我要吃瓜

Addressing urban air pollution and climate change requires effective mobility policies such as low-emission zones, congestion charges, and driving restrictions. While these measures promise immediate benefits like reduced congestion and long-term improvements in air quality, they frequently face public opposition, threatening their political feasibility and environmental effectiveness. The psychological and economic factors influencing acceptance of these policies remain underexplored.

This project establishes a new collaboration between researchers from the 我要吃瓜 in Scotland and Leuphana University in Niedersachsen. Both teams bring extensive expertise in analyzing determinants of pro-environmental behavior and policy acceptance, supported by previous funding (e.g., AHRC, British Academy).

We seek funding to design, run, analyse, and disseminate a survey experiment assessing public support for mobility schemes currently proposed in Scottish and Lower Saxon cities (e.g., Glasgow's Congestion Charge, Hannover's Car-Free City Plan). The experiment will evaluate how varying the way these schemes are communicated influences people’s beliefs about policy costs and benefits affecting how people anticipate and later on experience the implementation of these schemes.