Abstract
Academics have analyzed individual environmental perceptions for a long time. Researching on friendly attitudes toward the environment has progressively gained relevance as support for public policies on the topic. Since most of the literature deals with public opinion in industrialized countries, mainly the USA, the topic in the rest of the world has been generally overlooked. The main goal of the present chapter is to identify if drivers of environmentally friendly attitudes are the same in the North than in the Global South. Against this backdrop, the present work tackles the impact of political values on the levels of environmental concern in the developing world, with a particular focus in Latin America, by using worldwide survey data to test the most extended academic explanations and their resilience when they are applied in the Global South. Results of this work suggest that the effect of ideology is the inverse in the developing than in the industrialized world: while environmental concern is heavily associated with left-wing ideology in developed countries, and in the Global South it is linked with market-oriented and right-leaning attitudes. On the other hand, the effects of post-materialist values appear to be region-dependent, with a similar impact in Latin America to the observed in industrialized countries.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Defining the “Global South” is not an easy task. Terms as “Global South,” “Third World,” or “developing countries” have been often used indistinctly as synonyms. Even when different definitions coexist, most of them refer to “the Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, that is the people of the countries located roughly in three southern continents and sharing a history of underdevelopment and colonialism (Braveboy-Wagner 2009: 2)”.
References
Braveboy-Wagner JA (2009) Institutions of the Global South. Routledge global institutions. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge, New York
Brechin SR, Kempton W (1994) Global Environmentalism: a challenge to the postmaterialism thesis? Soc Sci Q 75:245–269
Brough AR, Wilkie JE, Jingjing MI, Isaac MS, Gal D (2016) Is Eco-friendly unmanly? The Green-feminine stereotype and its effect on sustainable consumption. J Consum Res 43:567–582. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucw044
Bruine De Bruin W, Wong-parodi G, Morgan MG (2014) Public perceptions of local flood risk and the role of climate change. Environ Syst Decisions 34:591–599. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-014-9513-6
Brulle RJ, Carmichael J, Jenkins JC (2012) Shifting public opinion on climate change: an empirical assessment of factors influencing concern over climate change in the U.S. 2002–2010. Clim Change 114:169–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0403-y
Carlton JS, Mase AS, Knutson CL, Lemos MC, Haigh T, Todey DP, Prokopy L (2016) The effects of extreme drought on climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and adaptation attitudes. Clim Change 135:211–226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1561-5
Carter N (2013) Greening the mainstream: party politics and the environment. Environ Politics 22:73–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.755391
Carter N, Ladrech R, Little C, Tsagkroni V (2017) Political parties and climate policy: a new approach to measuring parties’ climate policy preferences. Party Polit 24(6):731–742. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817697630
Chen C, Noble I, Hellmann J, Coffee J, Murillo M, Chawla N (2015) University of Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index—Country Index Technical Report. University of Notre Dame. Available at https://gain.nd.edu/. Accessed 2 Jan 2019
Dunlap RE, York R (2012) The globalization of environmental concern. In: Steinberg PF, VanDeveer SD (eds) Comparative environmental politics, 1st edn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp 89–112
Egan PJ, Mullin M (2012) Turning personal experience into political attitudes: the effect of local weather on Americans’ perceptions about global warming. Journal Politics 74:796–809. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381612000448
Egan PJ, Mullin M (2017) Climate change: US public opinion. Annu Rev Polit Sci 20:209–227. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051215-022857
Falkner R, Buzan B (2017) The emergence of environmental stewardship as a primary institution of global international society. Euro J Int Relations. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117741948
Farstad FM (2017) What explains variation in parties’ climate change salience? Party Polit 24(6):698–707. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817693473
Gelman A, Hill J (2007) Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , New York:
Gleditsch NP, Sverdrup BO (2002) Democracy and the environment. In: Page E, Redclift M (eds) Human Security and the environment: international comparisons, 1st edn. Elgar, London, pp 45–70
Grossman GM, Krueger AB (1995) Economic growth and the environment. Q J Econ 2:353–377. https://doi.org/10.2307/2118443
Guber DL (2013) A cooling climate for change? Party polarization and the politics of global warming. Am Behav Sci 57:93–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212463361
Holtz-Eakin D, Selden TM (1995). Stoking the fires? CO2 emissions and economic growth. 57:85–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/0047-2727(94)01449-X
Inglehart R (1981) Post-materialism in an environment of insecurity. Am Political Sci Rev 75:880–900. https://doi.org/10.2307/1962290
Inglehart R (1990) Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J
Inglehart R, Haerpfer C, Moreno A, Welzel C, Kizilova K, Diez-Medrano J, Puranen B (2014) World values survey: all rounds—country-pooled Datafile Version. Available via World Value Survey. Available at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSDocumentationWVL.jsp. Accessed 14 Dec 2018
Joshi S (2014) North-South relations. In: Harris PG (ed) Routledge handbook of global environmental politics. Routledge, New York, pp 272–283
Kahn ME, Kotchen MJ (2010) Environmental concern and the business cycle: the chilling effect of recession. National Bureau of Economic Research. Available via NBER. Available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w16241. Accessed 14 Dec 2018
Kemmelmeier M, Król G, Kim Y (2002) Values, economics, and proenvironmental attitudes in 22 societies. Cross-Cultural Res 36:256–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/10697102036003004
Kim S, Wolinsky-Nahmias Y (2014) Cross-national public opinion on climate change: the effects of affluence and vulnerability. Global Environ Politics 14:79–106. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00215
Kvaloy B, Finseraas H, Listhaug O (2012) The publics’ concern for global warming: a cross-national study of 47 countries. J Peace Res 49:11–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343311425841
McCright AM (2010) The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public. Popul Environ 32:66–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-010-0113-1
Mildenberger M, Leiserowitz A (2017) Public opinion on climate change: Is there an economy-environment tradeoff? Environ Politics 26:801–824. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2017.1322275
Mostafa MM (2013) Wealth, Post-materialism and Consumers’ Pro-environmental Intentions: a multilevel analysis across 25 Nations: wealth, post-materialism and consumers’ pro-environmental intentions. Sustain Dev 21:385–399. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.517
Najam A (2005a) Developing countries and global environmental governance: from contestation to participation to engagement. Int Environ Agreements: Politics Law Econ 5:303–321. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-005-3807-6
Najam A (2005b) Why environmental politics looks different from the South. In: Dauvergne P (ed) Handbook of global environmental politics. Elgar, Cheltenham, pp 111–126
Neumayer E (2003) Are left-wing party strength and corporatism good for the environment? Evidence from panel analysis of air pollution in OECD countries. Ecol Econ 45:203–220. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0921-8009(03)00012-0
Neumayer E (2004) The environment, left-wing political orientation and ecological economics. Ecol Econ 51:167–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2004.06.006
Selden TM (1994) Environmental quality and development: is there a Kuznets curve for air pollution emissions? J Environ Econ Manag 27:147–162. https://doi.org/10.1006/jeem.1994.1031
Spilker G (2013) Globalization, political institutions and the environment in developing countries. Routledge, New York
Stern DI (2004) The rise and fall of the environmental Kuznets curve. World Dev 32:1419–1439. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2004.03.004
Tobin P (2017) Leaders and laggards: climate policy ambition in developed states. Global Environ Politics 17:28–47. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_a_00433
Weber EU (2011) Climate change hits home (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 2293085). Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY
Williams M (2005) The Third World and global environmental negotiations: interests, institutions and ideas. Global Environ Politics 5(3):48–69
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yamin Vázquez, P. (2020). Environmental Concern in the Global South: Tackling the Post-materialist Thesis and the Impact of Ideology. In: Lorenzo, C. (eds) Latin America in Times of Global Environmental Change. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24254-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24254-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24253-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24254-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)