Perceptions on equity and responsibility in coastal zone policies

This paper studies public perceptions of fairness in managed retreat policies. We try to empirically test the acceptance of the following four principles of fairness: efficiency, need, responsibility and priority to property rights. Using responses from a questionnaire, the objective of the paper is to generate information on the issue of solidarity between people exposed to the risk of climate-change-induced flooding and those who are not, as regards to funding managed retreat policies and damage compensation. To that end two population zones (Coastal and Hinterland) were surveyed in order to characterise personal preferences of stakeholders and distributive preferences of third parties Results show (i) a support for national solidarity in the funding of managed retreat policies, (ii) a difference in people'ssupport for the responsibility principle depending on whether it is embedded in a general principle of justice or in a particular compensation scheme and (iii) a difference between distributional judgments of the coastal inhabitants (stakeholders) and those of the Hinterland (third parties) according to the choices of the funding principles of damages on private assets and the choices of the general principles of fairness in managed retreat policies.