Governing the Global Commons
Aaron Maltais
Department of Government
Uppsala University
The Card Game
• Each player is given two cards: one red and one black
• Each player will anonymously hand in one card to the
collective pot
• Payoff to each student after game play:
– 5 kr for a red card in your hand
– 1 kr to every player for each red card Center holds
• Your task: figure out what to hand in to the collective
Public goods and common pool resources
Non-rivalrous
Rivalrous
Public goods
Common pool resources
Defence, law and order,
weather forecasts, benefits
Non-excludable
associated with reductions of
air pollution.
Excludable
Transboundary ocean fishery,
the atmosphere’s protective
functions
Club goods
Private goods
Patented knowledge (legal
exclusion), cable television
(technical exclusion)
Food, computers, cars
Common Pool Resources
Exclusion is impossible or difficult and joint use involves
subtractability
• Non-Excludability:
– Ability to control access to resource
– For many global environmental problems it is impossible to physically
control access
• Subtractability:
– Each user is capable of subtracting from general welfare (removing fish
from a shared stock or adding pollution to a shared sink)
– Inherent to all natural resource use
“The Tragedy of the Commons”
Article published in 1968 by Garrett Hardin.
A shared resource in which any given user reaps the full benefit of
his/her personal use, while the losses are distributed amongst all users.
If there is open access to the resource the result of individual rational
choices is a collective tragedy of unsustainable depletion.
Reducing GHG concentrations is a public good
1. Non-excludable - every reduction in GHG emissions
benefits all people (although not equally due to
variation in the impacts of global warming based on
location).
2. Non-rivalrous – no individuals enjoyment of the
benefits of mitigating global warming subtracts
from others individuals enjoyment of the same
good.
Negative externalities
Free-riding
The state can:
- ensure public financing for national defense by having a systems of
taxes, laws and penalties that make non-cooperation unattractive.
- limit access to a common pool resource (e.g. fishing quotas).
- turn common resources into private property.
But all these options are made possible because of the state’s
monopoly on political authority within its territory.
International Environmental Agreements
•Over 900 multilaterals
•1500 bilaterals
• Do countries behave selfishly and continue to
pollute?
• Does mutually beneficial cooperation take place
between independent states?
• What can be done to increase the chances of
cooperative behaviour?
Oil Pollution at Sea and The International Convention for
the Prevention of Marine Pollution (MARPOL)
Migratory Ocean Fisheries - International Commission for the
Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT)
Ozone Depletion without the Montreal Protocol
Source: Nasa, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=38685
Projection of real world ozone recovery
Source: Nasa, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldWithoutOzone/page2.php
(Perceived) Payoffs to US with and without Montreal
Billions of 1985 US$
Montreal
Protocol
Benefits
3,575
Unilateral Action
without Montreal
Protocol
1,373
Costs
21
21
Net
Benefits
3,554
1,352
Source: USEPA (1988), reproduced in Barrett (1999)
1. Number of actors
OZONE DEPLETION
GLOBAL WARMING
Positive for international cooperation
Negative for international
cooperation
A few key actors and a
limited number of industry
players
Several important actors
and virtually all major
industries
2. Where damages will be
most sever and where
mitigation costs will be
highest
Tend to coincide territorially
3. Timeframe of impacts
Near term benefits from
mitigation
Benefits far off into the
future
4. Level of certainty about
benefits of mitigation.
Exceptionally positive
cost/benefit assessments
gives us a high level of
certainty
Less positive CBAs and more
modelling uncertainty give
much more uncertainty
Yes, the United States
No
5. Natural Leaders?
6. Technical/Infrastructural
complexity and costs
Low, known, and inexpensive
Tend to diverge territorially
High, unknown, and expensive
The international process isn’t working
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Contentious negotiations
Very weak emissions targets
Non-participation of many states
Lack of enforcement mechanisms
Failures to meet targets
Non-binding commitments
Delaying of meaningful emissions cuts/investments
to the future
Short timeframe for action:
• Delay makes future mitigation efforts much more costly.
• Delay locks us into polluting energy structures.
• Delay increases the severity of future climate impacts.
• Delay increases the risk of nonlinear climate disasters.
• Governments will predictably be faced with hard choices about
investing in short‐term measures to deal with major climate
impacts versus long-term mitigation.
• Overshooting safe emissions budgets strengthens preferences
for short-term interests over long-term mitigation.
What can we do about global warming?
Lie about the timing impacts versus the benefits of
mitigation or wait for the early climate catastrophes
World Government
Bottom up: Regional, local, and individual action
1. Number of actors
2. Where damages will be
most sever and where
mitigation costs will be
highest
3. Timeframe of impacts
OZONE DEPLETION
GLOBAL WARMING
Positive for international cooperation
Negative for international
cooperation
A few key actors and a
limited number of industry
players
Tend to coincide territorially
Near term benefits from
mitigation
Several important actors
and virtually all major
industries
Tend to diverge territorially
Benefits far off into the
future
Exceptionally positive
cost/benefit assessments
gives us a high level of
certainty
Less positive CBAs and more
modelling uncertainty give
much more uncertainty
5. Natural Leaders?
Yes, the United States
No
6. Technical/Infrastructural
complexity and costs
Low, known, and inexpensive
4. Level of certainty about
benefits of mitigation.
This is the problem
feature we can actively
do something about
High, unknown, and expensive
What really really matters about
climate change is
• Avoiding delay in emissions reductions
• Acting now to demonstrate that high welfare
is compatible with rapidly declining GHG
emissions
The Need for State Leadership
•
Developing, demonstrating and deploying new low-carbon technologies
•
The difficulty of addressing an environmental problem need not be that
determinative of success or failure. BUT the combination of a hard problem with
uncertainty is toxic (Breitmeier, Underdal, and Young, 2009).
•
In theory the prospects for alternative energy structures are very promising BUT
there is extensive uncertainty surrounding practical application (Kannan, 2009, p.
1874).
•
Current investment in renewable energy averaged 165 billion US dollars per year
over the past three years.
•
The IEA assesses that this amount needs to rise rapidly to 750 billion per year by
2030 and again to US 1.6 trillion per year between 2030 and 2050 (IEA, 2010, p.
523).
•
What is at stake is the need for a rapid and sustained increase in our efforts by a
factor of four to ten over decades.
Note that Ostrom’s conditions for voluntary governance
are categorically not satisfied in the climate case:
(i) use of the resources can be easily monitored (e.g., trees are easier to
monitor than fish);
(ii) rates of change in resources, resource-user populations, technology, and
economic and social conditions are moderate;
(iii) communities maintain frequent face-to-face communication and dense
social networks—sometimes called social capital—that increase the
potential for trust, allow people to express and see emotional reactions to
distrust, and lower the cost of monitoring behavior and inducing rule
compliance;
(iv) outsiders can be excluded at relatively low cost from using the resource;
(v) users support effective monitoring and rule enforcement.