Elsevier

Global Environmental Change

Volume 29, November 2014, Pages 92-104
Global Environmental Change

Does effective climate policy require well-informed citizen support?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.09.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Most citizens are ill-informed about British Columbia's climate policies.

  • Regulations achieve the highest citizen support, carbon tax the lowest.

  • Citizen awareness and knowledge are not associated with higher policy support.

  • Providing policy information does not increase citizen support.

Abstract

Citizen support for climate policies is typically seen as an important criterion in climate policy making. Some studies of climate policy support assume that a significant number of citizens need to be aware of the policies in question and able to provide informed opinions. In this study, we probe this assumption using a web-based survey of residents of the Canadian province of British Columbia (n = 475) by assessing: (1) citizen awareness and knowledge of climate policies, (2) citizen support for different climate policies, (3) the relationship between citizen knowledge and policy support, and (4) the effect of information provision on policy support. Our main finding is that most survey respondents are not aware of any of British Columbia's climate policies, and have little understanding of the potential effect of these on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Once they are made aware of different types of climate policies, respondents are more likely to express support for regulations, such as the zero-emissions electricity standard and energy efficiency regulations, and less likely to support a carbon tax. Statistical analysis indicates that citizen knowledge of policy is not associated with higher policy support. Furthermore, providing information on likely policy effectiveness to our survey respondents did not translate into higher support, suggesting that widespread knowledge and well-informed citizen support are not necessarily required for implementation of effective climate policies.

Introduction

Climate policy that is effective might not be implemented if it is not politically acceptable. Often, this concept of political acceptance is simplified as meaning “citizen support,” with the assumption being that the extent of such support is somehow related to the level of citizen awareness and knowledge of climate science and climate policies. But the relationship between climate policy support or acceptance, on the one hand, and climate-related knowledge, on the other, is difficult to discern. Moreover, some climate policies are quite effective at reducing GHG emissions while others are not. While experts can generally agree on this distinction, it is likely beyond the grasp of all but the most keenly interested citizens. This raises several interesting questions about what level of citizen knowledge about science and policy might be required before effective climate policies would actually be enacted.

In the research described in this paper, we explore some of these questions. In particular, we investigate the idea that well-informed citizen support is needed for effective climate policy implementation by using British Columbia (BC), Canada as a case study – one of the leading climate policy jurisdictions in North America. With survey data collected from a representative sample of citizens in this region, our research objectives are to assess:

  • 1.

    citizen awareness and knowledge of climate policies,

  • 2.

    citizen support for different climate policies,

  • 3.

    the relationship (if any) between citizen knowledge and policy support, and

  • 4.

    the impact of information provision on climate policy support, especially support for effective climate policies.

In this paper, we distinguish two terms – citizen awareness and citizen knowledge of climate policy. We define citizen awareness as acknowledgement that a particular climate policy exists in BC. By citizen knowledge, we imply consistency between the beliefs (i.e., perceptions) of citizens in the effectiveness of specific greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction policies and the beliefs of experts.

It is sometimes assumed that conflicts over public policies and science are caused by citizen ignorance – a gap between citizen and expert knowledge, also known as a “knowledge deficit” (Stoutenborough and Vedlitz, 2014). According to the knowledge deficit model, providing more detailed information to citizens about science and policy should increase citizen knowledge, which in turn should change citizen perceptions to be more aligned with the perceptions of natural scientists, economists, and policy experts. Guided by this premise, many policy-makers, scientists, and science communicators believe that citizens need to be better educated about climate change and climate policies for these to gain support (Lorenzoni et al., 2007). Indeed, many of the current attempts to increase citizen concern for climate change and support for climate policies are based on the knowledge deficit model. This is manifested through calls for more scientific articles in newspapers and journals, and more appearances of scientists on television, radio shows, online blogs, public lectures, educational books and films (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2009).

The knowledge deficit model has been criticized, however, for being somewhat simplistic where it is taken to imply that more information can directly translate into higher citizen knowledge and, as a consequence, support for science-based policies. Reynolds et al. (2010) showed that despite two decades of widespread coverage of climate change in the mainstream media and political discourse, citizen understanding of climate science has changed little since 1992, remaining at a superficial level. Furthermore, while some researchers find a moderate association between knowledge of climate science and policy support, others show that more accurate knowledge does not necessarily affect citizen support for climate policies, and may even undermine any existing support, if that scientific evidence is perceived as overwhelming, frightening, uncertain, or disempowering (O’Connor et al., 2002, Dietz et al., 2007, Kellstedt et al., 2008).

The absence of strong empirical research supporting the knowledge-deficit model raises the question of whether well-informed citizen support is essential for effective climate policy implementation. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to empirically test the knowledge deficit model in regards to the link between citizen knowledge of climate policies and climate policy support.

Alternative theories of human behaviour challenge the knowledge deficit model. Drawing from theories of collective action and democratic participation, economists explain that self-investment in scientific and/or policy knowledge represents a public good, the benefits of which accrue to all citizens regardless of the amount of time (if any) a given individual spends on studying information about scientific issues and/or public policies (Olson, 1971, Caplan, 2007). Therefore, there is an incentive to invest less time in researching or understanding science and policy and to instead free-ride on other people who invest their time in gaining this knowledge. Moreover, because climate science and climate policies are particularly complex issues, requiring a high level of background knowledge and attention, the incentive to free-ride on the knowledge of others is particularly strong (Cvetkovich et al., 2002).

Long before climate change was a policy concern, Olson (1971) argued that support for public policies is primarily influenced by minority groups who face concentrated costs or who hope to gain concentrated benefits. This explanation is supported by the more recent arguments of Caplan (2007), who noted how a self-serving bias (i.e., people believe whatever appears to benefit them) induces the discrepancy between citizen and expert assessments of policy effectiveness and ultimate policy support. As a result, highly salient policies with visible costs (such as carbon taxes) attract strong opposition from interests who believe the policies to be especially detrimental to them, whereas less salient policies (such as regulations) tend to avoid such opposition (Harrison, 2012).

Besides the economic arguments, some social psychologists suggest that pre-held values and beliefs, social networks and peer pressures can have a stronger impact on citizen support for climate policies than knowledge about climate science (Shwom et al., 2010, Semenza et al., 2008). Consistent with these claims, research into human cognition of scientific information has shown that prior to accepting facts, citizens filter new information in a selective manner that tends to reinforce their values and worldviews – a theory known as cultural cognition (Kahan and Braman, 2006). This theory suggests that unless new information conforms to cultural values and beliefs of an individual or a group he/she is identified with, that information will tend to be considered less reliable and will thus have a higher chance of being ignored or rejected.

Cultural cognition is induced by a series of interconnected psychological and social processes forming citizen perceptions of scientific information. Some of the psychological mechanisms include cognitive dissonance avoidance, affect, and biased assimilation. Cognitive-dissonance avoidance leads some people to deny information that endangers their beliefs and actions (Festinger, 1962). Affect determines some people's perceptions through positive or negative emotional reactions defined by cultural values (Nussbaum, 2001). Biased assimilation inclines individuals to accept new information based on its congeniality to their prior beliefs, especially when these prior beliefs are strongly related to cultural identities (Lord et al., 1979).

Social mechanisms, such as group dynamics, also induce cultural cognition and have a prominent effect when individuals lack time or capacity to assess new information (Kahan and Braman, 2006). To determine if new information is credible, individuals rely on knowledge and beliefs of people they trust (Cvetkovich et al., 2002). Given the scientific complexity of climate change, conflicting and controversial media coverage of climate policies, and the human tendency to free-ride on policy knowledge of a few people, trust in information sources plays a particularly important role (Marx et al., 2007). Although scientists are generally considered credible sources of information, they are not necessarily the most trusted with all types of information and are generally not trusted among some social groups (Cvetkovich and Löfstedt, 2000). In fact, media information presented by elites and advocacy groups appears to have a stronger impact on citizen perceptions of climate science than information from independent scientific sources (Brulle et al., 2012). Cohen et al. (2003) explain that trusted sources are represented by commentators and in some cases experts who share citizen values and worldviews and therefore are inclined to have similar opinions regarding the public policies in question. As a result, the efforts of independent scientists to educate citizens about public policies may be undermined and at times ineffective.

Our study seeks to contribute to this field of research by exploring the relationship between citizen knowledge of individual climate policies and their level of support for these. Even though climate policy experts recognize British Columbia as a North American climate policy leader, in terms of both its emission reduction goals and the likely effectiveness of its policies to achieve them, we hypothesize: (1) that most of the province's climate policies are not well-known among the general population, (2) that citizen awareness and knowledge about a particular policy are not strongly associated with stated support for it, and (3) that providing information about a climate policy does not significantly increase stated support for it. We thus anticipate that increasing citizen awareness and knowledge of a given climate policy is not certain to lead to increased citizen support, and may not increase the political acceptability of a policy.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews British Columbia's key climate policies. Section 3 describes the survey sample and methodology. Section 4 presents the study results. Finally, Section 5 discusses how the results confirm or challenge the knowledge deficit model, and how they align in general with some of the alternative theories of policy implementation reviewed in this section.

Section snippets

Case study: climate policy in British Columbia

Different levels of governments in Canada have made apparent efforts to reduce GHG emissions for at least two decades without much success (Simpson et al., 2007). However, in the period from 2006 to 2009, British Columbia enacted North America's most substantial carbon tax and several other forceful policies guaranteed to reduce emissions. During this time, the BC government made a substantial effort to inform citizens about the development and implementation of all climate policies by

Methods: data collection and analysis

We collected primary data to assess citizen awareness of, knowledge of, and support for British Columbia's climate policies. We conducted a web-based survey of BC citizens (age 19+) in January 2013 as part of a larger national survey on climate policy support in Canada. We separated and oversampled British Columbians (n = 475) to minimize the sampling error to ±4.5%. Eighty-five percent of respondents are self-reported voters. We have not found any substantial demographic differences in results

Awareness of climate policy existence

Fig. 2 shows the number of BC's current policies that respondents identified in the open-ended format (without seeing a reference list of climate polices) and in the closed-ended format (with a list provided of actual and false climate policies). In an open-ended question with no prompts, the vast majority of respondents (73%) could not name any climate policies. However, in the closed-ended format most respondents (78%) could identify at least one current policy after reviewing the list of

Discussion and conclusion

There are several shortcomings of our findings that can be addressed in future research. First, the results are location-specific in that they apply to BC's unique climate policies in their current design, which could limit the generalizability of our results. Second, our study is based on a general sample of BC citizens, who are unlikely to have as much interest in and influence on policy-making as would active members of key interest groups. Complimentary research is needed to assess climate

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships programme).

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