The Determinants of Mass Support for Cross-Border Climate Compensation

• In Event: Living with the Consequences of Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change creates large socio-economic risks, but so do industrial reforms that seek to mitigate climate change. A growing literature discusses how compensation can incentivize people to support climate policy that tries to simultaneously abate the costs of climate change itself and of mitigation reforms. While scholars have investigated the determinants of public opinion regarding domestic compensation, there is a dearth of research exploring the bases of support for international compensation and investments. This paper presents theory and evidence to investigate public opinion regarding international climate compensation. We explore if and how people residing in different communities across a country, and therefore with different types of vulnerability to climate change, develop preferences for cross-border mechanisms of redistribution. We pay particular attention to how compensation to vulnerable "domestic" and "foreign" workers may be evaluated by different types of communities within countries in the Global North and the Global South, respectively. Our findings, based on original surveys in the United States and India, suggest that in both countries people living in coal producing regions wish to have fewer vulnerable workers lose jobs, even if this implies no aid from abroad and higher prices to be paid by co-nationals. By contrast, the average American and Indian citizen supports international strategies that rely on cross-border compensation because these policies are more cost-efficient and impact the average household energy bill less, even while threatening more directly vulnerable co-national workers.

Authors

• Federica Genovese, University of Essex

• Nikhar Gaikwad, Columbia University

• Dustin Halliday Tingley, Harvard University