The United Nations held its Climate Summit in September. (Photo courtesy of United Nations)
Many policymakers and scientists argue that North-South financial transfers in the order of $100 billion per year will be required to obtain commitments for greenhouse-gas reductions from developing countries and emerging economies, and to help protect poor countries from climate-related risks. At the United Nations’ Climate Summit on Sept. 23, heads of state from developing and developed countries stressed the need to scale up both public and private climate finance instruments. Pledges to various funding mechanisms were made, one of the most significant being Germany’s $1 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund.
But will rich countries be willing to provide the amounts needed over longer periods of time? And will populations in likely donor countries, such as the United States and Germany, approve of such large financial flows from their public purses at times when government budgets are being cut? Assuming that policymakers pay at least some attention to what voters prefer, climate funding mechanisms need to be designed carefully so as to garner enough public support in donor countries to be politically feasible.
We implemented two nationally representative survey experiments in the United States and Germany to study this question (1,500 respondents were in each study). The results offer, for the first time, quantitative and systematically comparable insight into public perceptions of large-scale North-South climate funding (the forthcoming article in Global Environmental Change is available ungated here).
We used a so-called conjoint experiment to estimate whether and how much particular characteristics of North-South climate funding are likely to affect public support. Participants were confronted with sets of proposals for funding schemes that had a fixed set of attributes. These attributes describe characteristics of countries entitled to receive the funding, how funding decisions are made, the general purpose of funding (adaptation vs. mitigation), and how much other donor countries contribute. The order of attributes was randomized across participants, and the values on each attribute were randomly assigned. Participants had to compare and express their preferences with respect to two proposals shown side by side, and each participant was asked to complete five of these choice tasks.
The results provide insight into the effects of distinct design elements on public support for climate funding, but also into combinations of policy design features that are more (or less) popular. The figure below reveals some effects that are quite intuitive, whereas others are quite surprising.
To start with, surprisingly, the magnitude of expected climate-change damage in recipient countries plays no significant role. Also, rather unexpectedly, income levels in recipient countries do not affect public support for climate funding. The same holds true for per-capita greenhouse-gas emissions in recipient countries. However, government efficiency in recipient countries has the expected effect; support for funding efficient foreign governments was about 5 percent to 9 percent higher than support for less efficient governments. Overall, however, recipient country characteristics do not substantially influence public support for climate-funding mechanisms.
Contrary to our (perhaps overly pessimistic) expectation, populations in donor countries are willing to accept joint decision-making on funding allocation, rather than leaving funding decisions to donors alone. Funding schemes in which recipients control the decision-making process are, unsurprisingly, least acceptable to populations.
Populations in both countries consider funding for adaptation alone least acceptable, and funding for both mitigation and adaptation most acceptable. This is in line with recent scholarship, which calls for greater integration of mitigation and adaptation efforts in development cooperation.
Burden sharing between donor countries has by far the largest effect in both countries. The larger the contribution share of other countries compared to the respondent’s country, the more likely respondents are to select this proposal. This result suggests that climate funding is very much viewed as a burden-sharing problem, where some distributional equity among donors is considered essential.
Lower contribution shares of other countries might also be considered as free-riding, which would undermine the overall problem-solving effectiveness of funding, thus leading to a drop in public support. However, the effect on public support of moving from a 10 percent contribution by other countries to 30 percent or 50 percent, respectively, are very large, whereas the effects of a 70 percent and 90 percent contribution by others are only marginally bigger. This suggests that citizens in donor countries are likely to support a substantial share of their country in total North-South climate funding, as long as it is not overwhelmingly large compared to other countries’ contributions. Furthermore, the effects in the German sample are notably smaller than for the United States in the case of 70 percent and 90 percent contributions by others. This means that German citizens appear to have a higher tolerance for their country assuming a large share of the burden of climate funding, compared with American respondents.
Our experiments provide insight into the most (and least) popular climate finance proposals, overall. The most popular climate funding scheme among American respondents provides funding to recipient countries with moderate climate damages, considerably lower income than the United States, similar emissions and a highly efficient government. It is based on joint decision-making, funding is used for mitigation and adaptation, and the U.S. contribution is rather small (10 percent) relative to other countries’ contribution. The probability of this proposal gaining acceptance is 50.3 percentage points higher than acceptance of a proposal consisting of the baseline attribute values.
The most popular climate-funding scheme among German respondents provides funding to countries with moderate climate damages, considerably lower income than in Germany, similar emissions and a moderately efficient government. It is based on joint decision-making, funding is used for adaptation and mitigation, and the German contribution is in the order of 10 percent of total funding. The probability of this proposal being selected is 46.5 percentage points higher than selection of the baseline proposal.
One implication of these findings is that finance mechanisms that focus primarily on compensating developing countries, without contributing to the global public good of mitigation, are unlikely to garner much public support. Similarly, discourses focusing on developing countries’ needs and differences in historical responsibility are unlikely to be very conducive. Instead, greater attention should be paid to burden-sharing equity among donor countries, and to options for increasing the efficiency of use of money in recipient countries.
Nonetheless, citizens seem to support relatively large contribution shares from their country. Even funding schemes where only a small coalition of perhaps five to 10 countries contribute could thus be politically feasible. The often-debated proposal of ambitious “climate clubs” looks like a realistic option not only in the area of climate policy more generally (see also an earlier contribution by Bechtel and Scheve to Monkey Cage), but also in the area of climate finance. The differences between Germany and the United States regarding the implications of contributions from other countries also demonstrate that public concerns about equitable burden sharing are likely to be similar in direction, but not in size, across donor countries.
Thomas Bernauer is a professor of political science, and Robert Gampfer and Aya Kachi are post-doctoral researchers at ETH Zurich.
