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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mrx-10.1177_01979183221116883 for Does Changing the Narrative Improve Host Community Attitudes Toward Climate Migrants? Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh by Ivar Kolstad, Sosina Bezu, Päivi Lujala, Minhaj Mahmud, and Arne Wiig in International Migration Review

Hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will have their lives and livelihoods affected by climate change in the coming decades (IPCC 2022). With credible mitigation strategies failing to be implemented, increasing attention is being paid to strategies of adaptation to these coming changes. These include protective measures against increasingly frequent and intense fast onset events such as cyclones, floods and fires, changes in agricultural and other production processes to adjust to slow-moving changes such as changes in temperatures, precipitation and seasons or increased soil salinity due to sea level rise, and other in situ adaptation practices.

In settings where complex social decisions are made, information is often aggregated into indices to facilitate decision making. The value added of such composite indices depend, inter alia, on the extent to which decision makers trust and make use of them. This paper presents a randomized experiment on the use of an index designed to inform migrant resettlement decisions, using 410 graduate students in Bangladesh as respondents. Respondents were randomly assigned to control and treatment conditions. In the control group, respondents faced a discrete choice experimental set-up where they were asked to allocate 1000 migrants between two locations described by five attributes (availability of cropland, distance to hospital, distance to school, poverty incidence, and frequency of floods, droughts and cyclones). In the treatment group, respondents also had access to the migrant resettlement index for the two locations, and we also had a second control group where an irrelevant attribute was included instead of the resettlement index. The results show that the resettlement index is used by the study participants, and mechanism analyses suggest that this is due to perceptions of improved benefits to costs from using the index to make decisions. Results from the control group also suggest that past adverse environmental events are particularly important for resettlement decisions. Use of the index in decision making does not depend much on respondent background characteristics, but the perceived importance of the five attributes in the control group does vary with background, sometimes in surprising ways. Notably, respondents who grew up in locations where land was scarce or floods, droughts and cyclones were frequent, placed less emphasis on these attributes in their migrant resettlement decisions.

We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which tests the impact of interaction with migrants on host community members’ attitudes towards migrants. In three treatment groups, host community members were randomly paired with a migrant from a nearby refugee camp to play an incentivized guessing game. In the first of these treatments, the game was neutral in content, in the second it introduced subtle cues to economic matters, and in the third subtle cues to ethnic identity. In a fourth treatment, host community members were paired with other host community members to play the neutral game, and in the control condition host community members did not interact with anyone. The results show that, compared to the control group, interaction with a migrant significantly improved attitudes towards them. Subtle cues to economic matters or identity did not diminish this effect. However, we see similar effects on attitudes to migrants in the treatment group where hosts interacted with other hosts, which suggests that the effects are driven by human interaction in general, rather than by interacting specifically with a migrant. The effects of interaction are not much affected by the characteristics of the paired hosts and migrants, though host respondents in low skill occupations appear to respond more favourably to the treatments. Interestingly, however, we find no effects of the treatments on how migrants believe they are perceived by host community members.

Den nasjonale forskningsetiske komité for samfunnsvitenskap og humaniora (NESH) er et uavhengig og rådgivende organ, som har ansvar for å utarbeide nasjonale forskningsetiske retningslinjer. Den første utgaven av NESHs retningslinjer ble utgitt i 1993, og de har kommet i reviderte utgaver i 1999, 2006 og 2016. For mer om NESH og retningslinjene, se vedlegg. I denne utgaven har NESH valgt å fremheve og tydeliggjøre de grunnleggende forskningsetiske normene. Formålet er å fremheve NESHs retningslinjer som en selvstendig kilde til forskningsetisk refleksjon og kontinuering diskusjon i forskerfellesskapet. NESH har også presisert hvordan forskning i økende grad er under press, og hvordan ulike aktører som oppdragsgivere, finansiører og samarbeidspartnere har medansvar for å ivareta forskningsetikken. Videre er skillet mellom etikk og juss presisert for å tydeliggjøre grenseflatene mot henholdsvis gransking av vitenskapelig uredelighet og krav om rettsgrunnlag ved behandling av personopplysninger. Høsten 2020 ble det reviderte utkastet til nasjonale retningslinjer sendt på høring. NESH mottok over 60 innspill fra forskere, forskningsinstitusjoner og andre forskningsaktører. En arbeidsgruppe bestående av Elisabeth Staksrud (leder), Ivar Kolstad (nestleder) og Vidar Enebakk (sekretariatsleder) har gått gjennom alle innspill og utarbeidet forslag, som er grundig drøftet og vedtatt av alle medlemmene i komiteen.

We present unique survey data on the migration predictions of 400 households in two extremely climate exposed unions of coastal Bangladesh. We have four main findings. First, despite having prospects no better than many low-lying pacific islands, few households in our two locations expect to relocate elsewhere over the coming five-year period. Second, to the extent that households predict they will move in the near future, they believe that fast onset events such as cyclones will be a main reason - not slow changing environmental factors like increasing soil salinity. Third, household migration predictions correlate non-linearly with household assets; the poorest and the richest households are the most likely to move. Fourth, results from an embedded discrete choice experiment suggest that the poor are more likely to migrate in scenarios where their wages are low, while the rich are more likely to migrate in scenarios where their earnings are high. One possible interpretation of these results is that the poor expect to migrate because and when they have to, while the rich expect to migrate because and when they can. Our discrete choice experiment confirms that households expect to move if there is considerable destruction of property from fast onset events, but not due to gradual erosion of environmental conditions. In sum, our results suggest that households in climate exposed regions to a limited extent perceive migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change. Acknowledgements The authors thank Rune Jansen Hagen, Katrin Millock and Solomon Walelign for helpful suggestions and comments.

Supplemental material, IPS808610_supplemetary_note for Too big to fault? Effects of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Norwegian exports to China and foreign policy by Ivar Kolstad in International Political Science Review

When confronted with information that ordinary citizens do not care that strongly about efficiency, do economists change their views of optimal public policy? In a randomised experiment on tax preferences conducted among business and economics students in Tanzania, we supplied the treatment group with information that ordinary citizens disagree with implications of efficiency-based optimal tax theory. Tax preferences were then measured using discrete choice experiments. The results show that the treated students modify their position in the direction of public opinion, an effect driven by students with longer exposure to economics. An economics education hence seems to produce professionals who are part democrats and part technocratic paternalists.

A number of studies suggest that our narratives about the situation of the poor and vulnerable affect how we view them and treat them. Theoretically, a potentially powerful way to make host communities more welcoming of climate migrants is to shift the blame for their situation away from the migrants themselves and onto other forces or agents. We present results from a randomized field experiment conducted among long term residents of host communities in the Satkhira district of Bangladesh. We exposed three treatment groups to narratives that shift the responsibility for climate migration towards natural forces, Westerns countries, and local authorities, respectively. Despite power to detect reasonably small effects, we find no positive effects of the narratives on attitudes to climate migrants. On the contrary, one treatment has a borderline negative effect on attitudes relative to the control group. Our results suggest caution in attempting to influence attitudes through attribution of blame to outside forces or third parties. Such narrative interventions may shift responsibility away from not just the migrants but also from the treated host community residents, and may increase social identification within the host community relative to outsiders.

On what bases should corporations be taxed? This article presents evidence from a series of discrete choice experiments designed to elicit the tax preferences of ordinary citizens. We find that respondents favour higher taxes on more profitable companies, but not high enough to make taxes progressive. Moreover, respondents prefer higher taxes on more internationally mobile companies, which is at odds with well-known results from optimal tax theory. The experiments were conducted in Tanzania, making this result all the more striking as developing countries are particularly sensitive to location decisions of corporations. We also find that citizens favour lower taxes on companies that have more local employees, and higher taxes on foreign owned companies compared to domestic ones. The latter result is not due to perceived differences in local or foreign employment or other local impacts, suggesting a strong home bias in respondent preferences. Furthermore, we find significant gender differences. Men appear more efficiency oriented in their tax preferences. Both men and women are primarily in favour of companies that offer employment to their own gender, and male respondents focus more on job growth than on job security. The results have important implications for debates on the legitimacy of tax policies.