(Un)fair to Me – (Un)fair to You? How the Distributional Implications of Environmental Policies Shape Policy Support

Addressing climate change and environmental degradation requires ambitious policies, yet their success depends critically on public support in democratic societies. This challenge proves particularly acute for transport policies, which are essential for reducing emissions but often impose unequal costs and benefits across social groups. Vehicle restrictions and public transport investments raise fundamental questions about environmental justice: who should pay for cleaner air, and who should benefit from policy interventions? Recent protests demonstrate how distributional concerns can mobilize resistance even to technically sound environmental measures. Research consistently identifies fairness perceptions as among the strongest predictors of policy acceptance, yet three critical gaps limit our understanding. First, existing studies concentrate almost exclusively on high-income Western contexts, leaving uncertain whether fairness concerns operate similarly in Global South cities where inequality is often more pronounced and environmental burdens fall heaviest on disadvantaged populations. Second, while climate policy research has examined carbon taxation extensively, fewer studies explore fairness perceptions for other policy instruments, particularly subsidies and targeted benefit programs that may offer more progressive distributional outcomes. Third, scholars distinguish between self-interested fairness (how policies affect me) and distributional fairness (how policies affect others), but rarely investigate how these dimensions interconnect or their relative importance for shaping support. This study asks: How does the distribution of policy costs and benefits shape fairness-to-me and fairness-to-others perceptions, and how do these dimensions link to policy support? We examine transport-related air pollution policies in Jakarta and Delhi, two major cities facing severe environmental challenges where policy design choices have significant implications for both climate mitigation and social equity. Original vignette experiments with representative samples allow us to identify how support is shaped by whether costs and benefits fall universally on all citizens or target private car owners specifically. Respondents evaluate each scenario on fairness-to-me, fairness-to-others, and overall support. Results reveal that targeting reduces perceived fairness compared to universal allocation, though patterns differ across contexts. Fairness-to-me perceptions consistently correlate more strongly with support than fairness-to-others concerns. Car ownership conditions self-interested fairness evaluations but not distributional judgments, suggesting material interests dominate even for policies with clear collective environmental benefits. These findings carry significant implications for designing politically feasible climate policies that address inequality. They suggest that even in contexts with high inequality and severe pollution, equality norms may prevail over alternative fairness principles, potentially constraining progressive policy options that could simultaneously advance environmental and distributional goals.