International climate adaptation assistance: Assessing public support in Switzerland

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317344 February 12, 2025 19 / 26 PLOS ONE Support for adaptation assistance in Switzerland cultural affinities (Supporting Information S12 Fig, S13 Table), and expressions of pride for Swiss history and culture with the baseline model (Supporting Information S14 Fig, S15 Table). All these factors are important in the contemporary discussion on populism. Much to our surprise, these interaction effects did not influence results in a statistically significant manner. Divergent views on the utility of development aid as a policy instrument (or lack thereof) similarly did not significantly affect our results. Conclusion This paper makes several contributions to the study of climate politics. We join the growing movement that links climate policy to broader policy debates on immigration, foreign aid, and trade. Substantively, this study provides important insights into how Swiss respondents view the subject of climate aid and immigration in the context of specific developing countries. It reveals that the favorability for policy packages that substantially increase climate adaptation aid correlates positively and consistently with recipient countries’ trade volumes and voting alignment with the Swiss position in international forums such as the UN Security Council. Respondents consider such issue linkages in expressing their favorability for adaptation assis- tance. The favorability of policy packages with climate adaptation aid and accepting migrants

increases as countries trade more with Switzerland and vote alongside the Swiss position in the UN Security Council. High levels of trade and alignment of votes in the UN Security Council with Switzerland increase the favorability of policy packages with ambitious aid levels and some level of climate migrant acceptance. While Switzerland maintains its neutrality in global politics, it is notable that public respondents (as opposed to policy elites according to standard expectations of the literature) regard countries that vote alongside Switzerland at the UN Security Council as more desirable partners for climate adaptation assistance. These results resonate with theories on development aid and issue linkage to gain traction on other international priorities. They furthermore suggest that establishing linkages with other issues (such as trade) and international regimes (such as international security and potentially other domains) could strengthen awareness domestically and public opinion in favor of increasing climate adaptation assistance. To our knowledge, the politics of linking adaptation finance with other international issues, such as trade and UN-level cooperation, has not been previously explored in the literature. Comparable findings in the case of Japan for UN General Assembly vote alignment and countries receiving Japanese exports [26] fur- ther imply broader generalizability of the relevance of such issue linkage for directing climate adaptation assistance beyond the Swiss context. Such political dynamics and their implication

can be explored with a broader comparative perspective, including for traditionally large donors such as the United States and countries in the European Union. Another significant result is the evidence of diminished support for the assistance pack- age that is directed to Algeria, while positive support is provided for packages directed to the Philippines. This suggests that the political and media representation and rhetoric aimed at North African countries might be influencing the perceptions of Swiss respondents. We are reluctant to frame this as purely religion-based discrimination bias because Swiss respondents do not reveal these negative preferences towards Bangladesh, another country with a similar background in terms of the prevalence of the Muslim religion, but with different geographic proximity and colonial past linked to continental European. Equally, despite cultural similar- ities between the Philippines and Kenya in terms of large shares of predominantly Christian population, we found support for the Philippines but a lack of support for Kenya, except for models with conditional effects of trade and UN voting. Thus, future research should explore the multidimensionality of factors that might guide public support for climate-induced migra- tion and how this coheres with other drivers of migration, such as war and economic distress.