Collective Responsibility in the Cooperative Governance of Climate Change

In this paper we provide a formalism to reason about the problem of many hands in organisations. This is a problem that arises whenever the organisation is responsible for some undesirable outcome but none of its members can be held responsible for the outcome. The formalism proposed here is a logic that extends the Coalition Epistemic Dynamic Logic by adding a notion of group knowledge and also organisational structures to its semantics. An organisational structure is a set of agents and some relations between them. It defines the power and coordination links between agents, which defines how agents delegate tasks and communicate. We give formal definitions for individual and collective responsibility, as well as for the problem of the many hands.

Responsibility Incorporated

When many people are involved in an activity, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint who is morally responsible for what, a phenomenon known as the 'problem of many hands.' This term is increasingly used to describe problems with attributing individual responsibility in collective settings in such diverse areas as public administration, corporate management, law and regulation, technological development and innovation, healthcare, and finance. This volume provides an in-depth philosophical analysis of this problem, examining the notion of moral responsibility and distinguishing between different normative meanings of responsibility, both backward-looking (accountability, blameworthiness, and liability) and forward-looking (obligation, virtue). Drawing on the relevant philosophical literature, the authors develop a coherent conceptualization of the problem of many hands, taking into account the relationship, and possible tension, between individual and collective responsibility. This systematic inquiry into the problem of many hands pertains to discussions about moral responsibility in a variety of applied settings.

It is becoming increasingly clear that if we want to live up to the Paris Agreement and meet the 1.5°C commitment, our societies and economies need to undergo systemic changes at an unprecedented scale. All sectors in the economy will be affected and climate change will therefore likely impact financial and price stability. This realization has led central banks to engage with climate-related issues, leaving central bankers in an unprecedented situation: working with a policy domain outside their immediate knowledge remits. Climate change has become a mainstream issue in central banks, and it is against this background that I seek to understand how central bankers have approached the work with climate change and the extent to which central banks have been repurposed as they have set out to deal with the greatest challenge of our time: the climate crisis. The dissertation draws on insights from International Political Economy, where the dominant approach has been to view central banking from institutional, structural, or ideational perspectives. Here I utilize a micro-level analytical approach constructed around three factors: practices, expertise, and legibility. To understand how central bankers have worked with climate change, I examine the practices they have incorporated, with a focus on climate stress testing and modeling of climate-related risks. I also discuss the types of expertise deployed as I seek to understand how central bankers, trained mainly as economists, work in an entirely new policy domain such as climate change. Finally, I set out to analyze how central bankers have made climate change legible by turning climate change into a risk issue; for central bankers, climate change becomes a risk-based issue, similar to other routine economic problems. I argue central bankers have approached climate change like any other task. In treating climate change as a risk issue, central bankers have been able to work with climate change using their existing expertise and adapting their modeling frameworks to deal with climate-related risks, like any other financial risk. Thus, even though climate change represents a new policy domain, central bankers have maintained the status quo, and subsumed climate change under their current modus operandi. The necessary fundamental changes to the conduct of central banking in the age of anthropogenic climate change remain absent. Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, it is business as usual for the central banks.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2022

Editors' overview: moral responsibility in technology and engineering.

Regulating the Climate

Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics and Comparative Political Economy

In some situations in which undesirable collective effects occur, it is very hard, if not impossible, to hold any individual reasonably responsible. Such a situation may be referred to as the problem of many hands. In this paper we investigate how the problem of many hands can best be understood and why, and when, it exactly constitutes a problem. After analyzing climate change as an example, we propose to define the problem of many hands as the occurrence of a gap in the distribution of responsibility that may be considered morally problematic. Whether a gap is morally problematic, we suggest, depends on the reasons why responsibility is distributed. This, in turn, depends, at least in part, on the sense of responsibility employed, a main distinction being that between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility.

Mental health and climate change: tackling invisible injustice

The main challenge for a sustainability transition is to scale up successful solutions. Upscaling requires coalitions of public, private, and civil society actors who align their motivations. Pathways to upscaling may involve leveraging a dominant player's market power, integrating successful initiatives into public policy, or reinforcing government-led change with private efforts. Various actors agree to collaborate to take advantage of their complementary capabilities, e.g., government policies facilitate private action, market incentives reward progressive actors while government sanctions punish laggards, actors take up different tasks of the policy cycle, and large players absorb and disseminate pioneer efforts. To achieve durable impacts, the upscaling of solutions to reach sustainability must continually maintain a balance of incentives among key actors. We identify general lessons for successful upscaling that provide insights on the importance of motivating actors, designing collaborations for lasting success, and incorporating concerns of developing countries.

IntroductionRefugia are habitats that components of biodiversityretreat to, persist in and can potentially expand fromunder changing environmental conditions (Keppelet al., 2012), facilitating the survival of organisms dur-ing extreme climatic changes (Me´dail & Diadema,2009). They may thus maintain favourable climatic con-ditions now absent in the surrounding landscape. Thisis enabled by higher local heterogeneity of micro-climates and the decoupling of local from regionalclimates (Dobrowski, 2011; Keppel et al., 2012).Because refugia potentially safeguard the persistenceof components of biodiversity over millennia, they mayact as safe havens under projected anthropogenic cli-mate change (Me´dail & Diadema, 2009; Keppel et al.,2012). This capacity makes them critical components inclimate change management. As a result, the identifica-tion and protection of refugia has increased in priorityin conservation planning (Noss, 2001; Game et al.,2011). However, refugia are currently loosely definedand their study is often based on ad hoc, descriptivedata sources (Ashcroft, 2010). We therefore clarify theconcept of refugia and related terms. We then argue foran increased focus on understanding how refugia willrespond to climate change. In the context of rapidanthropogenic climate change, we suggest that thisfocus will lead to prioritization of conservation actionstowards those habitats offering the greatest potential assafe havens for biodiversity.What are refugia and what are not?Despite an exponential increase in the use of the termsrefugia and refuges in literature (Fig. 1), refugia are stillconfused with refuges, remnants and reserves. Most cur-rent uses of refugia are to places providing environmen-tal conditions not available in the surroundinglandscapeoverlongperiodsoftime(e.g.,Ashcroft,2010;Dobrowski,2011),withanincreasinginterestinidentify-ing future refugia under projected anthropogenic cli-matechange.However,thetermisalsousedtorefertoavariety of other concepts. For example, in Global ChangeBiology refugia have recently been used to refer totemporary shelter from predation or disturbance (e.g.,Ledger et al., 2011) and to remnant patches of suitablehabitat (e.g., Rittenhouse et al., 2010). The term refugiahas also been used in reference to reserves (see Fig. 1).While thetermrefugiahas onlyrecently beeneffectivelydefined (see Keppel et al., 2012), use of the other threeR-terms has long been widely established. We thereforeadvocatethecorrectuseoftherelevantjargon.Refuges are places that through structures or pro-cesses provide shelter from disturbances, predation,herbivory or competition. They are therefore defined aslocations providing spatial and/or temporal protectionor advantages in biotic interactions over ecological timeperiods (i.e., within the life span of the relevant organ-ism). Remnants are patches of suitable habitats for spe-cies intolerant of changed or modified landscapes thatprevail in landscapes highly modified by human popu-lations and resource exploitation. Reserves are areaslegally or customarily protected from particular anthro-pogenic activities and may vary in size from remnantsto portions of large ‘intact’ landscapes or so-calledwilderness areas.Refugia and anthropogenic climate changeWhile refuges, remnants and reserves continue toreceive considerable research attention, refugia are anarea of rapid recent growth (Fig. 1). The ability of refu-gia to locally mitigate the effects of regional climatechange is increasingly considered important for climatechange adaptation planning (Ashcroft, 2010; Gameet al., 2011). This is because they are potential safehavens for biota and may offer the only hope for in-situpersistence of poorly dispersed species. Protecting suchclimate change refugia could allow some species to

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of Baumol’s work on entrepreneurship has had on framing the economic development puzzle.Design/methodology/approach– In many ways, the intuition behind the paper is straightforward. Entrepreneurs allocate their time and attention based on the relative payoffs they face in any given social setting. If the institutional environment rewards productive entrepreneurship, then the time and attention of entrepreneurial actors in the economy will be directed toward realizing the gains from trade and the gains from innovation. If, on the other hand, there are greater returns from the allocation of that time and attention toward rent-seeking and even criminal activity, alert individuals will respond to those incentives accordingly. The simplicity of the point being made is part of the brilliance in Baumol’s article. As with other classics in economics, once stated the proposition seems to be so basic it is amazing that others did not put it that way beforehand.Findings– It has been 25 years since Baumol published his paper in theJournal of Political Economy, and as pointed out, it has had a significant scientific impact. But to put things in perspective, James Buchanan’s “An economic theory of clubs” published in 1965 has accumulated roughly 3,500 citations, F.A. Hayek’s “The use of knowledge in society,” published in 1945 has over 12,000, and Ronald Coase’s “The problem of social cost” published in 1960 has over 28,000 citations. So Baumol’s paper would put him in rather elite company. The great strength of the paper is to focus the attention on the relative payoffs of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurial activity. But one of the most significant disappointments of the subsequent history of this paper is a methodological one. The comparative case study approach that Baumol employed did not result in a renewed appreciation for narrative forms of empirical research in political economy. It could legitimately be argued that the sort of questions about the fundamental institutional causes of economic growth and development can only be captured with these more historical methods. Attempts to force fit this analysis into a set of methodological tools which have already revealed themselves to be inadequate to do justice of the role of institutions and disregard the underlying cultural norms and beliefs that characterize human sociability.Originality/value– In this paper, the authors will focus on the contribution made by Baumol’s 1990 paper on the field of comparative political economy, and in particular on the literature on transitional political economy. Section 2 places Baumol’s argument in the context of the failure of neoclassical growth theory. Section 3, the authors argue that although the Baumol framing was an improvement over the old comparative economic systems literature, contemporary transitional political economists have failed to fully realize the implications of the institutional revolution. They have therefore been unable to understand the causes of the heterogeneity of outcomes among those countries that transitioned from communism to the market economy in the 1990s. In Section 4, the authors argue that the political economy of transition will gain from a more sophisticated view of the economic process of the market economy, an appreciation of the entrepreneurial function, and a deeper understanding of the role of formal and informal institutions and their effect on entrepreneurship. The authors will illustrate the point with some examples from the recent history of the Russian political and economic transition. Credible commitment problems and the deficiencies of the institutional reforms of the early 1990s were responsible for the failure of reallocating the entrepreneurial talent that existed in the Soviet economy to productive economic activities. The framework can therefore be used to solve the puzzle of why the announced liberalization of Russian markets and privatization of previously state-owned resources led to economic stagnation, the growth of black markets, and the rise of organized crime, instead of economic development through the operations of smoothly operating markets. Section 5 briefly concludes.

The escalating impacts of climate change represent one of the most significant challenges of our era, affecting not only the environment but also social, economic, and political systems globally. This chapter examines the complex relationship between climate change and crisis management, focusing on how societies can adapt to the “new normal” of environmental disruptions. It explores the critical components necessary for effective climate crisis management, including policy development, global cooperation, and leadership. It aims to answer key research questions: How can policy framework be structured to foster climate resilience, particularly in vulnerable regions? and What role does international collaboration play in enhancing the effectiveness of climate crisis management? Case studies and examples such as Germany’s Energiewende, the Paris Agreement, and the adaptation strategies in Kiribati provide practical insights into addressing these questions. Chapter concludes by offering specific recommendations for policymakers and areas for further research to enhance crisis management strategies for climate resilience.

Climate change is increasingly being framed as a “climate crisis.” Such a crisis could be viewed both to unfold in the climate system, as well as to be induced by it in diverse areas of society. Following from current understandings of modern crises, it is clear that climate change indeed can be defined as a “crisis.” As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 1.5oC special report elaborates, the repercussions of a warming planet include increased food insecurity, increased frequency and intensity of severe droughts, extreme heat waves, the loss of coral reef ecosystems and associated marine species, and more. It is also important to note that a range of possible climate-induced crises (through, e.g., possible increased food insecurity and weather extremes) will not be distributed evenly, but will instead disproportionally affect already vulnerable social groups, communities, and countries in detrimental ways. The multifaceted dimensions of climate change allow for multiple interpretations and framings of “climate crisis,” thereby forcing us to acknowledge the deeply contextual nature of what is understood as a “crisis.” Climate change and its associated crises display a number of challenging properties that stem from its connections to basically all sectors in society, its propensity to induce and in itself embed nonlinear changes such as “tipping points” and cascading shocks, and its unique and challenging long-term temporal dimensions. The latter pose particularly difficult decision-making and institutional challenges because initial conditions (in this case, carbon dioxide emissions) do not result in immediate or proportional responses (say, global temperature anomalies), but instead play out through feedbacks among the climate system, oceans, the cryosphere, and changes in forest biomes, with some considerable delays in time. Additional challenges emerge from the fact that early warnings of pending so-called “catastrophic shifts” face numerous obstacles, and that early responses are undermined by a lack of knowledge, complex causality, and severe coordination challenges.