Rethinking Global Environmental Governance to Deal with Climate Change: The Multiple Logics of Global Collective Action

Abstract

From the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatening climate change to depleted fisheries in the world’s oceans and the spread of persistent organic pesticides bioaccumulating across the food chain, a particularly challenging set of transboundary global environmental problems has emerged—defined by the need for a worldwide policy response. While the logic of collective action at a scope that corresponds to the scale of the public good to be provided is well understood in theory (Mancur Olson 1965; Henry N. Butler and Jonathan R. Macey 1996), the practice of good environmental governance at the supranational scale lags behind. The need to manage interdependence, and thus the economic logic for policy coordination in the context of problems such as climate change, is clear. Where natural resource consumption or pollution harms spill across national boundaries and affect neighboring countries or the shared resources of the global commons, the “super-externalities” that emerge present a special policy challenge (Andre Dua and Esty 1997). Absent a collaborative response that draws all harm-causers and harm-bearers into a regime that internalizes these externalities and provides an appropriate degree of global-scale environmental protection, a tragedy of the commons will likely unfold (Garrett Hardin 1968; E. Donald Elliott, Bruce A. Ackerman, and John C. Millian 1985). Pollution-causing activities will be conducted at an inefficiently large scale and open-access resources, such as the atmosphere, will be overexploited. But a successful response to climate change and other international environmental problems requires more than good economic theory. Legal, policy, ethical, and institutional underpinnings must also be established for effective global environmental governance. In this paper, Rethinking Global Environmental Governance to Deal with Climate Change: The Multiple Logics of Global Collective Action