Distributive justice concerns when combating air pollution: The joint modelling of attitudes and preferences

Abstract

Distributive justice is an important but often overlooked factor in policy evaluation. We thus examine how people's attitudes towards distributive justice affect their preferences for programmes aimed at reducing ambient air pollution resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels for residential heating. To do so, we carried out two multifactorial survey experiments that allowed us to incorporate justice attitudes into non-market valuation. The first experiment focused on recording justice attitudes towards payment distribution for air quality improvement, while the second experiment measured the willingness to pay for air pollution reduction programmes. Both experiments were conducted with the same respondents, from four cities in Poland, and were conducted separately one to two weeks apart. As a modelling approach, we employ a hybrid choice model. Our findings indicate that people strongly support an equity-based cost distribution and that those with a stronger equity-based distributive justice attitude are more willing to pay for air quality improvement programmes.