Biography
Sara Constantino is an assistant professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences and a visiting research scholar at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs. She has an interdisciplinary background at the intersection of economics, psychology, and environmental policy. Her research focuses on understanding the interplay between individual, collective, institutional and ecological factors, including how they shape preferences, decisions, and resilience to extreme events or shocks and how they mobilize or impede efforts to address climate change. Prior to starting at Stanford, she was an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University and an associate research scholar at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Before this, she was a senior research fellow in guaranteed income with the Jain Family Institute, a founding editor at Nature Human Behavior, and a research coordinator with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics from McGill University, a master’s degree in economics from University College London, a Ph.D. in cognitive and decision sciences from New York University, and a postdoc focused on environmental policy, politics and decision-making at Princeton University.
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of cross-national surveys measuring public attitudes about climate change impacts and solutions around the world. However, these surveys rarely include the small-island states and territories that represent some of the world’s most climate-exposed populations yet bear virtually no responsibility for climate change. A crucial question facing these countries concerns the financing and management of adaptation projects. We report results from a large-sample, quota-matched survey (N=20,026) fielded in 56 small-island states and territories. Overall, we find widespread awareness and concern about the threat posed by climate change and sea-level rise, but wide variation in attributions of responsibility for climate adaptation. Surprisingly, we find significant demand for foreign oversight of local adaptation projects—a finding that diverges from the literature on foreign aid, which suggests that recipient-country publics are skeptical of influence from international organizations and foreign governments. Yet, preferences for oversight and management of climate-related aid might differ, in part due to the asymmetric distribution of responsibility or causing climate change. We use a series of experiments to examine public preferences over the management of local adaptation programs and assess whether preferences are distinct for climate adaptation projects as compared with traditional aid projects.
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The David Bradford Energy and Environmental Policy Seminar Series is coordinated by the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment (C-PREE), and co-sponsored by the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI). This seminar is also co-sponsored by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy.
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