COMPLIANCE AND CLIMATE CHANGE. THE MOTIVATING POWER OF DELIBERATION

This dissertation addresses the problem of individuals’ noncompliance with climate change-related norms and behaviours. Starting from the consideration that noncompliance regarding environmental matters is too widespread to dismiss and that individuals’ compliance ought to be stable in order to effectively address climate change, this work asks how individuals should be motivated to comply with climate change norms over time. I will argue that it is possible to distinguish between individuals’ pertinent and non-pertinent reasons for compliance. This distinction plays on the correlation established between an individual’s motivation and the policy’s rationale. When the individual’s motivation and the policy’s rationale converge, then there are pertinent reasons for compliance. If instead, they diverge, there are non-pertinent reasons for compliance. Therefore, pertinent reasons derive from the coexistence of (a) aptly devised policies and (b) individuals’ environmental concern motivating them to act. The hypothesis advanced is that only pertinent reasons can ensure stable compliance. To prompt stable compliance, I propose an argument which develops into two phases. The first phase focuses on proving that pertinent reasons are more likely to sustain stable compliance than non-pertinent ones. Assuming that individuals are either equipped with an environmental concern or not, I will split them into two groups, concerned and unconcerned individuals. I will play on the possible political means that can be used to elicit reasons for compliance in both concerned and unconcerned people. For concerned individuals, I will argue that efficacy-driven policies would have a twofold role in bridging a cognitive gap (by showing individuals how to act upon their concern practically) and motivating them to comply with climate-related policies. Considering that there would be a convergence between the policy rationale and individuals’ environmental concern, I will conclude that concerned individuals would likely have pertinent reasons for compliance. By contrast, for unconcerned individuals, I will argue that to motivate them to comply, the political authority should play on their self-interest, by using incentives and sanctions as leverage to prompt unconcerned individuals’ compliance. I will conclude that unconcerned individuals would likely have non-pertinent reasons for compliance, as the policy rationale and the individuals’ motivation diverge. Once established that concerned individuals would have pertinent reasons and that unconcerned people would instead have non-pertinent reasons to comply, I will focus on stable compliance. I will assess if pertinent and/or non-pertinent reasons could sustain compliance over time. To do so, I develop a counter-reasoning envisaging what might happen if the political authority would withdraw the policies addressing climate change. From this argument, it will emerge that individuals motivated by non-pertinent reasons, would likely stop to comply once that the incentives are removed. By contrast, individuals motivated by pertinent reasons would likely maintain their compliance because of their environmental concern, even if the effective policies are no longer at work, thus proving my initial hypothesis that pertinent reason can fulfil the stability requirement. However, this conclusion will highlight that the crucial element for having stable compliance does not lie specifically into having pertinent reasons. Instead, it derives from the fact that pertinent reasons can exist only under the condition of having an environmental concern. Therefore, in the second phase of my argument, I will investigate if it is possible to raise in unconcerned individuals an environmental concern, so as to make it more likely for them to develop pertinent reasons. To do this, I will drop the assumption that considered having an environmental concern in one’s motivational set as a given fact, and I will argue that it is possible to raise such a concern in unconcerned individuals. Through deliberation, it is indeed possible to induce reflection on unconcerned individuals' interests, values, and opinions to raise in them a concern about environmental matters. I will further discern unconcerned individuals into more specific ‘ideal-types’ representing the main contrarian stances regarding climate change – tackling both epistemic and normative disagreements. I will argue that for most contrarian stances, it is indeed possible to raise an environmental concern.