Taxpayers’ Willingness to Pay for Global Decarbonization via Renewable Energy Official Development Assistance: A Discrete Choice Experiment in South Korea

South Korea’s official development assistance to the energy sector has increased steadily over the past decade, reaching USD 232.20 million in 2024. Yet public willingness to pay for renewable energy official development assistance remains largely unknown. This study uses a discrete choice experiment with 1000 nationally representative South Korean respondents and a mixed logit model to estimate marginal willingness to pay for key project attributes, including electrification, greenhouse gas reduction, firm expansion, expert training, and reputation enhancement. The results show that greenhouse gas reduction and expert training receive the highest willingness to pay, followed by firm expansion. Electrification and reputation enhancement receive relatively low support. The findings also reveal substantial preference heterogeneity, with younger and nationally oriented respondents placing greater value on economic returns. These results provide new donor country evidence on public preferences for renewable energy official development assistance and offer policy implications for designing a more climate-focused and socially supported green aid portfolio.