Abstract
The most evident shortcoming of the international agreements on climate actions is the compliance to their prescriptions. Can John Rawls’s social contract theory help us to solve the problem? We apply the veil of ignorance decision-making setting in a sequential dictator game to study the compliance to climate change agreements and we test the model in a laboratory experiment. The veil of ignorance shows to be very powerful at inducing the subjects to converge on a sustainable intergenerational path. However, the voluntary compliance to the agreement still remains an open issue, because even small incentives to defect can undermine the compliance stability, and therefore break the whole sustainable dynamic.
Highlights
Climate change is a threat that looms over future generations but that is triggered by the consumption decisions taken in the present (Clements, 2015)
Starting from this general frame where the lack of compliance seems to be a widely observed behaviour, in this paper, we address some structural issues of climate change agreements through the social contract theory of John Rawls (1999)
It is within this ambiguous utilitarian theoretical frame that we consider the social contract theory of John Rawls (Rawls, 1999) as a valid alternative to deal with distribution of resources between generations, and in particular with the climate change agreements
Summary
Climate change is a threat that looms over future generations but that is triggered by the consumption decisions taken in the present (Clements, 2015). Without an international agreement aimed at reducing effectively greenhouse gas emissions, the world will soon head a tragedy of commons (Hardin, 1968; Ostrom et al, 1994) because the atmosphere, big, can contain a limited quantity of greenhouse gases before these produce their harmful and irreversible effects on the whole mankind, and in particular on future generations Starting from this general frame where the lack of compliance seems to be a widely observed behaviour, in this paper, we address some structural issues of climate change agreements through the social contract theory of John Rawls (1999). In the Conclusions, we summarize the main achievements, highlight the limits of our study and provide some insights for the future research
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