Global Failures and Missing Institutions | Science
Co-authors include Brian Walker, Carl Folke, Frank Ackerman, Ken Arrow, Stephen Carpenter, Kanchan Chopra, Gretchen Daily, Paul Ehrlich, Simon Levin.
New and reformed institutions are needed for facilitating a change in human behavior, to increase local appreciation of shared global concerns (7), and to correct collective action failures that cause global-scale problems. ...
Nations gain by cooperating to address global-scale problems. The challenge is to design international institutions that overcome free-riding by creating incentives to reward cooperation and to sanction violations. ...
A crucial question is how to secure a country's consent to binding rules in the first place. Agreements must be designed so that countries are better off participating than not. ...
International climate agreements must be designed to align national and global interests and curb free-riding. Borrowing from the WTO architecture, the linkage between trade and the environment could be incorporated within a new climate treaty to enforce emission limits for trade-sensitive sectors. New global standards could establish a climate-friendly framework with supporting payments, e.g., for technology transfer, to encourage developing country participation. In this context, trade restrictions applied to non-participants would be legitimate and credible, because participating parties would not want nonparties to have trade advantages. ...
The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, which was adopted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in 1995 was a positive step, but because adherence is voluntary, it has had little effect. Another approach would be to develop a norm, akin to the responsibility to protect (12), requiring all states responsible for managing a fishery to intercede when a state fails to fulfill its obligations. ...
Agreements should not only be instruments of change but should establish processes for change, engaging a wide set of actors.
The institution of the nation-state has helped improve the well-being of many individuals, but at the cost of reduced global resilience. To address our common threats we need greater interaction among existing institutions, as well as new institutions, to help construct and maintain a global-scale social contract.
