Governing the Global Commons

1. Governing the Global Commons Aaron Maltais Department of Government Uppsala University

2. 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 play of game: • 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

3. Public goods and common pool resources

4. Common-Pool Resources • Exclusion is impossible or difficult and joint use involves subtractability • Excludability: • Ability to control access to resource • For many global problems it is impossible physicallyy to 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.

5. “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 collectively tragedy of unsustainable depletion.

7. Pollution Game (prisoner‘s dilema) Country 2 • Strictly dominated strategy is abate (not confess) • Strictly dominated strategy: a strategy which is never played • Non-cooperative solution (pollute, pollute) Pollute Abate Pollute Country 1 Abate

8. The benefits of reducing GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are: • 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) • Non-rivalrous – no individuals enjoyment of the benefits of mitigating global warming subtracts from others individuals enjoyment of the same good.

9. Externalities and market failure

10. Free-riding

11. Providing public goods and protecting common-pool resources using the state The state ensures public financing for national defense by having a systems of taxes, laws and penalties that make non-cooperation unattractive. The state limits access to a common pool resource (e.g. fishing quotas) The state turns common resources into private property All options are made possible because of the state’s monopoly on political authority within its territory.

12. Over 900 multilaterals • 1500 bilaterals Global Commons and International Environmental Agreements • 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?

13. Oil Pollution at Sea and The International Convention for the Prevention of Marine Pollution (MARPOL)

16. Migratory Ocean Fisheries - International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT)

17. Ozone Depletion without the Montreal Protocol Source: Nasa, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=38685

18. Projection of real world ozone recovery Source: Nasa, http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldWithoutOzone/page2.php

20. (Perceived) Payoffs to US with and without MontrealBillions of 1985 US$ Source: USEPA (1988), reproduced in Barrett (1999)

27. A very large number of key actors A few key actors Tend to coincide Tend to diverge Yes, the United States No Near term benefits from mitigation Benefits come far off into the future Exceptionally positive cost/benefit (i.e. gives high certainty) More uncertainty about both costs and benefits Low, known and inexpensive High, unknown and expensive

28. Elinor Ostrom – Winner of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for "showing how common resources—forests, fisheries, oil fields or grazing lands, can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies".

29. Ostrom’s and the conditions that facilitate voluntary governance of common pool resources: • use of the resources can be easily monitored (e.g., trees are easier to monitor than fish); • rates of change in resources, resource-user populations, technology, and economic and social conditions are moderate; • 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; • outsiders can be excluded at relatively low cost from using the resource; • users support effective monitoring and rule enforcement.

30. 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 Unilateral state action: investment in low carbon technology

31. A very large number of key actors A few key actors Tend to coincide Tend to diverge Yes, the United States No Near term benefits from mitigation Benefits come far off into the future Exceptionally positive cost/benefit (i.e. gives high certainty) More uncertainty about both costs and benefits Low, known and inexpensive High, unknown and expensive