Social inequality and the perceived legitimacy of global climate governance

Citizens worldwide are divided over the legitimacy of global climate governance.

This makes it difficult for global institutions to engage governments in ambitious climate action and to ensure compliance with joint norms and rules.

This project examines the sources of individual legitimacy beliefs toward global climate governance by focusing on an understudied factor: social inequality.

The working hypothesis is that income inequality is a persistent structure in which the poorest are consistently among the most vulnerable to climate risks, and often feel precarious and left behind, which might shape their legitimacy perceptions.

Effects of income inequality on legitimacy perceptions are likely to be magnified by intersecting factors such as gender and ethnicity, which previous research has shown to be linked to high vulnerability to climate risks. The theory will be examined by using three novel datasets.

The first contains district-level measures of legitimacy beliefs in 60 countries from 1990–2022, uniquely aggregated from existing survey datasets.

The second dataset includes social inequality and climate shock measures for the same districts, and will be matched to the first dataset.

The third dataset is based on two survey experiments in four countries to study social inequality effects on legitimacy at the individual level.

The project enhances understanding of the challenges and opportunities to legitimize global climate governance in the face of rising inequality.