Citizens' perceptions of justice in international climate policy: an empirical analysis

Abstract

Relying on a recent survey of more than 3400 participants from China, Germany, and the US, this article empirically analyses citizens' perceptions of key guiding principles for sharing mitigation costs across countries, justification of climate policy and trust in climate policy. Our findings suggest that the ranking of the main principles for burden-sharing is identical in China, Germany, and the US: accountability followed by capability, egalitarianism, and sovereignty. Thus, on a general level, citizens across these countries seem to have a common (normative) understanding of fairness. We therefore find no evidence that citizens' (stated) fairness preferences are detrimental to future burden-sharing agreements. In all three countries a majority of citizens considers international climate policy to be justified, but citizens' perceptions differ across specific items and countries. Finally, a substantial portion of citizens in all countries exhibit a lack of trust in international climate agreements.

Policy relevance

Disagreement over the distribution of mitigation costs across countries is blocking current negotiations about a new international climate change agreement to be adopted in 2015. At the heart of this disagreement are different perceptions of distributive justice among those involved in climate policy making. Our findings show that there is no difference in the ranking of fairness principles across citizens in China, Germany, and the US, suggesting that the common ground for crafting a future agreement is larger than expected. In particular, the accountability principle should weigh heavily when deciding on the burden-sharing. In addition, our findings suggest that in order to gain support among citizens, international climate policy may need to take measures to improve trust.

Keywords:

• burden sharing
• climate change policies
• distributive justice
• equity
• justice

Acknowledgements

This research has been carried out within the project titled ‘The Relevance of Voluntary Efforts and Fairness Preferences for the Success of International Climate Policy: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis at the Individual Level (VolFair)’. VolFair is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the funding priority ‘Economics of climate change’. Some of the findings were presented and discussed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP/CMB 19, Warsaw, Poland, 11–22 November 2013 in the Side Event titled ‘Squaring the Circle of Mitigation Adequacy and Equity – Options and Perspectives’. We are thankful to four anonymous reviewers, to Vicki Duscha for providing helpful comments, and to Greg Molecke for proofreading.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2014.979129.

Notes

1. The Copenhagen Accord adopts the 2 °C target by recognizing ‘the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 °C' (UNFCCC, 2009).

2. The recent UNEP ‘Gap-Report' estimates that global GHG emissions in 2020 will be at least 59 GtCO₂e, and hence 8–12 GtCO₂e above emissions pathways deemed consistent with a likely chance of meeting a 2 °C target (UNEP, 2013).

3. Article 3.3 of UNFCCC (1992) demands ‘full consideration of specific needs and special circumstances of developing country Parties'.

4. Of course, two or more of these burden-sharing principles may also be combined. For example, the ‘equal cumulative per capita emissions’ approach derives emissions from a carbon budget and essentially combines the accountability and egalitarian principles (e.g. Kanitkar et al., 2010). Similarly, multiple principles may be employed, typically via an ad hoc weighting scheme. Such burden-sharing approaches are likely to be politically more palatable, and may be seen as a compromise solution.

5. Note that ambitious emission targets do not necessarily translate into high mitigation costs for countries with a large potential of low-cost mitigation measures. Also, if trading of emission certificates or of credits from offsetting projects across countries is allowed, the distribution of costs does not necessarily correspond to the distribution of emission reduction efforts. The focus of our analysis is on citizens’ fairness perceptions of the distribution of costs (rather than emission reductions).

6. For simplicity we will refer to those as ‘negotiators’ for the remainder of the article.

7. See Brekke and Johansson-Stenmann (2008) for an overview of the behavioural economics literature on the self-serving bias.

8. The large sample size allows us to use two-sample z-tests to test for differences in the shares between observations for two countries. Note that, compared to t-tests, z-tests are less restrictive because they do not require variables to be normally distributed.

9. Table A1 in Appendix 1 reports all general questions on climate change and climate policy together with descriptive statistics on the responses by country and the results of the z-tests for differences across countries.

10. In the survey, we randomized the order in which the items were displayed to avoid order bias effect.

11. * means statistically significant differences between the principles at the 1% significance level (based on z-tests on the shares of responses in the categories ‘consider rather strongly’ and ‘consider very strongly’).

12. In this section, ‘strongly' combines ‘rather strongly' and ‘very strongly'. Similarly, ‘successful' and ‘important' also combine the answers for the two highest response levels.

13. The questions in Sections 3.2 and 3.3 were only asked to those respondents who believe that climate change is real. The order of the items was randomized. Figures given in the text and tables refer to valid responses (i.e. ‘don't know/no answer' are not included in the calculations).

14. A prime justification for international cooperation in climate policy is the public goods (global commons) character of mitigation efforts. That is, no country can be excluded from the benefits (e.g. lower risk of climate damage) of emission reduction efforts by one country (non-excludability). Also, all countries may simultaneously enjoy these benefits, without lowering the benefit for any other country (non-rivalry). Mitigation efforts, however, incur costs. When countries decide on their efforts without taking into account the benefits of these efforts on other countries’ wellbeing, global mitigation efforts will be too low. In principle then, all countries may benefit from well-designed international climate agreements, providing the economic rationale and justification for such agreements. Differences in costs (and benefits) across countries further complicates international cooperation.