What's in it for us? Moral foundations, co-benefit narratives and preferences for renewable energy investments

Zarah Thiel, Ivan Gonzalez-Gordon and Andreas Löschel

No 1216, Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract: Scaling of renewable energy (RE) delivers global mitigation and local co-benefits, such as enhanced energy security. Narratives and policies in the energy transition differ in their advocacy of international cooperation or competition, reflecting different priorities in securing co-benefits for one's own country or others. We conduct a pre-registered information provision experiment with 4,000+ representative respondents in Germany and Spain analyzing two novel determinants of locational mitigation preferences: moral universalism-altruism towards strangers versus in-group members- and economic narratives about the energy transition. In our 2x2 design, treatments manipulate the location-home versus developing country-of required investments in renewables and resulting cobenefits. We identify a universalism gap, underpinning the moral universalism literature: universalist individuals show stronger support for foreign RE projects than communitarians. While co-benefit narratives shift average policy preferences, they do not close this moral divide in preferences, even under narratives targeting communitarian audiences. Despite notable differences between Germany and Spain with respect to their technical and institutional environment to scale RE, the effects of the narratives and the association between moral universalism and policy preferences are consistent across both countries. Overall, our results indicate that moral foundations strongly shape locational mitigation preferences, and that communicating positive spillovers to the home country from RE investments abroad is an effective narrative to build support for climate transfers.

Keywords: economic narratives; moral universalism; co-benefits; climate mitigation; renewable energy; survey experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ppm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/343082/1/1981586334.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:rwirep:343082

DOI: 10.4419/96973401

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Ruhr Economic Papers from RWI - Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Ruhr-University Bochum, TU Dortmund University, University of Duisburg-Essen Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().