Does religion promote pro-environmental behaviour? A cross-country investigation

ABSTRACT

Religion is one of the most prominent social institutions in the world and is profoundly entangled with day to day activities of the majority of the population. However, the effect of religion on socio-economic and environmental dimensions of development is not yet well explored in literature. Thus, this study aims to investigate the influence of multiple indicators of religion on pro-environmental behaviour and attitudes, and whether its effect varies across different income categories of countries. To this end, we use the World Value Survey data from up to 212,995 respondents across 91 countries collected from 1989 to 2014. The results of the study show that religion induces pro-environmental behaviour. Religion promotes individuals' willingness to contribute money and dampens individuals' protest against contributing for environmental protection. Similarly, religion has a positive effect on ecological donation and participation in the environmental demonstration. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate that the effects of some of the religious indicators on stated willingness to contribute for environmental protection are more pronounced in low-income countries than countries in high-income categories. These results highlight the importance of religion on environmental protection and suggest that integrating religion into environmental policies and programs may yield better environmental outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• ecological donation
• protest behaviour
• willingness to contribute
• environmental protection

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Q50
• Q53
• Q57
• Z12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) and Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences (IFEES) are the two faith-based organizations that intervened in the Tanzania case through local sheikhs. Read more about ARC and IFEES in http://arcworld.org/ and http://www.ifees.org.uk/, respectively.

2 The term 'unwillingness to contribute' refers to a protest against contributing money for environmental protection. In the stated preference (SP) literature, individuals who refuse (do not have genuine willingness to pay of zero) for environmental protection are called protesters (Bateman et al. 2002; Frey and Pirscher 2019).

3 The data are available on the following website: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

4 The data can be accessed in the following website: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/378834-how-does-the-world-bank-classify-countries

5 The data can be accessed in the following website: https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/378834-how-does-the-world-bank-classify-countries

6 An alternative approach to model this is either by creating a single index of PEB or use factor analysis. We thank one of the reviewers for raising this important concern. However, we chose the current methodology because the indicators are framed very differently; some of the indicators are measured based on revealed behaviour while some are measured based on stated willingness to protect the environment. Further, we are interested to understand whether the effect of religion on the different framing of indicators remains the same. In addition, related studies have used a similar approach (e.g. Owen and Videras 2007; Sulemana 2016; Bénabou, Ticchi, and Vindigni 2015). Nevertheless, following the reviewer's suggestion, as a robustness check, we have created an index using factor analysis based on the three indicators (statements) of stated willingness to protect the environment: ‘willingness to contribute money’, ‘willingness to accept tax increase’, ‘government should pay for environmental protection’, as the data for these indicators were collected in three of the six waves of WVS. We find consistent results with the approach that we employed in this paper and the full result can be found in Table A8 in the appendix.

7 WTA and WTP question formats are widely used in stated preference surveys.