International climate adaptation assistance: Assessing public support in Switzerland

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317344 February 12, 2025 1 / 26 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Andonova L, Zucca A, Montfort S, Dolšak N, Prakash A (2025) International climate adaptation assistance: Assessing public support in Switzerland. PLoS ONE 20(2): e0317344. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0317344 Editor: Sung Min Han, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, REPUBLIC OF KOREA Received: July 2, 2024 Accepted: December 27, 2024 Published: February 12, 2025 Copyright: © 2025 Andonova et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data availability statement: Data is posted on Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse. harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=- doi%3A10.7910%2FDVN%2F3YWEEV&ver- sion=DRAFT Funding: Andonova: Graduate Institute Geneva Seed Grant Simon Montfort: Doc.CH funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF grant number 207269). RESEARCH ARTICLE International climate adaptation assistance: Assessing public support in Switzerland Liliana Andonova1, Agnese Zucca1, Simon Montfort2, Nives Dolšak3, Aseem Prakash 3* 1 Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, 2 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, 3 University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States of America * aseem@uw.edu Abstract Lower-income countries account for a small share of accumulated greenhouse gas

emissions but are highly vulnerable to climate-induced events. In response, industrialized higher-income countries, the major contributors to greenhouse gas stock, have pledged policy packages to support developing countries to adapt to climate change. Foreign aid and international migration often figure prominently in such packages. We employ a survey-embedded conjoint experiment to assess public support in Switzerland for interna- tional climate assistance packages which consist of six attributes: (1) the country receiving the package (Algeria, Kenya, Bangladesh, and the Philippines); (2) the volume of Swiss bilateral climate aid to this country; (3) the number of climate migrants from this country in Switzerland; (4) types of extreme weather event this country faces; (5) Swiss trade with this country; and (6) the country’s record of voting with Switzerland in the United Nations Security Council. We find that while Swiss respondents are indifferent to aid volume, their support for the policy package diminishes as the number of migrants increases. Respon- dents support policy packages for countries that trade with and vote alongside Switzerland in the Security Council. Respondents also have country-specific preferences: they support assistance to the Philippines, disfavor Algeria, and are indifferent to Kenya and Bangla- desh. Ideology, cultural beliefs, and benchmarking with peer countries of Global North or past Swiss aid and immigration records do not change support for the policy package. Introduction

Global climate policy has an important domestic component. As Putnam’s [1] two-level game framework suggests, leaders take positions on global issues while being watchful of domestic reactions. The global-local connection has been debated in the context of climate mitigation policy. Historically the lack of progress on climate policy was largely attributed to global free riding. Increasingly, scholars recognize the important role of domestic distributional conflicts in impeding decarbonization [2–5], and alternatively, the significance of domestic political incentives for stimulating transnational climate initiatives [6,7]. In this paper, we extend the domestic-global connection to the study of climate adaptation politics. A well-established literature examines public support for adaptation at the domestic and local levels [8–11]. We contribute to this literature by examining domestic support for