Decentralization and attitudes towards the environment: Survey-based evidence

Attitudes towards the environment are changing around the world. This may be due to greater awareness about environmental challenges, in part motivated by climate change, but also innovations in the policy landscape, such as those associated with decentralization, or the assignment of policymaking, administrative and political responsibilities to the subnational levels of administration. Decentralization brings the government closer to the people and creates room for bottom-up policy experimentation and citizen participation in policy design, which may influence attitudes. To shed light on these linkages, this paper provides survey-based empirical evidence based on data from the World Values Survey that exposure to decentralization contributes to more favorable attitudes towards the environment, controlling for personal and household characteristics of respondents, as well as country and cohort fixed effects.