Effectively reducing fossil fuel emissions and fighting climate change necessitates coordinated policy efforts. Many developed countries have begun to domestically tackle greenhouse gas emissions but continue to face significant political hurdles.Footnote 2 Meanwhile, in the Global South, decarbonization and adaptation programs requiring structural reforms face vigorous public opposition.Footnote 3 International cooperation can alleviate these domestic difficulties by spreading the responsibility for action abroad. Financial transfers, defined as monetary flows from industrialized to developing countries for the purpose of setting up climate-related projects, facilitate collective action on mitigation and adaptation.Footnote 4 Transfers are cost efficient in the aggregate, can catalyze carbon pricing and green industrial policy practices, and address issues of internal and cross-national climate justice.Footnote 5
In polarized domestic and global environments, however, it is not obvious that donor countries are politically prepared to provide, or that recipient countries are willing to accept, international climate funding.Footnote 6 Because policymakers sign international agreements, the politics of their creation are somewhat technocratic. But since climate politics are increasingly litigated in the public domain in democratic countries, public opinion broadly influences policymakers’ ability to domestically ratify and implement such commitments. This is especially the case with climate finance channeled via bilateral transfers, which are subject to heightened public scrutiny.Footnote 7 As we will discuss later, such international transfers are debated by political parties and covered by the media, leading the public in turn to take positions on them.
What are the determinants of public support for cross-border climate transfers? The answer to this question is not immediately obvious. On the one hand, a growing body of research suggests that because “home bias” dominates preferences for climate investments, public opinion in both donor and recipient countries should be stacked against international transfers.Footnote 8 On the other hand, evidence suggests that citizens can have positive attitudes toward the international implementation of public-good projects.Footnote 9 Prior work indicates that citizens support international cooperation to halt the climate crisis, are cognizant of historical responsibilities, and recognize the importance of redressing harms experienced by others, especially communities that are vulnerable to climate change and decarbonization.Footnote 10 This suggests that climate transfer agreements can be designed to incorporate features that cultivate support across societal coalitions.Footnote 11
In this paper, we offer a theoretical framework and a series of empirical tests to study how citizens in both donor and recipient countries form opinions on and evaluate distinct design elements of climate transfer agreements. To begin, we consider how tangible factors such as costs and conditionalities, and normative factors such as reciprocity and peer acceptance, shape public support for bilateral climate transfers, given that the literature on public support for international cooperation routinely emphasizes such determinants.Footnote 12 Next, we propose three focal factors that inherently encapsulate both material and normative logics, building on recent research showing that climate policy attitudes intrinsically reflect mixed motivations.Footnote 13 We argue that domestic audiences view targeted compensation, the involvement of domestic partners from both donor and recipient countries, and the goal of mitigation over adaptation as materially benefiting their communities and countries while also embodying principles of climate justice that are key to sustaining long-term cooperation.
We empirically probe these expectations with a series of original survey experiments on representative samples in the United States and India—the world's two largest democracies and top emitters of greenhouse gases. We find that the public has systematic preferences regarding climate-motivated foreign investments, as citizens understand the implications of different international financing designs and weigh the trade-offs of various types of cross-border funding.Footnote 14 A key take-away is that public support can be augmented by specific design-based features of transfer agreements.
Patterns of similarities emerge between the two countries. Voters consistently privilege transfers that allocate more funds to compensate those harmed by climate change and climate policy; in fact, compensation is among the biggest overall drivers of support for transfers. Both donor-country and recipient-country citizens prefer transfers that target mitigation rather than adaptation goals—a noteworthy finding in light of elite-based discourse that emphasizes support for international adaptation efforts. And transfers that provide grants to a mix of home and foreign firms muster the most acceptance, pointing to a zone of intersecting support for donor and recipient countries, which are often assumed to have distinct partnership preferences. Because these factors encapsulate mixed considerations, they cultivate buy-in from various sections of society, including among those more skeptical of international climate action.
Our experiments reveal additional insights. Citizens in donor countries are sensitive to the costs of climate transfers and evidence a home bias in their spending preferences. Meanwhile, citizens in recipient countries prefer having fewer conditionalities and more monitoring. Given that donor countries also value monitoring, this points to an area of shared interest in the design of transfer agreements. Interestingly, we find weak evidence for an effect of duration and strong evidence of the meaningfulness of social norms like reciprocity and peer acceptance in both samples.
Overall, the series of symmetrical findings across the United States and India indicate that climate transfer agreements can be designed in ways that satisfy domestic coalitions in both donor and recipient countries. We shed light on how specific features of climate transfer agreements can help bolster public support even in polarized political contexts and build legitimate transfer mechanisms to withstand popular backlash over the long run.
Theoretical Framework
We focus on public opinion on cross-border climate transfers because citizens in democracies constrain the policy actions of their elected representatives, and international policies that entail major financial commitments have direct and indirect repercussions in domestic economies, in which voters have a stake. This section theorizes why public opinion is important for understanding the politics of international climate finance, and how different attributes of transfer agreements can lead domestic audiences in archetypal Global North and Global South countries to become more favorable toward climate financing. We assume that congruity across countries in preferences for specific design features increases the possibility of transfers being negotiated and domestically ratified.
Climate Finance and Public Opinion
The landscape of climate financial transfers
The call for international climate finance first emerged from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in the 1990s. The Global Environmental Facility was launched in 1992 for this purpose; in the 2022–2026 cycle it budgeted more than USD 5 billion. As of 2024, several multilateral banks exist that cater to international climate finance. Other mechanisms include bilateral finance, climate-related export credits, and private funds. In 2023, the bulk of international climate finance comprised multilateral and bilateral transfers, which together accounted for more than 80 percent of funding.Footnote 15
We focus on the determinants of support for bilateral climate transfers, and specifically bilateral climate grants, where we expect public opinion to matter most, both on the donor and the recipient side.Footnote 16 Bilateral climate finance effectively targets similar goals and incorporates similar conditions as multilateral finance.Footnote 17 At the same time, with the recent fractionalization of international climate politics and disagreements between strategic donors such as China and the United States, bilateral agreements have become more relevant.Footnote 18 They have also increasingly become an actionable commitment among countries that are historically less willing to engage with multilateral organizations, such as Australia and the United States.
In terms of recipients, bilateral climate finance has so far targeted mainly low- and middle-income countries, a group with significant emissions and adaptation needs. The sharp rise in global interest rates since 2021 could plausibly alter these countries’ demand for bilateral climate transfers. Presumably, resistance to taking on further debt may lead developing countries to push for more grants and reject increased debt burdens. However, this does not mean that bilateral climate grants and subsidized debt will be systematically favored and unconditionally accepted. Cross-national evidence from recent inflationary years suggests that various developing countries have at times rejected cheaper conditional finance, despite its efficiency.Footnote 19 As we will show, most types of climate finance, even in the form of grants, face varying degrees of public support and opposition; understanding how different design features of climate finance arrangements can bolster support thus represents a pressing task.Footnote 20
The role of public opinion in climate transfer design
As this discussion indicates, international climate finance has been in the hands of multilateral funds for many years. By default, the politics of international climate transfers have been delegated to bureaucrats and diplomats, following the logic that financial agreements “are technically complex and well beyond the understanding of most citizens.”Footnote 21 Nevertheless, recent turns in international debt and aid politicsFootnote 22 suggest that mass preferences matter in systematic ways, and public resistance to elite-driven economic deals has become more common.Footnote 23 Similarly, though technocrats dominated international climate agreements until recently, climate policy has now entered mainstream politics, becoming a central economic, geopolitical, and security issue. Consequently, understanding the parameters of public support for climate action is increasingly crucial for forging successful climate commitments.
Against this background, we argue that public support matters for the politics of international climate transfers for at least three reasons. First, public opinion is a crucial test of the credibility of elite discourse in this area. It is reasonable to expect that extensive discussions by political leaders of climate transfers shape popular support for climate finance efforts.Footnote 24 Global politics and great power rivalry are also factors that, when linked to international economic policy, elevate the role of public support for ratification,Footnote 25 and international climate policy is increasingly couched in geopolitical terms. Public positioning on climate transfers is then feasible; scholarship shows that citizens understand the trade-offs of different designs of international agreements in similar areas.Footnote 26
Second, climate transfers are already on the political agendas of various industrialized and developing countries in meaningful ways, with climate finance currently discussed on media platforms and reported in widely broadcast debates. It has also increasingly become an issue of electoral campaigns and pledges.Footnote 27
Third, there is evidence that voters in both donor and recipient countries expect to be part of the conversation around climate policy and climate transfers.Footnote 28 Our own surveys indicate that voters believe that the public should have as prominent a role in ratifying cross-border climate transfers as businesses and political elites.Footnote 29 We therefore consider how support for climate transfers can be built based on various design features of transfer agreements, and what coalitions may emerge for or against such transfers.
Background Considerations: Determinants of Public Support for Climate Transfers
Transfer agreements that feature properties deemed more desirable by voters should muster greater public approval. We now theorize how various considerations and attributes can be incorporated into the design of cross-national climate transfer agreements to amplify public support in developed and developing countries.
We begin by focusing on determinants of preference formation previously established in relevant scholarship. This allows us to distinguish the main drivers of policy preferences, which prior work typically classifies in either material or ideational terms. We discuss how each of these factors informs support for design features of climate transfer agreements, and how we should expect them to tilt support for climate finance. Recall however that our innovation is to propose additional factors that, we argue, increasingly capture the more complex, intersectional nature of material and nonmaterial concerns in the climate policy space. Therefore, in the next section we discuss three features that we predict will boost public support for climate finance in both donor and recipient countries.
To start, the climate public opinion literature agrees that self-interest is a rational and strategic determinant of individual behavior. Accordingly, personal economic motivations are a key driver of decisions to fund climate agreements.Footnote 30 Effectively, various features of climate transfers can embody this type of motivation. We highlight three: costs, conditionalities, and durations.
First, the costs of climate transfers should elicit powerful material concerns. In richer countries, citizens bear financing costs, either through increased direct or indirect taxes or by curtailed access to other services at home. The structure of transfers is also likely to matter for public support; for example, citizens should care about whether transfers exclusively benefit recipient-country actors or whether they can bring benefits to constituents in the donor country. In the United States, this is precisely the framing of the debate: for example, the Republican Party has articulated a prioritization of domestic energy security over support for the transition to clean energy sources,Footnote 31 while Democrats have pinned the shortcomings of the Green Climate Fund on the Republican Party's “refusal to engage on climate change in any meaningful way.”Footnote 32 Against this background, we expect first and foremost that transfers that entail a higher domestic burden on taxpayers are less favored than those with lower costs.Footnote 33
Similar considerations motivate public opinion in recipient countries. While these citizens do not incur direct costs when they receive international grants, the burden of these transfers usually takes the form of conditionalities. These impose policy costs for recipient governments and publics that impinge on domestic sovereignty. Indian authorities, for example, have emphasized the importance of developed countries fulfilling prior financing commitments and have opposed conditionalities that they view as creating dependency for developing countries.Footnote 34 Consequently, we expect that climate transfer conditionalities on recipient countries elicit strong opinions among voters, and fewer conditions are preferred to more conditions.Footnote 35
Next, the durations of transfer programs also have important implications for voters. While climate change requires immediate action, the products of climate policy will be realized only over extended periods of time. On the one hand, shorter-term transfers might be preferred by citizens in both donor and recipient countries since they involve fewer commitments and shorter bouts of effort, which can effectively decrease costs in the long run. On the other hand, voters might prefer longer-term transfer programs that promise to spread the costs and perhaps be more durable.Footnote 36 While the literature does not provide clear predictions about program duration and public attitudes on climate agreements, the implications of time (in)consistency in climate policy for public opinion in this area are well scrutinized.Footnote 37
In addition to material self-interest, the literature soundly affirms that peer-related concerns are central in the public's understanding of climate agreements.Footnote 38 The actions of other countries have been known to motivate the public in many international climate policymaking spheres.Footnote 39 Concepts such as historical culpability and shared destiny underpin the climate crisis and set it apart from many other economic policy domains. Sensitivity to burden sharing is seen consistently in public opinion scholarship on international cooperation, and previous work shows its role in climate institutional design choices.Footnote 40 In the climate finance context, transfers might be expected to elicit more support if they embody similar principles, with other countries also participating in similar transfer schemes.Footnote 41
In the donor-country (Global North) literature, this has been termed reciprocity, referring to the joint conditional behavior across countries that can help sustain collective action around climate change. Donor-country citizens might reject “lone wolf” climate transfer proposals if they consider shouldering the burden of overseas climate mitigation and adaptation efforts unfair. This is, for example, the case in the United States, which has forcefully signaled that its funding decisions will be contingent on China's participation as a donor.Footnote 42 As more countries contribute to climate financing, perceptions of a shared global responsibility to fund transfers should motivate support among donor-country citizens.
We argue that a somewhat parallel—though distinct and untested—logic applies to public opinion in recipient countries. Global South countries may be nudged into accepting agreements on climate transfers as a function of the transfers other developing countries have accepted. Given that transfer schemes typically entail conditionalities and real (or perceived) debts and obligations to donors, voters might be skeptical of climate funding that other developing countries have spurned. But as more countries accept transfers, the impression of an emerging global compact surrounding cross-border climate cooperation should galvanize approval. Based on this discussion, we expect that support for transfers in developing countries will increase with the number of other countries accepting similar policies. We term this recipient-side phenomenon peer acceptance.
Finally, the literature finds that “home bias” considerations should undergird perceptions of the benefits and costs of climate transfers. Concerns with foreign vis-à-vis home investments (target) on the donor side and foreign vis-à-vis home observation (monitoring) on the recipient side should affect perceptions of, and public support for, international climate transfers in both sets of countries.
On the donor side, citizens of richer countries are known to have home-centric preferences.Footnote 43 This may be due to the material costs of climate action abroad as well as concerns related to national status and patriotism.Footnote 44 Effectively, for donor countries, climate investments abroad could be substituted with investments at home; indeed, while the Paris Agreement encourages international transfer commitments, it also recommends domestic action.
Citizens in recipient countries might also hold home bias driven by material and nonmaterial considerations. Prior climate transfers have largely been structured as loan-based investments requiring repayment, which developing countries have largely resisted.Footnote 45 But national pride may also motivate opposition to transfers, for example, due to the monitoring that typically accompanies them. Monitoring encompasses concerns of surveillance, trust, and sovereignty. Accordingly, the public in poorer countries may evaluate international climate financing as a function of how involved the foreign country is in tracing the money and potentially threatening withdrawal.Footnote 46 A home bias in developing countries would suggest that domestically monitored transfers will be preferred to foreign monitoring.Footnote 47
Expanding Coalitions of Public Support: Three Focal Factors
In addition to the factors already outlined, certain attributes of international transfer agreements provide a mix of material and nonmaterial benefits, which in turn expand appeal among broader coalitions of voter groups. Designing agreements to incorporate these attributes should thus increase prospects for ratification and approval. Along these lines, we now propose three factors that we argue bolster domestic support for cross-border climate transfers. We analyze the factors separately, elaborating the effects we expect from each one.
Compensation
Climate transfers have stark welfare implications that, if left unaddressed, may undermine their purpose. Compensation, which has become a cornerstone of “just transition” theories, can soften vigorous political opposition among powerful constituencies that are otherwise negatively impacted by the distributional implications of climate projects. In this spirit, at COP27 in 2022 nearly 200 countries signed on to an agreement that developing nations cannot be held legally liable for payments related to climate action.Footnote 48
A growing literature explores how various voter groups support national investments targeted at specific domestic communities that will lose from climate change and decarbonization policies.Footnote 49 But it is a priori unclear whether incorporating compensation mechanisms into the design of international transfers can increase support for these schemes. Thus, we investigate whether voters favor more transfers that allocate a proportion of funds to compensate groups directly impacted by the effects of climate change and by emissions reduction policies.Footnote 50
We expect the public in donor and recipient countries to be inclined to compensate vulnerable domestic communities more than international communities, just because home investments are preferred to international ones. However, we also theorize that voters in both donor and recipient nations will evince strong absolute support for international compensation, for both material and ideational reasons. On the material side, citizens may be inclined to give resources to communities abroad to reduce the likely externalities of foreign vulnerability, for example, migration.Footnote 51 Meanwhile, voters in developing countries may consider transfers that include targeted compensation as an effective redistributive policy.Footnote 52 On the ideational side, compensation activates other-regarding attitudes. Transfers that redress the harms borne by vulnerable groups may instill in individuals a higher moral purpose, a sense that climate justice is being achieved, and a commitment to global solidarity.Footnote 53 Overall, we predict that targeted compensation embedded in international transfers can unlock support for climate transfers in both donor and recipient countries.
Partners
The implementation of climate finance implies resourcing actors that deploy projects for the purpose of decarbonization or, alternatively, climate change adaptation. For donor countries, climate finance programs require deciding whether the financing will involve organizations within the donor country and/or the recipient country. That is, who will be the partners that receive funds to implement projects? We focus here on implementation via donor or recipient country companies and governmental agencies.Footnote 54
Projects implemented (or handled) by domestic actors might be seen more favorably by domestic publics due to perceived preference alignment and latent home bias. Independent of home bias, with the involvement of domestic agents indirect benefits may flow to stakeholders in the involved countries.Footnote 55 Consider first donor countries. On the one hand, material benefits to donor constituencies could boost interest in providing climate transfers.Footnote 56 For example, people may think that the domestic employees and owners of firms involved in transfers abroad may circulate their economic returns at home. On the other hand, the involvement of domestic partners is also closely tied to questions of control over climate arrangements and may be politically, rather than economically, beneficial.Footnote 57 This is why countries including Canada and members of the European Union have developed public–private partnerships and derisking initiatives aimed at the mobilization of private-sector participation.Footnote 58
Citizens in recipient countries might prefer their firms and government agencies to be involved in the management of transfers for similar reasons.Footnote 59 The public might believe that organizations in the recipient country are better suited to implement climate projects due to superior local contextual knowledge. They may also have strong preferences against interventions that can be viewed in neocolonial terms. Conversely, if programs that involve donor agents have greater political support in the donor country, then these projects may be seen as more credible and likely to be continued.Footnote 60 This could lead to a greater openness to the involvement of donor-country actors. Recipient countries routinely express partnership preferences; for example, Indian officials from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change have publicly called for “enhanced climate finance that is largely public, grant based and concessional.”Footnote 61
To be sure, the choice of partners need not be a binary decision. Precisely because they optimize material and ideational benefits, partnerships between donor and recipient actors could meld a range of expertise, increase accountability, and build domestic political support in both countries.Footnote 62 We therefore hypothesize that voters in both donor and recipient countries will view collaboration between donor and recipient country firms positively.
Goal. Finally, we consider the goal of climate transfers as a potential source (or deterrent) of public endorsement. Climate spending can be used for mitigating emissions or adaptating to climate change. Mitigation reduces warming impacts in the future by minimizing global risks and transitioning local areas to a greener economy. Adaptation helps build resilience to climate shocks and provides more concentrated benefits for particular communities facing climate vulnerability today.Footnote 63
Evidently, these goals are not mutually exclusive, and both have positive collective externalities. At the same time, they constitute two separate areas of investment, and, importantly for a public perspective, mitigation and adaptation have different economic and political trade-offs. Thus, while voters may care about transfer programs that target both mitigation and adaptation efforts, as most areas are increasingly pressed to transition to decarbonization while maintaining resilience,Footnote 64 highlighting one of these two goals may mobilize more support.Footnote 65
We theorize that people evaluating climate transfers may assign more value to mitigation, at least in the Global North. Mitigation efforts stand to directly benefit broad sections of society, so they are likely to elicit approval in industrialized economies, where the material costs of mitigation are higher.Footnote 66 Furthermore, the public discourse in the Global North is fixed on mitigation policies as a strategy for reindustrialization and job creation.Footnote 67 Consequently, mitigation activates the appeal of a new growth model and a green future.Footnote 68 Along these lines, it is not surprising that mitigation financing efforts have commanded nearly three times more financing than adaptation efforts.Footnote 69
For the mitigation-versus-adaptation preferences of recipient countries, we have weaker priors. While acknowledging that prominent policy proposals discussing climate transfers at COP meetings have increasingly focused on adaptation efforts, we note that voters in developing countries face competing pressures regarding the goal of transfers. They may recognize that international transfers allow their countries to meet long-term mitigation goals that benefit their economic welfare. But the domestic costs of mitigation projects, such as internal fossil fuel job displacements, may dampen support. Conversely, facing the reality of climate change and its effects on vulnerable populations, voters in receiving countries might prefer to focus efforts on adaptationFootnote 70—although this would imply losing the opportunity for new technology acquisition and economic decoupling.Footnote 71 While we expect mitigation to be the preferred goal of climate transfers for donor constituencies, we remain agnostic with respect to the preferences of voters in recipient countries.
Experimental Designs and Findings
To test our preregistered predictions, we conducted a series of original survey experiments in the United States and India—the world's largest democracies, second- and third-largest emitters, and key climate finance donor and recipient nations, respectively. The paired design of the experiments allows us to compare developed and developing countries, with implications for the odds of North–South climate finance agreements. We employ conjoint experiments to investigate the relative importance of the factors we have theorized.Footnote 72
We report the US and Indian design and results in turn. We offer a discussion of the scope conditions of these findings by summarizing additional conjoint data based on the profile of donors and recipient countries, as well as additional analyses, in Appendix J.
US Experimental Design
We fielded a conjoint survey experiment in August 2022 on a general population sample of 2,006 American respondents.Footnote 73 The design introduces respondents to pairs of policies that vary on our theoretical dimensions. After viewing a pair of policy profiles, respondents chose their preferred one and then ranked each profile on ten-point scales. The first outcome, which is a forced choice, lets us assess the effect of each attribute value in the evaluation of one profile relative to another. The second outcome lets us evaluate each profile independently.Footnote 74 The experiment began with a preamble;Footnote 75 it then described each dimension to ensure that respondents understood the underlying concepts.Footnote 76
The policy options in the experiment comprise the attributes delineated in the previous section; they include the factors already established in the literature, as well as the three under-investigated features that we theorized would meaningfully affect support for international transfers. Table 1 reports their values, which we fully randomized.Footnote 77
TABLE 1. Donor policy conjoint experiment: attributes and their levels
*Donor-specific features.
For the levels of the donor-specific attributes of cost and target, as well as the more general duration and reciprocity attributes, we use the values employed in other published work.Footnote 78 For example, we present the equivalent amounts of monthly abatement costs to the average household for three different scenarios, ranging from 0.5 percent to 2.5 percent of the US GDP.Footnote 79 Target can be either domestic spending or, importantly for this paper, spending in a developing country. We include the possibility of domestic targets (that is, US investments) to keep with the logic of the Paris Agreement.
Turning to our key attributes, the compensation dimension focuses on the amount of funding in the transfer agreement allocated to compensate individuals and communities harmed by climate change and decarbonization policy. We varied the amounts earmarked for compensation along three percentage levels of the full funds (0, 15, and 30 percent), to capture different ranges of money potentially reaching the most vulnerable communities within the targeted countries in line with real-world figures.Footnote 80 We expect more support for higher percentages of compensation.
The partners dimension explores whether climate finance support differs depending on the organizations funded. Following our theoretical discussion, we focused on the most likely options of transfer partners according to the Paris Agreement: government agencies, domestic firms, foreign firms, and a combination of foreign and domestic firms.Footnote 81 We expect domestic involvement to matter, and domestic private actors to capture a mix of efficiency and reputation benefits.
Finally, we vary the agreement's goal by distinguishing between mitigation and adaptation, which we explained to respondents in detail.
Each respondent reviewed four pairs of climate transfer policy profiles, hence selecting four preferred choices and providing eight ratings. The results pool the data from all selection rounds with standard errors clustered at the individual level.
US Results
Figure 1 presents the estimated average component marginal effects based on a linear probability model with the outcome focusing on respondents’ preferred policy.Footnote 82 Recall that in this exercise American respondents confront proposals for climate transfers that can be targeted either domestically or at a developing country. We refer to the complete set of results here, but note that the findings remain consistent if we condition the variation of the other attributes to developing-country programs only.Footnote 83
FIGURE 1. US policy conjoint experiment results
Our estimates corroborate the findings of previous research with respect to material self-interest on the one hand, and normative thinking on the other.
On the more material dimension, Americans are sensitive to the costs of climate transfers. As the payment for transfers increases by 1 percent of the American taxpayer's monthly budget, public support for a climate program decreases by about eight percentage points. Also in line with previous work, Americans on average prefer that the policy's target is domestic rather than a developing country.Footnote 84 Notably, the duration of the program does not appear to influence support.
We also confirm strong effects on the more normative dimension: reciprocity. We observe that 50 and 90 percent of rich countries pursuing similar transfer policies increase support for the policy proposal by five and eleven percentage points, respectively. These quantities are on par with other public opinion scholarship on climate cooperation.Footnote 85
Turning to our focal variables, our results illustrate the importance of domestic control and welfare concessions in driving public support for climate programs. As expected, earmarking a fraction of the financial allocations for compensation catalyzes policy support. Allocating 15 percent of funds to people harmed by climate change or decarbonization policy increases support by about ten percentage points compared to the baseline case of no compensation.
With respect to partners, compared to the option of giving grants to US government agencies, we confirm the hypothesis that most Americans prefer grants to be given to US companies. But, importantly for international cooperation and concessions, similar levels of support are detected for policies that involve grants split equally between US and foreign companies. By contrast, Americans seem less enthusiastic about climate transfers that give full responsibility to foreign companies: the coefficient of the “grants to foreign companies” attribute is negative and statistically significant. Finally, US respondents show less support for commitment goals that focus on adaptation vis-à-vis mitigation. This preference for mitigation plausibly corresponds with the notion that mitigation produces globally diffuse benefits, as well as the logic that mitigation technology and strategies have a powerful business case. By contrast, adaptation has more locally concentrated benefits and must be tailored to geographically specific impacts, making it plausibly less appealing.
Overall, we find that donor publics have clear preferences over climate finance, and that different features of climate-oriented transfers can mobilize or deter public support. American citizens’ home bias, sensitivity to costs, and preference for international reciprocal behavior align with findings of studies in other domains of climate policymaking. Importantly, however, the under-investigated factors identified in our theoretical discussion can sway the public in favor of supporting climate transfers; and these factors do not simply involve material considerations but also include issues of domestic agency and compensation embodying principles of climate justice.Footnote 86
India Experimental Design
We now move to opinions about climate transfers in a recipient country. We use survey data collected in November 2022 to April 2023 from 1,459 online Indian respondents.Footnote 87 Online samples are more educated and wealthier than the average Indian citizen; these characteristics could bear on some of our findings.Footnote 88 That said, such voters are likely more in tune with climate politics and influential in foreign policymaking deliberations, which makes them an interesting and intrinsically important group on which to focus. Respondents chose policy profiles based on randomized policy pairs and also rated each policy independently. As in our US design, respondents read a short preamble,Footnote 89 and then received detailed explanations of each of the conjoint experiment's attributes. The experiment included seven attributes, and each respondent reviewed four pairs of climate transfer profiles and returned four choices (and eight ratings).Footnote 90
Table 2 reports the values of the randomized attributes. For the focal variables compensation and goal, we use identical values to the US-based conjoint experiment; for the variable partners, we probed the same concepts tested in the US study but adjusted the wording to reflect the Indian context.
TABLE 2. Recipient policy conjoint experiment: attributes and their levels
*Recipient-specific features
For the material self-interest variables, we rely on categories that are politically meaningful to Indian voters. Because the India-based experiment focuses on the scenario in which transfers are coming from abroad only, instead of household costs (not directly incurred by Indian taxpayers), we study conditionalities, which reflect the notion that in order to receive international transfers, recipient governments are required to change domestic policies to meet certain donor conditions.Footnote 91 We specifically focus on gender equality, the rights of religious minorities, and preferential trade, following real-world debates (see Appendix A). Furthermore, international transfers in this context may have different principals, so we use distinct providers of monitoring to capture the idea that the use of funds can be monitored by various domestic or international governmental organizations or NGOs.Footnote 92 We use the three levels of the US conjoint experiment for duration. As for peer acceptance, we use 10, 50, or 90 percent of other developing countries accepting such transfers, mirroring the values in the US study.
India Results
Figure 2 presents the estimated average component marginal effects and 95 percent confidence intervals based on the Indian data. The headline finding is a remarkable congruence in the preferences of Indian and US voters on various dimensions, which indicates that climate transfer agreements can be designed in ways that satisfy coalitions in both recipient and donor countries.
FIGURE 2. Indian policy conjoint experiment results
As in the US experiment, we find weak evidence for an effect of duration and strong evidence of the meaningfulness of social norms. Peer acceptance has a positive and statistically significant effect: more developing countries accepting similar transfers leads to more support for the transfers. Presumably, observing other countries accepting similar programs creates the impression of a shared sense of responsibility and an emerging global compact on cross-border climate cooperation, which voters seem to value strongly.
In terms of conditionalities, the only policy adjustment that increases support for international transfers is mandated increases in gender equality—a salient policy issue in India's highly patriarchal society.Footnote 93 The effect of mandated increases in the rights of religious minorities is statistically indistinguishable from the baseline scenario of no conditionalities. Conditionalities to increase trade also have no effect. Together, the evidence suggests that citizens in general prefer fewer conditionalities, although their preference for gender equality is notable. We also observe greater support for transfers with any kind of monitoring. The most preferred scenario implies monitoring by both the Indian and donor governments, although we also find high support for monitoring by Indian government agencies.Footnote 94 Given that donor countries often prefer to be involved in monitoring, this highlights an area of shared interest between donor and recipient countries.Footnote 95
Scrutinizing our focal attributes, the results mirror the US conjoint results in magnitude and qualitative significance. We uncover tremendous support for compensation policies that redress communities harmed by climate change and decarbonization policy. This finding points to the popularity of just-transition policies that protect the vulnerable through compensatory mechanismsFootnote 96 and that find voice in climate advocacy efforts in the Global South.Footnote 97 It also shows that incorporating compensation into the design of transfer agreements is one of the most effective ways by which policymakers can drum up public support for cross-border finance.
Regarding the partners attribute, unsurprisingly, climate funding channeled only to donor-country companies is the least preferred outcome—significantly less liked than the baseline case of grants to national government agencies. However, splitting grants between donor and Indian firms reverses this negative effect. Even more notably, partnering between donor and recipient firms is not statistically different from providing grants to the Indian government or solely to Indian firms. This suggests that there is room for citizen-backed compromise between recipient and donor governments. We previously showed that American respondents prefer involving US firms in international climate transfers; here we demonstrate that such corporate involvement does not decrease support among Indian respondents compared to other options.
Remarkably, as in the US results on goals, our sample of Indian respondents strongly favors mitigation over adaptation. Developing countries receiving transfers may be expected to prefer to spend those funds on adaptation projects narrowly targeting their own protection. Consistent with this logic, Indian government officials have recently advocated for increased prioritization of adaptation efforts; and India was a major proponent of the Loss and Damages Fund. However, our respondents on average favor mitigation, which has globally dispersed effects. Speculatively, this may be because these relatively wealthier and more educated Indians view mitigation transfers as a vehicle to allow their country to meet longer-term goals, especially in light of the global race for green growth. A reasonable interpretation is that citizens view adaptation efforts as limited in scope and temporary, and mitigation by contrast as a broader and more permanent response to the climate crisis, obviating the need for future adaptation investments.
In sum, the Indian experiment shows several features of policy design that can engender popular support, including some that are consistent with traditional pocketbook-versus-normative motivations of public opinion, but also others that, as we argue, have both material and ideational underpinnings and appeal to different sections of society. Importantly, the effects of these under-investigated factors are congruent with those uncovered in the US conjoint experiment, and thus point to the compatibility of their appeals across audiences in the Global North and South.
Additional Evidence
Subgroup analyses and interaction models strengthen the interpretation of our main results.Footnote 98 But notably, the preferences uncovered in our data may be latently driven by the type of donors/recipients the subjects had in mind. Therefore, in additional conjoint experiments, we explored the preferred type of climate transfer recipient (for the US sample) and donor (for the India sample).
Donor and recipient country profiles conjoint experiments
We study whether there is variation in support for climate transfers based on the economic, political, and geopolitical features of the foreign countries potentially involved in transfer agreements. On the economic side, we focus on the foreign country's economic attributes either directly or indirectly related to emissions. We concentrate on GDP performance and (in the US) efficiency in abating greenhouse gases in absolute terms or (in India) efficiency compared to the donor country. We also include the cost of emissions abatement (in the US) and cost of emissions reporting (in India), as well as climate change preparation (that is, vulnerability to climate-induced disasters). We also estimate the effect of regime characteristics of the partner country. These include whether the partner is a democracy or autocracy and whether the partner is an ally or adversary. For the US, we also study the racial makeup of the recipient country to see whether shared identity augments support or whether, conversely, voters support transfers to countries with colonial histories. Meanwhile, in India we also include the level of resource matching compared to the donor.
Appendix J reports these results. Geopolitical factors are the strongest drivers of support for climate transfers to particular partners, corroborating findings in the public opinion literature on trade.Footnote 99 The average American and Indian voter prefers to engage more with countries that have strong economic fundamentals and mitigation potential. However, these effects are dwarfed by preferences for partnering with geopolitical allies and democracies. These results speak to the scope conditions of our main findings. They also further underscore that the geopolitical determinants highlighted in the international relations scholarship are key predictors of public support for cross-border climate financing.
Conclusion
Transfers from developed countries to developing countries are heralded as playing a major role in global efforts to combat climate change. Yet past work points to reluctance in developed countries to send money overseas and increasing resistance to foreign transfers in developing countries. Overcoming these challenges requires proposing features of climate transfers that appeal to broad sections of societies in both donor and recipient countries. We argue that the most successful features will evoke wide-ranging material and normative motivations for support.
We investigate various distributional considerations that may increase public acceptance of climate transfers. In addition to studying factors that have appeared in prior work, such as costs and reciprocity, we establish the scope of three specific design factors that blend self-interest and normative motivations: the role of targeted compensation, the involvement of domestic and foreign partners, and the preference for mitigation over adaptation. We argue that these three factors capture multifarious aspects of climate transfers that can be favored by domestic audiences on various grounds and, in turn, appeal to different political coalitions.
Using multiple original, paired surveys in the US and India, we find that, in addition to other established predictors of public support for climate transfers, specific choices regarding compensation, partners, and goals meaningfully increase support among American and Indian citizens. First, we reveal a democratic basis for policy discourse that emphasizes climate justice considerations and embraces compensation for climate-change-vulnerable and decarbonization-vulnerable communities abroad. Second, we show that citizens favor transfers structured as grants split between donor and recipient country firms, consistent with real-world policies of donors such as Canada and the EU, as well as recipient countries such as Indonesia, which has promoted the Just Energy Transition Partnership. Finally, both donor and recipient country publics support pursuing mitigation more than adaptation, in line with international deals that allocate around three times as much funding to mitigation as adaptation,Footnote 100 but in contrast to proposals at recent COP meetings that have prioritized adaptation-focused programs.
Overall, a key contribution of our findings is to highlight the politically inclusive dimensions of support for climate transfers, pointing to a way forward for policymakers seeking the public's buy-in for such cross-border arrangements.Footnote 101 For example, mitigation-oriented transfers that incorporate compensatory arrangements for communities at risk from decarbonization may muster more support from mass publics than generic adaptation transfers. At the same time, policymakers seeking to drum up support for transfers may wish to portray mitigation and adaptation efforts not as mutually exclusive but as complementary, since evidently mitigation reduces the need for longer-term adaptation.
A range of opportunities exist for additional work. Long-term support of transfers may be contingent on additional theoretical considerations, such as voters’ responses to the size of prior transfers or perceptions that earlier funds have been spent effectively. As we have shown, voters are sensitive to country-specific factors in the allocation of climate financing, including regime type and alliance status; additional factors such as perceptions of recipients’ institutions and state capacity might also influence support. Future studies may also further unpack the motivations behind the popularity of partnerships, such as whether private agents are perceived as less corrupt than public agents, and the mix of ideational and material motivations behind the support for compensation.
Data Availability Statement
Replication files for this research note may be found at <https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PQV2BY>.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary material for this research note is available at <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818324000365>.
Acknowledgments
Darrin Gilkerson, Diana Ding, Kylan Rutherford, Aura Gonzalez, Jenny Xiao, Samuel Housekeeper, Beenish Riaz, and Simran Singh provided excellent research assistance. We thank Patrick Bayer, Liam Beiser-McGrath, Thomas Bernauer, Diego Gambetta, Amanda Kennard, Vally Koubi, Erta Kurti, Jaya Nahar, Michael Ross, Sam Rowan, David Rueda, Lena Schaffer, Erik Voeten, Alice Zhang, audiences at the 2021 APSA conference, the 2022 UCLA Comparative Politics speaker series, the 2022 ETH Zurich Workshop on Carbon Taxes and Carbon Pricing, the 2022 Stanford Political Economy of Environmental Sustainability workshop, the 2023 EPSA meeting, and seminars at Collegio Carlo Alberto, Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, King's College London, and Nuffield College for helpful comments. We thank Allison Corbett and the Qualtrics team as well as CVoter News Services for helping field the surveys.
Funding
Research for this paper, and discussion at several research meetings, was made possible by generous funding from the Balzan Foundation under the terms of a prize awarded in 2017 to Professor Robert Keohane and administered by Princeton University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences under his supervision.
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