Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Thematic Session: Social Dynamics of Climate Policy Design
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Effective policy responses and interventions to address climate change have lagged behind technological advances. Among the reasons is that an understanding of how policies affect citizens’ values and beliefs, and how those values and beliefs may in turn affect policy effectiveness, feasibility and durability is lacking.
Climate policies have direct effects on the incentives and constraints under which individuals make choices, but they also have indirect effects through their impacts on people’s norms, values and beliefs. These indirect effects can erode or reinforce the aims of a policy. For example, building low-carbon infrastructure can increase the desirability of low-carbon behaviors, while the prevalence of associated norms can further reinforce those behaviors. Yet, policies can also backfire when they do not account for the effects of policies on people’s beliefs and values.
Our thematic session features contributions that document how policies or interventions might affect values and beliefs in ways that could reinforce or undermine the policy. Specifically, they elucidate our understanding of the spillovers of targeted interventions on attitudes towards climate change, the lasting effects of peer influence on dietary preferences, and the influence of a climate education program for teachers on teacher and student climate policy preferences.
This topic of this thematic session is of critical importance given current and emerging governance challenges surrounding climate change mitigation, including recent backlash towards health and climate policy in many parts of the world. The dynamics covered by our contributions suggest that accounting for the direct and indirect effects of policies on preferences, norms and beliefs may be critical to improve how we approach the design of climate policy. | ||
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Nice to meat you: Peer effects in consumption choice 1Wageningen University and Research; 2Technical University Berlin; 3Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK); 4University of Glasgow We study how social interactions shape meal choices using detailed canteen transaction data comprising roughly two million purchases over one academic year. Leveraging purchase timestamps, we infer the social networks of university students and examine how exposure to vegetarian peers influences individual consumption patterns. We find that individuals that dining with a vegetarian peer on a given day reduces meat consumption by about 4 percentage points, corresponding to roughly 9 percent of baseline levels. Together, our findings highlight how social contexts can shape sustainable consumption behaviors. Climate Change in the Classroom 1Georgia State University; 2University of Padova, Italy; 3University of Turin, Italy Knowledge gaps and biased beliefs concerning both climate change and climate policy represent major obstacles to the decarbonization process. Climate education may offer a scalable solution to address such obstacles. In the context of a national reform of the school curriculum in Italy, we implemented a nationwide field experiment, training thousands of secondary school teachers across thousands of schools using a staggered design. Our intervention, a comprehensive course on climate change and climate policy, goes beyond the light-touch interventions typical in the literature. Using extensive survey data, we examine how training affects teachers’ knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences and, in turn, those of students. Our study highlights important initial knowledge gaps and biased beliefs about climate change among teachers and students, and provides evidence that climate education can address them at scale. Following our intervention, teachers and students also reconsider their support for climate policies. Tastes better than expected: Post-intervention effects of a vegetarian month in the student canteen 1University of Glasgow, United Kingdom; 2University of Kassel, Germany Interventions to reduce meat consumption are often short-lived, leaving their long-term effects unclear. We study the post-intervention effects of a one-month removal of meat meals from a university canteen menu. Using transaction data on over 270,000 purchases by more than 4,500 guests, we estimate difference-in-differences effects in an intent-to-treat framework. Treated guests were 4% less likely to choose meat in the two months after the intervention, with no change in visit frequency. Purchase patterns and survey evidence suggest these effects are driven mainly by taste discovery rather than habit formation or shifting social norms. | ||