Environmental sustainability from below: public opinion across the Globe

Abstract

Against the backdrop that most political economies across the globe need to promote transitions towards more environmentally sustainable public policies and economic practices, we ask what factors explain public support for and opposition to such trajectories among people living in different institutional and socio-economic contexts. To study this, we used survey data on individual attitudes from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2020 module on the environment. The dataset included a random sample of adult population in 28 countries. The analysis was organised in two steps. First, we examined whether improvement in living standards for people should now be prioritised over the preservation of nature for future generations, commonly referred to as the trade-off between economic growth and the environment. Next, we studied public support for and opposition to three specific environmental policy instruments: higher prices, higher taxes and decreased standard of living across numerous countries in the Global South and Global North. The countries differ greatly both in terms of human development, welfare systems and vulnerability to climate change. The motivation is to examine how these variations influence individual priorities in transition processes. The analysis results showed that the correlation between individual-level variables and pro-environmental attitudes varies across countries, and the results from the regression models were only partially in line with previous literature in this field. Importantly, typical explanatory factors identified in previous studies using data from Europe and North America explain, only to some degree, the variation in attitudes in other parts of the world. The explanatory power of our models is particularly weak in the case of acceptance of environmental policy instruments that facilitate the transition to more sustainable societies in countries with low rankings on the Human Development Index.