10.2: Why Is International Cooperation Required?

Climate change politics, as currently structured, is not conducive to much cooperation. Because the pollutants that cause climate change mix across national borders in the atmosphere and because the economic effects of controlling those emissions are felt throughout the global economy, actions to protect the climate inherently involve the provision of what is often called a global public good. That is, a safe climate system is advantageous for everyone on the planet (to different degrees), but no party can be excluded from these benefits regardless of its own actions.

Public goods are typically underprovided in the absence of a well-organized government because each actor has an incentive to free ride—to gain a beneficial climate while failing to pay its share. It is perhaps especially likely that the world, as a whole, will underprovide global public goods because there is no well-organized and highly effective global government. Indeed, in areas where international governance is weakest—for example, fishing on the high seas—the incentives for free riding create strong incentives for each party to take what it wants. Often these outcomes are called a “tragedy of the commons” because even when each party would benefit from better management, narrow self-interest leads to the opposite outcome. In the area of climate change, these problems of free riding are worsened by the fact that leaders of states think that cutting emissions will make energy more expensive, adversely affecting national economic competitiveness.

The effects of this malign structure help explain why emissions, for all the talk about action on climate warming, keep rising. Figure 10.2.1, taken from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shows emissions since 1970 for all the major warming gases. Since climate change has reliably been on the international agenda, starting in the early 1990s, emissions have kept on rising because even as awareness of the problem has grown, the incentives for individual countries to alter course have not much changed.

Figure 10.2.1 Emissions of major warming gases. The chart shows emissions in common units (gigatons of CO₂ equivalents per year) by converting the different warming gases via “global warming potentials,” a widely used method explained in Chapter 1. Emissions of CO₂ are further divided into those that come from burning fossil fuels (CO₂ energy), which are the majority, and those that emanate from industrial processes and changes in land use. From IPCC 2014.

Global public goods are most easily provided when a single dominant country, or a small group, takes the lead. That mode of cooperation is why, after World War II, so many effective international institutions were created—from the World Bank to the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, a precursor to the World Trade Organization). One country was dominant—the United States—and it created public goods that benefitted most nations, including and especially the US. Even though the US often paid a disproportionate share of the cost of creating and sustaining these institutions, it also reaped a disproportionate share of the benefits.

In climate change today, however, no such dominant country or group exists that can readily solve the problem. The two largest emitters—China (23%) and the US (12%)—together account for only about one-third of world net emissions of warming gases (Box 10.2.1 for a note on data sources). Global public goods can emerge, as well, when a global governing authority is already in place. Yet no such authority exists, although the Paris process or a successor to Paris may in time yield one.

Thus, because of the underlying structure of the problem itself, most states have strong incentives to avoid costly unilateral action, to wait for others to act, and to negotiate for self-interested advantages.

Box 10.2.1  Emissions Data Sources

There are many different sources of data on emissions. I tend to rely heavily on the data set from EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), because it is regularly updated and includes not just emissions of CO₂ from burning fossil fuels but also (after a year or two delay) other emissions. Moreover, the latest IPCC assessment report, for which I was one of the convening lead authors, used principally that data set. In addition, for data on energy production and consumption—the main source of CO₂ and the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions—I find that the annual BP Statistical Review of World Energy is a reliable source.

Political structure

Breaking the gridlock requires building international institutions that help promote collaboration.* Collaboration is the most encompassing concept to describe joint international action to achieve mutual gains. Collaboration can take many forms along a continuum from coordination to cooperation. In situations of coordination, agreements are self-enforcing: that is, once an agreement has been made, the parties do not have incentives to defect (fail to honor or withdraw from their commitments). For instance, once everyone in the US understands that Americans drive on the right-hand side of the road, no rational driver has an incentive to drive on the left; and vice versa for drivers in the UK. Agreements to use common frequencies and language (English) for air traffic control provide another example—no pilot or airline wants to crash, so all, more or less, follow the rules. These kinds of agreements are quite rare in international politics. Cooperation, by contrast, is not self-enforcing. When one country lowers its trade and investment barriers, others may not automatically see a benefit in doing the same. The deep coordination needed between states to provide public goods has a similar structure.

Two variables largely determine the prospects for collaboration. The first, shown in the rows of Table 10.2.1, concerns cooperation and coordination: whether joint action is self-enforcing. The second major variable, shown in the columns of Table 10.2.1, refers to the degree to which the potential joint gains from collective action are high or low. Where joint gains are larger, there are stronger incentives for collaboration—even if it is costly and difficult to create effective systems for working together.

Table 10.2.1 Four basic structures: prospects and strategies for coordination and cooperation

	Potential joint gains are high.	Potential joint gains are low.
Agreements are not self-enforcing (cooperation is required for collaboration).	Possible cooperation with high rewards, but with dangers of defection that rise with the depth of cooperation	Little incentive to seek to cooperate, although shallowness of cooperation limits dangers of defection
Agreements are selfenforcing (coordination is sufficient for collaboration).	Likely coordination, with limited but realizable gains, often leaving potential gains “on the table”	Easy coordination, limited by the low level of potential gains

Source: Keohane, R. O., and Victor, D. G. 2016, Cooperation and discord in global climate policy. Table 1. Nature Climate Change 6, 570–575. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2937. Reproduced with permission of Springer Nature Publishing.

The most important and interesting cases are in the left-hand column, where the potential joint gains are high. In the upper left quadrant are the crucial situations where there are large potential gains from cooperation but strong incentives for parties to shirk from doing their share. Deep mitigation of climate-warming emissions is a good example. As the gains from joint action on this public good rise, so does the temptation to defect. Effective action on mitigation of climate change requires policies and institutions that reduce that temptation. The essence of the global political challenge in addressing climate change is the creation, implementation, and maintenance of those policies and institutions.

In the lower left quadrant, coordination is sufficient to achieve joint gains. Often, diplomats shift problems from the difficult cooperation box, in which incentives to defect are high, to the much easier coordination box, which has low incentives to defect. Over the 60 years of international diplomacy on trade, for example, international agreements began by focusing on the highest tariffs whose reduction was clearly in the self-interest of countries and thus self-enforcing. As confidence grew, it became feasible to construct the World Trade Organization (WTO), with binding rules, adjudication, and enforcement mechanisms. The 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer began as a prime example of successful coordination in which countries adopted national policies whose benefits to the US, the European Union, and Japan exceeded the cost by a wide margin. Thus these countries paid a large share of the costs (which proved to be relatively small) and the whole planet reaped the benefits. Deeper cooperation followed later. However, this strategy of shifting hard problems to an easier structure comes with risks if collaboration remains shallow, enabling the parties to capture only a portion of the potential gains that could in principle be available.

The right-hand column is somewhat less interesting but parallel. The November 2014 US-China bilateral agreement on emissions and cooperative research exemplifies easy coordination (lower right). The US and China announced individual as well as joint efforts to address a global problem. In effect, they made pledges to each other for action that aligned with their self-interests and initially provided small joint gains. Many initiatives announced in Paris—such as on innovation, protection of forests, and regulation of potent short-lived climate pollutants—can also be seen as examples of relatively easy coordination. When such easy but shallow coordination is unsatisfactory to participants, they have incentives to press for deeper cooperation. Here, as elsewhere, cooperation derives not from harmony but from discovering areas of discord where additional collaboration—moving up and to the left on Table 10.2.1—would provide additional gains. Insofar as this logic applies, cooperation could arise from such coordination within small groups of countries and from other actors dissatisfied with the status quo. For example, the US-China accord of November 2014 was important in generating incentives for other countries to make meaningful pledges of action as part of the Paris process because it signaled to other countries that the two biggest emitters were beginning to tackle the problem.

In the upper right quadrant, cooperation is difficult and potential joint gains are low. In my previous research, I have argued that the Kyoto Protocol was an example of this kind of shallow dead-end cooperation—a topic I explore in more detail below.

The situations in Table 10.2.1 are stylized, but they help explain a key distinction in diplomacy: the difference between shallow coordination and deep cooperation. That distinction helps to explain why there has been massive diplomatic activity on climate change but little progress on the difficult task of cutting emissions.

The coordination-cooperation distinction also suggests how progress could be made on climate change. If the toughest problems are tackled first, deadlock is likely to result. Examples include the failed effort by governments to reach agreement on a meaningful new treaty at the Copenhagen Conference in 2009 to replace the original Kyoto Protocol. Too many issues with too many fissures of disagreement were packaged into an accord that required too many countries to consent before it could become law. It is crucial to move from shallow coordination toward deeper cooperation, while at the same time creating the conditions for favorable political coalitions within countries. Much of the enthusiasm around the larger role for bottom-up cooperation on climate change, as was on display in Paris, is rooted in this idea of building cooperation by working on smaller, easier problems where progress is feasible. Effective cooperation requires focusing on areas where agreement is feasible and then working to deepen and expand that cooperation into true collaboration over time. One of the many challenges in climate diplomacy is that that process of confidence building and learning is slow, whereas climate scientists, as outlined in other chapters of this book, are constantly warning that time is short.

*The text that follows relies heavily on two main sources that are good introductions to the logic of collective action applied to climate change: Victor (2011) and Keohane and Victor (2016).