Policies designed to promote green behavior can backfire.
“Imagine a policy that banned cars in cities. People might start biking more, reducing carbon emissions. But many would feel a loss of freedom and come to despise environmentalists,” says SFI Omidyar and EPE Postdoctoral Fellow Katrin Schmelz, a behavioral economist and psychologist.
These people’s concern about climate change would weaken and, eventually, they might vote for politicians who oppose green policies.
To avoid the unintended consequences of climate policy, Schmelz says, “we need to better understand how climate policies and people’s values coevolve.” This insight motivated her to co-organize the “Effective Public Policy Design When Preferences and Beliefs are Endogenous” working group, held at SFI March 12–14.
Climate activists often argue that individual lifestyle change is a red herring, pushed by big polluters to allocate the blame for pollution to consumers and divert attention from their role in climate change.
“There’s a whole school of thought that says, ‘don’t bother me with your vegetarianism or your recycling, because the only thing that’s going to tackle climate change is a carbon tax,” says SFI Professor and economist Sam Bowles, who helped organize the event. “But if people don’t have green values, they’re not going to vote for a carbon tax. And how do you develop green values? One way is by creating conditions where people actually want to live a life consistent with a carbon-mitigated planet.”
Choosing the right climate policies now will shape generations.
“If we design policies badly, they may erode people’s green values. The chance to affect climate change is now, and then it will be gone,” says Schmelz.
During the working group, economists, psychologists, political scientists, policy experts, and complex-systems researchers explored a radical idea — policies affect who people are, not just whether or not they do a target action.
“Policymakers rarely take account of the only recently recognized fact that policies and institutions actually change people’s preferences, beliefs, values — and thus change how that citizen will interact with future policymaking, sometimes in ways that make green policies harder to sustain,” Schmelz explains.
This coevolution of policy and people applies to any institution, such as a market or democracy itself. And the phenomenon affects more than climate change policy.
Take COVID-19. Mandates to get vaccinated probably raised the rate of vaccinations. But they also may have intensified resistance to overall COVID prevention policies, and turned many people against the medical establishment and science itself.
Learning from the COVID example, well-designed climate policies could push society over a tipping point, towards a self-reinforcing process of greener values and behaviors.
Working group participants see reason to hope. “Attendees came with their hearts as well as their brains,” Schmelz says. They discussed how per-capita emissions are declining in Western industrial countries. Representatives of large cities like New York have compared and coordinated emissions-tracking systems with peers, sparking measurable change — Copenhagen will be the first CO2-neutral city in 2025.
Bowles and Schmelz hope the working group will contribute to better interdisciplinary climate science and policy action.