climate change. Individual environmental behavior is central to this change. Given that environmental behavior necessitates 1) effortful individual self-control and 2) cooperation by others, public policy may constitute an attractive instrument for regulating one’s own as well as others’ environmental behavior. Framing climate change mitigation as a cooperative self-control problem, we explore the incremental predictive power of self-control and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation beyond established predictors of policy support in study 1 using machine-learning (N = 610). In study 2, we systematically test and confirm the effects of self-control and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation (N = 270). Both studies showed that personal importance of climate change mitigation and perceived insufficiency of others’ environmental behavior predict policy support, while there was no strong evidence for a negative association between own-self control success and policy support. These results emerge beyond the effects of established predictors, such as environmental attitudes and beliefs, risk perception (study 1), and social norms (study 2). Results are discussed in terms of leveraging policy as a behavioral enactment constraint to control others’ but not own environmental behavior.

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Behavioural climate policy

Cited by 12 publications

References 38 publications

The effects of policy design complexity on public support for climate policy

The effects of policy design complexity on public support for climate policy

Survey Results on Using Nudges for Choice of Green-Energy Supplier

Climate policy support as a tool to control others’ (but not own) environmental behavior?

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