Green by Knowledge? How Local Knowledge Economies Shape Support for Climate Action

The rise of the knowledge economy, fueled by rapid technological change, is transforming societies and labor markets in particular. A crucial implication of the literature examining its consequences is that the growing knowledge economy contributes to a socially more progressive society by, for instance, fostering support for green policies. Moreover, while the earlier literature on the knowledge economy has focused on tech companies, nowadays green industries have become an important part of knowledge economies since green investment tends to cluster in existing knowledge hubs. This poses the question of whether these macro-level dynamics translate into more supportive attitudes towards climate policy at the individual level. Therefore, we pose the following research questions: In a first step, we ask whether living in a strong local knowledge economy is associated with more support of climate action. Secondly, we examine whether the relationship between living in a strong local knowledge economy and support for climate action is moderated by whether an individual works in a knowledge economy job. Regarding our first research question, we expect that a higher share of knowledge economy jobs will lead to more supportive attitudes towards climate action among individuals. Moreover, since knowledge economy jobs require high levels of education and highly educated individuals have been shown to be more concerned about climate change, individuals in strong local knowledge economies should, on average, be more supportive of climate action than individuals in weak knowledge economies. For our second research question, we aim to disentangle compositional and contextual effects regarding the relationship between strong local knowledge economies and individual-level support for climate action. First, this relationship could be moderated by whether an individual works in a knowledge economy job. On top of compositional effects by highly educated individuals, we also expect contextual effects through, for instance, better infrastructure to be at play in fostering support for climate action in strong local knowledge economies. it could be driven by individuals who work in knowledge-intensive jobs. We combine individual-level data from an original survey fielded in Germany in 2021 (N=4,100), based on which we construct our measure of whether an individual works in a knowledge economy job, with macro-level data at the district level, including the share of employment in the knowledge economy. In order to analyze the relationship between the strength of the local knowledge economy and individual-level support for climate action, we estimate OLS regressions with robust standard errors clustered at the district level. Preliminary results indicate that, as expected, individuals in strong local knowledge economies have significantly higher support for climate action. Furthermore, this effect is significant and more pronounced for those in a knowledge economy job. This suggests that knowledge economy jobs and their potential socialization effects are central to fostering support for climate action within knowledge hubs. We further explore heterogeneities with respect to gender and place of living, which both play an important role in moderating the existing relationships.