Western Voters Support Foreign Aid. Fearful Governments Are Blocking It.

International negotiations often follow a similar pattern: Global north countries promise bold action, summits come and go, and resources fail to materialize. In June, the ambitiously titled “Summit for a New Global Financing Pact” ultimately generated a road map of future meetings and announcements that rich countries would meet commitments they were supposed to have fulfilled years ago.

This pattern has only hardened the assumption that global north countries are unlikely to prioritize the needs of the global south. When global south countries complain, global north governments tell them to be realistic. For instance, last year, then-Executive Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans told African governments that “many of our citizens in Europe will not buy” the argument that Europeans hold outsize responsibility for addressing the climate crisis because they have emitted disproportionately. “Their worries are linked to their own existence in this energy crisis, in this food crisis, in this inflation crisis,” he said.

This hard-headed framing assumes that global north populations will naturally oppose the increased redistribution of money and power for the benefit of people abroad who they’ve never met. But what if this widely held assumption is not true?

According to conventional wisdom, globally redistributive policies go against the interests of the global north and will therefore never be implemented.

According to conventional wisdom, globally redistributive policies—or policies that pull resources from wealthy countries and distribute them to poorer countries—go against the interests of the global north and will therefore never be implemented. But encouragingly for supporters of global justice, global north populations don’t seem to buy this argument.

A working paper from the World Inequality Lab, authored by Adrien Fabre, Thomas Douenne, and Linus Mattauch, suggests that global redistribution and cooperation are actually quite popular among the populations of rich countries. The paper, “International Attitudes Toward Global Policies,” is based on a survey of more than 40,000 people from 20 high- and middle-income countries. The respondents constitute a representative sample, both in terms of demographics and partisanship. While the results are surprising, existing research suggests that the paper’s findings are not an anomaly.

In every country but France, more than 65 percent of respondents said countries that have emitted less carbon in recent decades should get a larger share of the world’s remaining carbon budget than countries with higher emissions. (And although France was the least supportive, 57 percent of French respondents thought so, too.)

In a world where the average American emits seven times more than the average Indian, this would require rich countries to take on far more ambitious emissions reductions than poorer countries, yet Westerners say they favor it anyway. Beyond climate, the paper finds that 78 percent of Spaniards and 72 percent of British people support allocating voting shares at international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in proportion to population—a change that would cut Spain’s voting share at the IMF in third and the United Kingdom’s share by nearly five.

If populations in the global north express high levels of support for globally redistributive policies, why do their governments so regularly resist them? For example, in global climate negotiations, rich countries led by the United States fought to water down the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, which demands more ambitious climate action from high-emitting rich countries—the same dynamic that the World Inequality Lab paper found Western populations largely support.

As this clash between global north public opinion and global north policies highlights, abstract public opinion only counts for so much in politics. Expressing support for a policy does not mean that someone will pressure their government to implement it, and many voters often don’t even know what current government policy is.

Right now, despite its immense global political and economic significance, global justice isn’t a politically salient issue in global north domestic politics. Global north populations have a relatively warm predisposition to global fairness, but they know little about it. This reality cuts both ways. The upside is that global north governments could advance globally redistributive policies without suffering the political costs that they fear. But as the status quo demonstrates, going against public opinion and resisting these policies does not yet bring sufficient political consequences.

It’s time for these governments to let go of a false premise: Globally redistributive policies are not anathema to their electorates. But until governments come around, it’s up to supporters of global justice to make them do it.

Public support for global justice in the global north is not without its limits. For example, when Americans draw up their ideal budget from scratch, they dedicate 3.7 percent to economic aid to other countries—more than a tripling of current levels, but still a small share of the budget. Research shows that residents of rich countries are sensitive to the costs of global policies even when they support the policies’ goals, but strategic policy design can help mitigate these concerns.

They are more likely to support investing money in global initiatives when others pick up the tab—whether by ensuring the burden is shared with other countries or by placing the costs on better-off people. In an example of the latter approach, one of the most popular policies in the recent World Inequality Lab working paper—with more than 67 percent support in every country surveyed—was a global tax on millionaires to provide finance to low-income countries.

There is a dire need for these types of policies. As it stands, half the world lives on less than $3,000 per year, resulting in a scarcely comprehensible level of daily struggling and stunted human capital. Developing countries face growing climate impacts, caused by a stock of carbon in the atmosphere that was mostly put there by rich countries. Mitigating climate change also cannot be achieved without developing countries: They now produce a majority of global emissions, even if this share of emissions is significantly less than their share of the population.

It is hard to see how this status quo meaningfully changes without large-scale supportive action from global north governments, backed by significant public resources. Worldwide economic and environmental action passes through global institutions where these governments hold decisive power, as would reforms to the structure of those institutions. The global monetary system runs on the U.S. dollar.

To meet the Paris climate agreement, developing countries collectively need at least $1 trillion per year in external finance, and yet they face far higher costs to investing in renewable energy than richer countries, as discussions at the first ever Africa Climate Summit hosted in September by Kenya highlighted. They simply don’t have enough money, especially in the face of high interest rates and debt. But global north countries do.

It is therefore very good news that global north populations tend to support more ambitious policies of global redistribution and cooperation than their leaders currently enact. Global northerners sometimes value altruism above traditional conceptions of the national interest. In a 2021 poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Americans thought combating world hunger was a slightly more important foreign-policy goal than maintaining global military superiority or limiting China’s international influence.

A 2022 paper by Gautam Nair and Kyle Peyton found that Americans thought it was more important to allocate COVID-19 vaccines on the basis of need than to distribute them in ways that would increase U.S. strategic influence.

However, this public sentiment will not change government policy on its own. Take the example of COVID-19. Supporting global vaccination efforts should have been a no-brainer—circulation of the virus anywhere creates a risk of more dangerous mutations everywhere. According to one leading estimate early in the pandemic, a $50 billion investment in global vaccination could have brought $9 trillion in benefits to the global economy. But even now, nearly two-thirds of people in low-income countries are yet to receive a shot.

As this missed opportunity highlights, the central barrier to getting global north publics to mobilize in support of progressive international policies is that—even when these policies are highly consequential for their own lives—the causal chain between global policies and their impacts is not directly visible. When access to vaccines expands domestically, people hear their friends and neighbors talk about getting vaccinated. They see schools reopen.

But apart from the minority of northerners with personal ties to global south countries, a brief news snippet or a charity appeal was all most were likely to hear about the state of global vaccination. Following the alphabet soup of vaccine policy debates—COVAX, TRIPS, MPP—was entirely beyond them. Northerners directly experienced new variants, but few realized how their governments’ failures to invest in global vaccine access made the positive COVID-19 tests in front of them more likely.

As a result, there was not a commensurate opposition to overcome the typical barriers to globally redistributive policies: policy inertia, inaccurate government perceptions of public sentiment, and the influence of concentrated interest groups—in this case, the pharmaceutical industry.

Although global north citizens often hold abstract support for global justice, their limited knowledge about inequality means that they struggle to understand when that justice is at stake. When the World Inequality Lab paper asked whether voting shares in international institutions should be allocated proportionately to population, large shares of global northerners agreed. However, these citizens know little about international institutions—less than half of Americans have even heard of the IMF, and even fewer know that voting power is based far more on a country’s wealth than its population.

While public sentiment is largely friendly to increased global cooperation and redistribution, there is a dire need for organized efforts to channel that sentiment into policy.

If reforms to align IMF voting shares with population were on the table, many global northerners could be susceptible to opposition arguments calling the reforms giveaways to China and India, countries that global northerners tend to have little trust in, rather than understanding these reforms as advancing the principles of democracy and fairness with which they agree.

Advocacy and organizing groups can help citizens make sense of when their interests and values are at stake. While public sentiment is largely friendly to increased global cooperation and redistribution, there is a dire need for organized efforts to channel that sentiment into policy. Right now, the first resort for individuals who want to address unmet needs in the global south is to donate money to aid nonprofits; it is far more difficult for them to figure out how to use their votes and their time to influence the political dynamics that dictate why there are so many unmet needs in the first place.

Providing easily understandable information, accessible political action opportunities, and supportive organizing communities can help move people from latent and relatively uninformed supporters of global justice to active drivers of political change. Donors should take note: Because public resources are so much larger than charitable giving, funding advocacy and organizing can generate outsize impacts.

When there is a shortage of constituencies pressuring governments over their policies toward global south countries, policy failures such as the failure to advance global COVID-19 vaccination do not produce sufficient political costs. Officials have faced few public protests and attack ads over vaccine hoarding or shortchanging global climate funds. At the end of the day, that type of political backlash is more politically persuasive than significant human suffering or even global economic and public health challenges that rebound to their own countries.

In a perfectly fair world, the residents of the global north would demand that their governments embark on a program of global equity on a scale akin to a wartime mobilization. In a perfectly rational, informed, and self-interested world, they would push their governments to make large-scale investments in global public goods. In the world we have, if organized supporters of global justice and cooperation give the publics of the global north a hand, they could get their governments to do a whole lot more than they do now.