Citizens support ambitious but costly regulation against food waste

Autor: Lukas Paul Fesenfeld, Lukas Rudolph, Thomas Bernauer
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Popis: About one-third of all food produced for human consumption worldwide is wasted, particularly in high-income countries. Reducing this waste is key to decreasing negative environmental impacts from the food sector and increasing food security in developing countries. Yet, achieving food waste reduction is challenging. It is widely presumed that efforts at stricter food waste regulation may increase food prices, and hence consumer and citizen opposition could render such ambitious regulation politically unfeasible. Here, we argue that appropriate policy framing, design, and feedbacks can ensure public support despite food price increases. Our empirical analysis uses survey experiments with a population-representative sample (N=3’329) from a typical high-income country, Switzerland. First, in a combined framing and conjoint experiment, we show that messages emphasizing national or international social norms in favor of reducing food waste (policy framing) can increase public support for more ambitious reduction targets. We also show that a majority of citizens support food waste regulation, even if this leads to substantial increases in food prices, but only if such policies set stringent reduction targets and are transparently monitored (policy design). Finally, in a vignette experiment, we show that voluntary industry initiatives do not crowd out individuals’ support for stricter governmental regulation, but potentially crowd-in support if industry initiatives are unambitious (policy feedback). Our research offers an analytical template for studying public support for food waste regulation and shows that there is more political room for adopting ambitious policies than hitherto presumed.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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