Conference Agenda

Cities are increasingly held accountable for climate action. By demonstrating their pro-environmentality through their own climate-related activities, they aspire to encourage individual climate protection efforts. However, economic theory suggests that this strategy may not be as promising as it seems. Since cities fund these initiatives using taxpayers' money, their contributions could be perceived as substitutes, potentially crowding out private contributions to the same public good. Inspired by research on the crowding-in effects of social norms, leadership, and the expressive influence of laws, we challenge this argument. We conduct a framed field experiment to analyze whether providing information on the previous contributions made by the city itself has an impact on individual private contributions to the same public good. Results show no statistical evidence that city contributions reduce resident contributions. Instead, referencing fellow citizens increases contributors, attracting especially those less pro-environmentally oriented.

We use a choice experiment to investigate the support for climate leadership among representative panels of citizens in seven European countries. We find that people tend to be conditional cooperators and are more positive about their country being a climate leader if assured that other countries will follow suit. At realistic cost levels, a majority oppose their country taking the lead, and most do not expect that taking the lead will result in other countries following suit. The lack of support is caused by expectations that such leadership will result in other countries free riding. One consequence of our study is that coordination at the level of the European Union as shown in the Fit for 55 package is essential. Individual countries would not have had enough popular support to carry out such policies independently, but a coordinated European-wide policy has proven possible.

National environmental protection policies are coming under pressure despite increasingly dramatic climate realities. At the same time, global cooperation in achieving fast enough emission reduction to fulfil the Paris Agreement is lacking. Knowledge of this lack of international cooperation may further reduce citizens’ willingness to support climate policies at home, potentially leading to a vicious circle of lower ambitions in national politics undermining global commitments. In this context, we present experimental survey evidence from all major EU countries with more than 50.000 participants, investigating links between individual attitudes on climate and moralisation and evaluating the effects of an information treatment showing international failure to cooperate. We analyze participants’ preferences for action at the national, EU and global level. Our analysis reveals that, on average, the sobering information has no statistically significant effect on preferred policy effort across the sample. Examining treatment heterogeneity across EU member states, the impact of the sobering information becomes statistically significant in several countries, with varying directions of the effect. This nuanced variation in responses is crucial for policy considerations, highlighting the need for tailored communication strategies and adaptive policymaking within the European Union and beyond.