International climate adaptation assistance: Assessing public support in Switzerland

PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0317344 February 12, 2025 5 / 26 PLOS ONE Support for adaptation assistance in Switzerland Hypothesis 3: Support for the policy package will be higher for countries that vote with Switzerland in the UN Security Council. Trade relations constitute another international factor that could affect public support in donor countries for climate assistance packages. Some research suggests that trade displaces aid, while others find that donors provide aid to countries with whom they have more trading relationships [24,36,37,65]. Bilateral trade has furthermore been deployed strategically to gain traction on other international priorities such as human rights, labor rights, or the environ- ment, and more recently on climate finance [61,66,67]. In international environmental poli- tics, issue linkage with trade regimes has served to incentivize international agreements and treaty ratification [68] and in supporting domestic commitments for climate mitigation [69]. Uji et al. tested the impact of Japan’s imports and exports with an overseas country on support for adaptation assistance, capturing the potential relevance of domestic distributional implica- tions [26]. Here we investigate whether the public view of linkages between international trade relationships and aid, rather than distributional implications, influence public support for adaptation packages. We hypothesize: Hypothesis 4: Support for the policy package will be higher for countries that trade more with Switzerland.

The elaboration of H3 and H4 furthermore allows us to explore in greater depth, both theoretically and empirically, to what extent the linkage between climate aid and issues such as trade and support in UN forums might have broader repercussions for the level of public support through conditional effect on other relevant attributes examined in this study. Hypothesis 5, in turn, explores the relevance of country characteristics related to migra- tion patterns, such as geography, on public support for adaptation packages. Public support for foreign aid is influenced by the geographical location of the recipient country [56,57,70]. Examining the relevance of distance or proximity to Switzerland on respondents’ support for policy packages may be reflective of the European context at large, given the high and divisive attention placed on immigration waves from relatively close destinations such as North Africa and Syria. Thus, unlike respondents in other contexts such as Japan, where migration is not a salient issue, respondents might fear larger (climate) migration from a country that is prox- imate to Switzerland. Second, such risk perceptions might be stronger if the donor country has previously experienced high immigration levels from specific overseas countries. In recent years, Southern and Western Europe – including Switzerland – have witnessed a surge in immigration from African and Middle Eastern countries. Scholars note the emergence of bias and specific negative frames for specific migrant communities [71]. Research has further-

more revealed a tendency to instrumentalize and politicize immigration from these countries by populist right-wing parties [29]. Thus, it is important to recognize that, sometimes, race, ethnicity, and geography overlap. Support for adaptation assistance to specific countries might also be influenced by such implicit or explicit political, cultural, or racial biases [34,49]. To unpack these related issues, our survey instrument features four potential recipient countries that differ in terms of their distance from Switzerland and cultural characteristics such as religion and language spoken within each region. We chose Algeria, Kenya, Bangla- desh, and the Philippines for several reasons. The countries in our study are located either in Asia or in Africa. They show high levels of vulnerability to climate change and have experi- enced extreme weather events. Their geographical distance to Switzerland varies, and so does the historical and current presence of these migrant communities from these countries. We selected two countries in Asia and Africa that vary in racial and cultural characteristics such as