Between Trust and Fact: Experiments on the Drivers of Policy Uptake in Household-Level Climate Adaptation Decisions

• In Event: Climate Affects Sentiment; Sentiment Affects Outcomes: Culture, Attitudes, and Environmental Policy

Abstract

The burden of long-term adaptation to climate change impacts communities globally but its impacts are experienced in differing degrees by the different demographic groups. In a similar vein, the benefits of state-led welfare policies combating climate change distribute themselves differently across religious, racial, caste, and gender identities, leading to varying degrees of resilience to climate change. From a policy perspective, the variation in climate resilience is most prominently observed in household adaptation behavior. This paper asks, between policy attributes and informant attributes, what drives uptake of community-based climate adaptation programs?

This paper utilizes a novel survey experiment to explain the nature and degree to which information regarding a specific climate adaptation policy and the personal attributes of the policy informant or broker determine policy uptake outcomes in marginalized communities where ethnic and racial ties dominate household level decision making (Ray, Herd and Moynihan, 2023; Thachil, 2017). Through a series of conjoint and vignette experiments fielded across five communities in two neighbouring districts (similar to counties), the survey (n=704) captures variables measuring representational hierarchy within participatory planning initiatives and administrative burden experienced by community members across the divides of religion, gender and caste. Drawing on the theories of collaborative governance, administrative burden and multi-dimensional decision-making, this paper sheds light on the micro-level socially embedded drivers of adaptation behavior in peri-urban farming communities in West Bengal, India. The paper specifically asks between policy attributes and policy agent attributes, what really drives policy uptake decisions, and how these uptake decisions influence resilience building as a direct result of state-level adaptation policy.

Theoretically, the paper is invested in identifying precisely the relative weight of ethnic networks, policy features and administrative within beneficiary preferences to explain for the spatial variation in policy uptake in otherwise comparable districts. The identification is then utilized to generate plausibly causal relationship between place-based policies and behavioral outcomes, informing public administration theory on household decision-making and climate resilience. This research also contributes to the growing literature on the spatial variance in administrative burden, linking theories on spatial inequality and administrative burden.

While survey experiments are widely used in competitive choice scenarios, particularly the ones where preferences appear in bundles and present the respondents with a multi-dimensional decision-making scenario, in this paper, the adopted methodology helps to distinguish policy attributes (features of the policy offerings) from policy agent attributes (characteristics of the policy agent, trust in the agent etc.), allowing for clear distinguishment across (i) social and cultural factors such as ethnic networks, (ii) planning strategy related factors such as observable policy benefits, and (iii) regional spatial inequality that influences household decision-making for short and long-term adaptation. Preliminary findings suggest that ethnicity, partisanship and access to platform economy determine much of the (in)equities arising as divergent outcomes at neighborhood and regional scales.

Author

• Sridipta Ghatak, University of California Irvine
  Presenting Author