The Public's Willingness to Pay More Local Taxes to Deal With Wild Animals in the City

Since Earth has entered the Anthropocene era, municipalities face growing challenges in managing interactions between humans and nature. Yet, limited research addresses the actual practices of coping with such situations, particularly within public administration, policy, and politics. To date, no systematic theory or methodology adequately captures the dynamics of animals as political agents, local governance, and policy support. Recent studies have begun to close this gap by examining governance and political participation in response to wild boars, support for local environmental morality policies, and the governance challenges posed by perceived harm. Building on these contributions, the present study introduces willingness to pay additional local taxes as a novel indicator of policy support, linking human–wildlife interactions to public finance, distributive fairness, and citizen compliance. Drawing on a quantitative, large-scale survey experiment (2020) and a choice-based conjoint analysis, supplemented by longitudinal trend indicators (2019–2024) for contextualization, we examine the individual, environmental, and political factors shaping residents' support for a local policy aimed at addressing urban environmental challenges. We use respondents' willingness to pay more taxes as a proxy for their support of the policy. Our findings show that individual and environmental factors negatively influence this willingness, whereas political incentives exert a positive effect. Unexpectedly, greater access to policy information generated information overload, which reduced public support. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for urban politics, approaches to managing wild animals in cities, and support for local environmental policies.