Internationality Vs. Sustainability: Measuring the Effectiveness and Fairness of Flight‑reduction Policies at Universities

How effective and how fair are institutional flight reduction policies, and how do their impacts vary across disciplines and career stages in research universities? Despite ambitious net-zero targets, air travel remains a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, yet higher education institutions lack robust evidence on which measures effectively reduce business travel emissions without undermining academic work. This paper addresses that gap with a comparative evaluation of flight reduction policies introduced across nine cantonal Swiss universities and the two Federal Institutes of Technology. This setting constitutes a most likely case for policy effectiveness given Europe’s dense rail network and Switzerland’s central location. I leverage policy variation across faculties and universities, including carbon taxes at different price levels, short-haul flight bans with time threshold rules, carbon caps, offsetting requirements, and rail travel subsidies. Outcomes cover absolute and relative changes in (a) CO₂ equivalent emissions, (b) kilometers flown, and (c) number of trips, complemented by equity indicators that track distributional effects for early career researchers versus senior staff and for fieldwork-intensive versus desk-based disciplines. The analysis covers the time span from 2016 to 2025. Methodologically, the study applies a synthetic interventions design that generalizes synthetic control to multiple treatments at different times, combined with pre-post diagnostics. This design allows for separating policy effects from secular shocks such as COVID-19 and cultural shifts such as “flight shame.” Department-level series serve as units of analysis to capture disciplinary heterogeneity while retaining cross-university comparability. The Swiss context offers unusually detailed monitoring of university air travel and a diverse policy bundle across units, yet identification must account for national debates on air ticket taxation, post-pandemic normalization, and technology-driven substitution towards virtual interaction. The research design explicitly addresses these confounders through the donor pool and with placebo checks in the synthetic estimator. Theoretically, I map policies onto two design dimensions that are central in public policy analysis: intrusiveness (the extent to which a rule constrains choices) and inclusiveness (the breadth of the targeted population). I test three hypotheses: H1, more intrusive policies tend to be more effective; H2, higher inclusiveness improves perceived fairness but may reduce effectiveness by lowering precision and increasing bypass options; H3, effects are smaller in highly internationalized or fieldwork-dependent disciplines. This framework explicitly links institutional governance choices to expected outcomes and distributional profiles. Expected contributions are threefold. First, I provide one of the first comparative, quasi-experimental estimates of the effectiveness of faculty and university-level flight reduction policies, with uncertainty assessments and transparent diagnostics. Second, I quantify distributional consequences across ranks and disciplines to surface equity trade-offs that frequently remain implicit in organizational climate governance. Third, by linking policy intrusiveness and inclusiveness to observed outcomes, I derive design principles for universities and other mission-driven public organizations that seek to decarbonize travel while safeguarding research quality. The findings speak directly to the ECPR Environmental Politics community’s interest in the governance of hard-to-abate sectors, institutional policy design, and the politics of fairness in climate transitions.