Managing Global Commons: The Challenges of Public Goods and International Cooperation

1. Session 2 Managing the global commons: The logic of international cooperation and the problem of the free-rider

2. What is private, what is public? • First distinction by Jean-Baptiste SAY: free goods vs economics goods • Private goods are rival and excludable in consumption • > suitable for market transaction • Club goods are excludable but non-rivalrous • Public goods are non-rival and non-excludable in consumption • > unsuitable for market transaction? Market failures? => Does that mean that the provision of private goods is regulated by the market, and the provision of public goods by the state?

3. Global public goods • Public goods ‘whose benefits cut across several countries and generations’ (Kaul) • Traditional GPGs, governed by international agreements • New GPGs, requiring concerted policy-making • Concern about publicness of benefits • Concerns about publicness of decision-making

4. Critiques of the definition • Pure public goods are almost impossible to find • Whether a good is private or public is a matter of public policy. Are some goods intrinsically private or public? • Public utility may vary • States are not the only providers of public goods • Suggestions to shift the definition towards: • Inclusiveness: active category, socially constructed • Public provision, participatory decision-making • Fairness and justice, public benefits

5. The logic of collective action Why do states cooperate?

6. Assumptions • States are self-interested • Their interests are often conflicting • There’s no central authority • Cooperation, at the end of the day, is about mutual adjustments to national policies so that a common, desirable outcome can be reached. • Model: Prisoner’s dilemma

7. Conditions for cooperation • Basic conditions: • Reliable information • Reciprocity • Mutual interest • Need for monitoring: role of international organisations as facilitators

8. The tragedy of the commons • Open-accessgazing land over-exploitedbecause of self interest and lack of constraints. • The field as a metaphor for commongoods: in the absence of regulation and/or property, commongoods are overexploited.

9. The prisoner’s dilemma • Self-interestisprimary driver • No interestincentive to cooperate on a one-shot basis • Equilibriumcanbereachedonly if the gameisrepeated (and preferencesrevealed : role of international institutions)

10. The problem of the free rider • Inherent problem of cooperation • How should each member contribute to the provision of the good? • How much can each member benefit from the good? > Issue of compliance

11. How to define collective preferences from individual preferences? • Collective preferences are not fixed • They’re not always rationnal • They’re not easy to identify and can be contested > The aggregation of individual preferences can lead to a detrimental collective outcome.