ABSTRACT
Although favourable stances towards climate policy have increasingly characterised French public opinion, climate leadership ambitions have not emerged from bottom-up. In a Eurobarometer survey (2005: 82), respondents were asked which fi ve environmental issues they were most worried about: in EU-15, climate change topped the list at 47 per cent but stood at 42 per cent in France, where larger proportions of respondents were ‘most concerned’ with man-made disasters (55 per cent), air pollution (49 per cent) and water pollution (48 per cent). In a 2008 survey, 84 per cent of French respondents considered that climate change was ‘a very serious problem’, rather more than the average of 75 per cent across EU-27. Yet the same survey found that 49 per cent of French respondents (as compared to 42 per cent in EU-27) thought that ‘it is governments, companies and industries that have to change their behaviour, not citizens’ (Eurobarometer 2008: 77). It is unclear whether these variations in responses across surveys refl ect meaningful shifts in opinion or are artefacts arising from differences in question wording. At face value, however, these fi ndings indicate a public opinion which is favourable to climate protection measures, but believes responsibility lies with government and business rather than the citizenry. This stance refl ects the framing of climate mitigation by French policy elites, which has been characterised by its state-led and technology-focused orientation.
