Future research

We end with a few suggestions for future research. A key question left unanswered in this paper concerns the relative importance of each of the factors. Future work could try to disentangle effects and measure their relative strength by use of quantitative meta-analysis.

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This might include socio-economic factors which were omitted here for reasons of space.

Next, there seems to be broad skepticism about whether and how climate change can be mitigated (see also Capstick and Pidgeon, 2013, on "response skepticism"). To this end, research might dive deeper into explaining how people make sense of different policies, its effectiveness as well as other attributes. For example, there is little understanding of how people see the effectiveness of policies related to the international dimension of climate change, collective efforts, and indirect system-wide effects, such as carbon leakage, energy/carbon rebound, and oil market responses (green paradox). Furthermore, instead of soliciting opinions on single policies, research may benefit from examining public support for more complex policy packages like combinations of carbon taxation and renewable R&D subsidies, or shifting taxes from labor to environment, as these are stressed by many policy experts as necessary to make a transition to a low-carbon economy. A particularly puzzling question may receive attention in this context, namely why a revenue-neutral environmental/carbon tax reform receives relatively little support in politics and society thus far. Research could also study a wider array of policies that can address climate change, such as the introduction of alternative well-being indicators, working time reduction, restrictions on certain types of advertising, and measures to discourage conspicuous consumption. Given that the majority of studies covered here are empirical, future research may use more experiments to better identify the causal relation between factors and policy support. A final remark concerns the geographical scope, namely that the bulk of the reviewed research focuses on public opinion in North America, Australia and Europe. Little is known about countries in other geographical areas and hence cultural contexts.

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Chapter 3

Public views on economic growth, the environment and prosperity:

Results of a questionnaire survey⁸ 3.1 Introduction

There is a long-standing and recently revived academic and public debate about economic growth and its relationship to environmental quality and prosperity. It gained momentum during the 1960s and 1970s (Mishan, 1967; Nordhaus and Tobin 1972; Daly, 1973; Easterlin 1974; Hirsch, 1976; Scitovsky, 1976; Sen, 1976 and Hueting, 1980), reaching a wide audience through the publication of the “The Limits to Growth” report by Meadows et al.

(1972). For various reasons, this debate waned somewhat after a while (Buttel et al., 1990).

Following the recent global economic crisis and the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss and other global environmental changes, economic growth has beco me again a contested issue (e.g., Turner, 2008; Victor, 2010a; Schneider et al., 2010; Jackson, 2011;

Antal and van den Bergh, 2014; Costanza et al., 2014; Anderson, 2015). Even certain influential mainstream economists express skepticism about continued growth: some argue that the times of high economic growth in rich countries like the US are over (Gordon, 2012;

2014), others lament the “GDP fetishism” (Stiglitz 2009), while again others ask whether it is time to reconsider the “growth imperative” (Rogoff, 2012).

These questions also attract considerable public attention. For example, the book

“Prosperity Without Growth” by Tim Jackson (2011) was featured in various media around the world. A BBC article (2014) recently opened with: “Poor GDP. Everyone seems to be rounding on the once highly regarded measure.” Paul Krugman, public intellectual and Nobel prize winner in Economics, has twice already devoted attention to questions of growth and the environment in his NYT column (New York Times, 2014a/b). Of course, the general narrative

8 This chapter has already been published in Global Environmental Change (Drews and van den Bergh, 2016).

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about growth remains positive and optimistic. Witness the recent report “Better Growth – Better Climate” (New Climate Economy, 2014) and the push for “green growth” by the World Bank (2012) and the OECD (2015a).

These examples indicate that economic growth and its relationship to environmental sustainability is an increasingly important public issue. If perpetual economic growth is indeed environmentally unsustainable, then it seems reasonable to study public attitudes towards the dominant paradigm, and seek public support for strategies that go beyond it.

However, public opinion is an element that is surprisingly missing in the newly emerging research on these topics. Although one can find a few survey questions on this issue scattered in the literature, these are rather ambiguous, and do not represent the relevant debate very well, as will be shown in a brief review below. In addition, there is a great deal of empirical research on environmental attitudes, but these studies are mostly carried out without considering the wider socioeconomic context (Uzzell and Räthzel, 2009; Gifford, 2014;

Capstick et al., 2015), let alone specific questions relating to economic growth.

This paper offers a more complete study of public views on the debate about economic growth and the environment. It reports the results of a representative survey from Spain specifically designed for this purpose. In the past, Spain has experienced high economic growth rates, followed by a deep economic crisis, and more recently a mild economic improvement. The four main aims of this study are as follows. First, we examine an array of attitudes towards economic growth and its underlying structure using statistical factor analysis. A second aim is to examine public preferences regarding economic growth and the environment by using a novel measure that captures four different positions. These preferences are then compared with the previously identified attitudes, and with an arguably related measure: namely, what people view as a desirable rate of GDP growth in rich industrialized countries. Third, we investigate public beliefs about a core element of the growth debate: namely, whether it is possible to grow indefinitely in rich countries. We also

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assess the reasons that individuals indicate for economic growth to end or not. Fourth, we study how beliefs and attitudes are related to each other, and how they vary across individual characteristics, such as sociodemographic, social-psychological and other factors.