Sustainability trade-offs and fairness perceptions

The (behavioral) gap between citizens acceptance of climate change as a threat and their unwillingness to support sustainable policies – let alone, act sustainably – has been mentioned times and again in the literature. Yet, we still know little about the actual mechanisms explaining this gap. In this paper, we present two mechanisms that may contribute to a better understanding of this gap.
We argue that while previous research has highlighted the role of narratives putting sustainable policies in trade-offs with other desirable policies, it has so far neglected how these narratives work out among different groups of citizens. To shed more light on this, we propose to turn to the concept of citizens’ fairness conceptions – more specifically, their perceptions of being treated unfairly in different ways (kind of unfairness) and their stances toward the relevance of fairness in an ideal society (relevance of fairness).
We argue that both of these concepts play a role in explaining the effect of trade-off (narratives) pitting sustainability policies against other policies, in our case economic development and social inequality policies. The effect of the kind of fairness is relatively straightforward: We argue that if the kind of perceived (un)fairness is connected to one of the policies – in our case, economic unfairness to economic policies –, this should make citizens less favorable toward the sustainable policy in the trade-off, even if they consider climate change and/or sustainability a salient political issue.
The effect of fairness relevance is less straightforward but theoretically even more interesting. Based on empirical findings in previous research, we assume that for citizens who ascribe a higher relevance to fairness as a moral foundation, solidarity with others is of equally high relevance. In policy trade-offs in which both policies are connected to the issue of fairness–e.g., in an trade-off between reducing social inequality (which would be fair to more disadvantaged groups) vs. increasing sustainability (which would be fair to the younger generations)–, citizens with higher levels of fairness relevance will have a hard time deciding between the policies, coming to no decision at all or to a position not favoring any of the two policies.
The paper tests these expectations using data from a self-administered survey covering 14,000 individuals in seven European countries. As the survey is to be fielded after submission of this abstract, nothing can yet be said about whether the data confirms the preregistered expectations.