Moral licensing, identity and eco-leadership: Can public managers’ support for a green recovery be undermined?

IMPACT

Local public managers are increasingly involved in policy co-design, especially in the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic. Municipal top management will benefit from this article because it shows how public managers’ policy priorities are shaped by their own and their leaders’ goals for the local administration. The authors provide a model clarifying the role of managers’ environmental self-identity and municipal eco-leadership in policy decisions that involve a trade-off between economic growth and protecting the environment/climate. Previous research has not shown whether ‘economy versus environment’ messages can influence public managers’ policy priorities. This article is important because it provides evidence, while there is still time to use it in policy-making, to support efforts to combat issues like climate change.

ABSTRACT

The authors investigate the effects of compensatory (i.e. ‘economy versus environment’) messages on public managers’ attitudes towards ‘business-as-usual’ plans, as opposed to green recovery plans, in the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic. They created a model which was tested on 90 Basque public sector managers. Exposing managers to compensatory messages increased support for green recovery plans due to an unintended moral licensing reduction effect. In addition, the authors show why it is important to acknowledge the link between public management and behavioural sciences.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavioural public administration
• climate change
• Covid 19
• green recovery
• municipal eco-leadership
• public sector managers

Acknowledgement

Our work was funded by the Basque Government (PRE-2020-1-0097; GIC12/57-IT 60-13) and the FESIDE Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).