Public Support for Environmental Aid: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in India

Recent scholarship on foreign aid has come to recognize the importance of recipient countries’ citizens and their preferences. This is particularly relevant for environmental aid, which has grown substantially as an instrument to address global environmental challenges while producing both local and global benefits. Recipient country residents experience environmental project outcomes directly and form opinions regarding these aid initiatives. We argue that these opinions reflect the extent to which domestic actors are involved throughout the lifecycle of environmental aid projects. Given that local participation can vary across project stages, we identify the most visible and salient steps of aid projects and link them to public support. To test our expectations, we use a realistic environmental project scenario to design a conjoint experiment exposing respondents to variation in local involvement at each stage. Our results suggest that when environmental project initiation and design stages respond to local needs and concerns – particularly when projects combine local and global environmental benefits rather than targeting only global problems – public support increases. Citizens also prefer co-financing arrangements where their government contributes to project costs. In contrast, we do not find evidence of a similar effect at the implementation stage of environmental projects.