Navigating Trade-Offs: How Citizens Perceive and Decide Trade-Offs in the Energy Transition

Large segments of the population in most Western democracies support the idea of transitioning to renewable energy sources to mitigate climate change, while at the same time, almost all of these countries face public opposition when implementing related measures, namely policies or infrastructure projects. We argue that a crucial but so far neglected element behind this “gap” are the trade-offs inherent in decisions about energy transition (and similar) measures. By trade-offs, we mean situations where two (or more) goal dimensions relevant to a particular decision cannot be maximized simultaneously or even contradict each other. In the field of renewable energy, trade-offs are often studied from a techno-economic or natural science perspective, but their politicisation is crucial for climate change mitigation and energy transition - an aspect largely overlooked in energy transition research. It is largely unknown how the population perceives the trade-offs and which dimensions they ultimately prioritize. This study examines these questions. We present novel data from a survey experiment using the Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method. AHP involves a repeated pairwise comparison of relevant dimensions of the energy transition (i.e., biodiversity, emissions, land use, energy imports, energy savings, and costs), where respondents have to make trade-offs between the different dimensions. AHP provides valuable insights by requiring respondents to make subtle trade-offs in non-quantified dimensions (e.g., increasing biodiversity vs. reducing emissions), thereby clarifying treatment effects and revealing how individuals navigate trade-offs. This approach follows the latest research in political science, which shows that respondents have structured belief systems that allow them to make decisions in trade-off situations. We also included a framing experiment when introducing respondents to the AHP task: Half of the respondents receive a positive frame that presents the energy transition as a change with potentially positive effects, while for the other half the issue is presented as a change with potentially negative effects. The online survey was fielded in Switzerland from November to December 2024 and is based on a sample from the official population register. Analytically, this study pursues both descriptive and explanatory goals. Regarding the former, we present new insights on the extent to which citizens in Switzerland perceive trade-offs and which dimensions they prioritize in decisions on energy transition measures. The explanatory goal of this study is to better understand what factors influence individuals’ trade-off decisions and prioritization. Combining prospect theory and framing with arguments from research on policy support and social acceptance, we theorize that the “reference category” used in decisions influences how individuals decide in trade-off situations. Moreover, we expect respondents to weight the dimensions differently depending on whether the trade-off situation is framed as a gain or a losss. Overall, our study provides relevant new insights into the underlying preference structures related to inherent trade-offs of the energy transition, which are likely to influence individual decisions on concrete policies and projects. While our study empirically focuses on the case of Switzerland, where citizens often decide directly on concrete measures, we believe that the study is relevant beyond the Swiss case.