Environmental Concern in the Global South: tackling the Post-Materialist Thesis and the Impact of Ideology

Abstract

Academics have analyzed individual environmental perceptions for a long time. Researching on friendly attitudes toward the environment has progressively gained relevance as support for public policies on the topic. Since most of the literature deals with public opinion in industrialized countries, mainly the USA, the topic in the rest of the world has been generally overlooked. The main goal of the present chapter is to identify if drivers of environmentally friendly attitudes are the same in the North than in the Global South. Against this backdrop, the present work tackles the impact of political values on the levels of environmental concern in the developing world, with a particular focus in Latin America, by using worldwide survey data to test the most extended academic explanations and their resilience when they are applied in the Global South. Results of this work suggest that the effect of ideology is the inverse in the developing than in the industrialized world: while environmental concern is heavily associated with left-wing ideology in developed countries, and in the Global South it is linked with market-oriented and right-leaning attitudes. On the other hand, the effects of post-materialist values appear to be region-dependent,with a similar impact in Latin America to the observed in industrialized countries.