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Study on Cities as Role Models for Climate Protection Published as Discussion Paper
Cities are increasingly hold accountable for climate change mitigation and adaption. At the same time, cities show a great willingness to engage and consider themselves as role models. By demonstrating pro-environmentality, they aspire to encourage climate protection efforts of their citizen.
Starting from a standard economic point of view, there is little reason to assume that the cities intention to stimulate individual climate protection efforts is a promising strategy. Financed by taxpayers’ money, city level contributions are considered as substitutes that crowd out private contributions to the same public good. Motivated by research on other regarding preferences and the effects of giving information on reference group behavior, we oppose this argument and conjecture that city contributions to a green public good can indeed encourage individual-level engagement.
Results from our framed-field experiment do not support the standard economic assumption of complete crowding out, but neither do we find that providing information of city climate protection crowds-in additional individual contributions. In contrast, providing information of climate protection activities of fellow citizens significantly increases the share of citizens that voluntarily contribute to the green public good. One reason being is that the reference to the commitment of fellow citizens attracts additional contributions from subjects, which are not per-se pro-environmentally oriented.